My generation’s weekends always began with The Smurfs.

Or maybe it was The Snorks? The Shirt Tales? The Super Friends?

No matter what the show was, we all share a common memory of sitting in our parents’ TV room every Saturday morning watching cartoons. I’m not sure when this particular tradition started–children’s programming had been part of Saturday morning television since Captain Kangaroo and The Howdy Doody Show in the 1950s–and I knew that it died out in the Nineties and 2000s as cable networks started becoming the place to go for endless hours of cartoons. But Generation X can lay a significant claim to sitting ont he floor in your PJs–possibly while eating some sugary cereal–and watching nearly four hours of cartoons. I mean, they’re such a part of our childhood that we remember even the more random ones that didn’t have a toy line, like Camp Candy or Kidd Video.

But when I think about my Saturday mornings, the often began a little earlier that 8:00. Sometimes by a couple of hours.

Maybe it’s just me because I have never been able to sleep in on Saturdays (well, with the exception of when I was in high school and college), so for much of my childhood, I would be up way before the ffirst cartoon started and because nobody else was awake, I had to fend for myself. Sometimes, that meant making myself breakfast or cleaning my room (for some strange reason I remember emptying out my dresser, folding all my clothes, and then putting everything back). Sometimes, I played with my toys. Very often, though, there was television.

Look at Wikipedia’s listings for daytime television int eh 1980s, and pre-cartoon Saturday mornings are listed as “local programming.” I didn’t have the luxury of cable as a kid, so I made do with seven channels: the three networks, WNEW (which would become WYNW, the Fox affiliate), WWOR 9, WPIX 11, and PBS (WNET 13). WPIX was usually the best bet for early morning cartoons because they’d run shows that had falled out of their afternoon lineups, so you’d catch Voltron or later seasons of Transformers a couple of years after they’d faded away. On the networks, though, the programming was completely random.

Looking at some archived TV listings (and thank you to Internet nerds with their hoards of TV Guides), I found listings from 1988 and 1991. There were shows I recognized, like The Little Prince, but there was Peppermint Place? Dragon Warrior (which I need to look up because there was a video game by the same title)? Patchwork Family? Young Universe? I never came across any of those. But I did remember a few, all of which happened to be on channel 4, which was our NBC affiliate.

I have distinct memories of watching a show called Sonrisas when I was very young. It was a Spanish-language education show for kids and I remember it seeming a lot like other little kids shows that I grew up watching, but cannot find any clip and the only proof of this show’s existence was a deep search with TV listings. Fast forward to the mid- to late-1980s and early 1990s and I was seeing Kidsongs, which was this early Kidz Bop thing where the premise is that little kids took over a television station and performed and aired music videos. It seems like most of them were typical–and often public domain–songs you’d sing in an elementary school music class, but there were at least a few episodes where they sang contemporary hits. Well, “Footloose” and “Centerfield” were a few years old by then, but that’s cooler than “Old McDonald”. Kidsongs was pretty wholesome, or at least more wholesome than some of the cringey over-sexualized stuff you’d get a decade later.

Another show that was in the “programming for kids” vein was Hickory Hideout. Filmed out of Cleveland, it was hosted by Cassie Wolfe and Wayne Turney with help from two puppet squirrels named Nutso and Shirley (their home was a big tree that was the centerpiece of the show’s set). I remember it being lighthearted and kiddie but not in a cringey way. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I did watch bits of a recent episode and what struck me is that they seemed to take the Mr. Rogers approach orf being nice and never talk down to their audience.

Funny enough, the show had a segment featuring a young Kathryn Hahn. And over the years, it’s bee something that I have mentioned in passing or on an old blog and someone comments or emails me to say that they knew of the show. That’s pretty cool for something so locally produced and makes me miss those types of programs. We’re in the days of cutting budgets and filling airtime with infomercials because kids don’t watch TV the way they used to. So a wholesome interesting show like Hickory Hideout is an extinct species.

But by the time Hickory Hideout was in its heyday, I was too old for it and even though it kept my attention, it was because it was on. Airing after that show in the early Nineties were two programs aimed at the junior high set: The Krypton Factor and Wide World of Kids.

Hosted by Willie Aames, The Krypton Factor was a teen game show that was part It’s Academic! and part Double Dare (without the slime). Shot on a stage that looked like it was constructed from scraps left over from a bad science fiction movie, the contestants sat in call center office chairs and went through rounds of competition: intelligence, observation, physical ability, and a lightning round, all so they could win prizes like a 20″ color TV, a set of World Book Encyclopedias, and a bookshelf. The show’s season was a tournament and the grand prizes were a PC and a trip to Space Camp.

The contestants were all dressed like mom and dad were taking them to grandma’s for Sunday night dinner after a stop at the Olan Mills portrait studio, but to their credit, they were all pretty smart. However, the show was painfully awkward. Aames was just not made for it (despite being pretty dynamic as Buddy Lembeck on Charles in Charge); he was not very good at game show patter, stumbled over a number of words (and you’d think they’d have done a second take); and they have to sit through his painfully turgid narration of the pre-taped obstacle course segment, which the kids watch in that Love Connection picture-in-picture.

From what I learned, The Krypton Factor was a U.S. version of a British game show, and while I do not know the quality of the U.K. original, I can say that the purse strings on the syndicated version were clearly visible.

Slightly better produced with actual “teen celebrities” of the day was the news/lifestyles show Wide World of Kids. It aired in the very early Nienties and I will tell you that the opening credits were some of the most 1990 things that every 1990ed, especially the theme song that contained a hip-hop beat and orchestra hits that I’m pretty sure was written on a Yamaha PSR-270 keyboard.

The host for the episode I watched were Jason Hervey (Wayne from The Wonder Years) and Jamie Luner (who was on Just the Ten of Us). Hervey is dressed like Mikey from Parker Lewis Can’t Lose and the rat tail he has makes him look like he’s wearing a Davey Crockett coonskin cap. Luner might as well be Kelly Taylor’s sister, wearing a bike shorts and tank top outfit that screams “cool girl.” What they do as hosts is introduce segements that feature ordinary kids doing extraordinary things and they’re all edited to look really “cool.” Or at least what a room full of adults in 1990 figured what kids thought was cool. Anyway, there’s also Scott Grimes at Universal Studios Hollywood doing silly things all over the place.

Wide World of Kids was not a unique show; there were a number of shows that were kids versions of That’s Incredible! or Real People; remember, even the original T-NBC lineup contained Name Your Adventure. in the very least, for all fot the early Nineties contrived cool, the hosts looked like they were having fun.

In a sense, these were all “hold you over” shows and were not ones that had much of a legacy (both Wide World of Kids and The Krypton Factor made it maybe two seasons at the most), but they’re burned into my brain because I was the only person I knew who watched them and they’re all unique in a peculiar way.