A Question from Brian Trester…
I know that you are an expert in the history of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and how they ran things there. Can you answer a simple question for me? I noticed much like Sid and Marty Krofft, most of their shows were very short-lived, some only making 16 cartoons or less. Why did they give up or cancel shows so fast? I know it took a lot of time, effort and money to create these shows. This seemed to be a running theme with a lot of cartoons in the 60s and 70s.
Was it that the networks always wanted something new or were they that poorly received by the audiences? I loved cartoons like Hong Kong Phooey and the like but they seemed to come and go before you could really build a strong following. However, cartoons like Scooby Doo seemed to drag on forever to the point I almost dreaded to see the new Scooby Doo offering in the fall.
Can you help shed some light on this?
Sure. There are a few exceptions but very few to this: The show was axed because the folks at the network, wisely or unwisely, thought its ratings were just not high enough to warrant another season. They'd look at how the show was drawing audiences and in particular how it did in reruns. During the years I worked on Saturday morning network shows, the math was that they'd make thirteen episodes and run each one four times.
There were a lot of shows that did well on the first run, a little less well on the second run, a lot less well on the third run and poorly on the fourth run. If yours did, that was a show that was not going to get renewed for another season. Once in a while, a show fared so poorly in reruns that they switched in reruns of something else they thought would do better there. And of course, there were many that didn't do well on the first run, which almost always meant it wouldn't do well on any runs.
But really, that's all there is to it: How are the ratings? I can think of only a few exceptions. The run of the 1973 Addams Family cartoon show was reportedly truncated because of a legal dispute over the ownership of the property. In 1984, I worked on a live-action Saturday morn show for Sid and Marty Krofft, Pryor's Place, that probably would have had more than one season if its star, Richard Pryor, had been willing to do more than the thirteen episodes we did. Another show I worked on, Garfield and Friends, could have had at least one more season than the seven we did if the producers had been willing to lower the price it cost CBS. There are probably a few other cases but not many.
You sometimes hear that a certain show — like yet another series I worked on, Dungeons and Dragons — was canceled because protest groups thought it was too violent or too scary. I know that wasn't why that show went off. It was declining ratings. And I don't think it was ever true with any other program. As with most things in show business, it all comes down to the numbers.
