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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (July 12, 1985)
— 1 — Co-editors/Writers Cathy Riely Walter Smith Photographer Bill Hughes at ease The Battalion’s Entertainment Weekly July 12,1985 Cartoons entertain young (at heart) By CATHY RIELY Co-editor T omorrow morning, if you're like four out of every live college students, you'll wake up and flip on the television — and not to MTV, but to Saturday morning cartoons. These entertainment outlets have found a significant audience over and beyond the vast kiddieland for which they were originally de signed. Or so says a recent study of col lege students' Saturday morning TV viewing habits conducted by Asst. Professor Albert Smith Jr. of Radford University. Smith finds that 82.1 percent of his 1,500-plus student sample spends part of most Saturday mornings in front of the tube. N early one in every seven students watch car toons every week, and one in five of tomorrow's leaders tune in ev ery other week. And for those who can't decide between MTV and cartoons — there's "Kidd Video," last season's top rated new Saturday morning se ries. The Saban Productions show has been renewed for a second sea son by NBC. The series combines live rock stars (Robbie Rist, Bryan Scott, Gabrielle Bennett and Steve Alterman) with their animated counterparts. Laurie Dominic, an assistant pub licist at Saban, says the nature of the show is more sophisticated than most cartoons which helps it appeal to a wider range of ages. "I think maybe the A-Team doesn't get as broad a response as our show does," she says. E arly research says that the "Kidd Video" audi ence is composed of viewers between the ages of two and 17, contrasting the established assump tion that Saturday morning tele vision appeals exclusively to chil dren 11 and younger. And the collegiate crowd is widening that demographic spread. Dominic says the show is success ful because "kids these days are all into rock." "It's not all cartoon," she says ex plaining the show. "It's live action mixed with popular rock video,'' she says. "Kidd Video" is a little more uni versal than most cartoons, Dominic says. This also helps the show ap peal to a wider age group. "You might still want to watch car toons when you're in college," she says. "But you expect more than something cute like The Smurfs, or a cartoon with the good vs. the bad." The audience wants something concrete — a message that they can relate to, she says. "I think 'Kidd Video' has that," she says. □ ' Saturday morning TV sure has changed Associated Press NEW YORK — At 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday, I turned on the TV, prayed for rain, and braced myself for a morning's worth of kiddie shows — a one-time-only return to a habit I'd outgrown several decades ago. What, I wanted to know, had changed since the golden dgys when the Lone Ranger thwarted evil, with a wave of a hand and a hearty "Hi-ho Silver!" or when kids sang "It's Howdy Doody Time!" with at least as much feeling as the national anthem? To help arrive at the scholarly an swer such a question clearly de serves, I was joined by an 18 month- old expert — a sort of Mrs. Miller in diapers. She proved to be useless. Barely into the fourth "Cocoa Peb bles" cereal commercial, the little in tellectual snob was asleep, leaving me to draw my conclusions alone. Truth is, Saturday morning chil dren's programming is not all bad. Some is quite good. A gold star goes especially to CBS's "Pryor's Place," which mixes wholesome themes with genuine, warm humor. Come dian Richard Pryor has a near gen ius for communicating ideas like re spect for senior citizens without the slightest hint of condescension. One recent show starred Pryor and a marvelous cast including Scatman Cruthers and Kareem Ab- •dul-Jabbar. Applause, too, for "CBS Story- break," with Bob "Captain Kanga- roo" Keeshan. NBC's "Smurfs" is OK too, if your kid's (or your) taste runs toward the cloyingly sweet. But the bad shows are oh-so pro foundly, deeply bad. For pure stupidity, it's hard to beat ABC's animated concoction called "Turbo Teen." I hope I have this straight: it's about a teen-age boy who finds himself able, when he perspires enough, to sprout wheels see cartoon p.2