It's hard for me to type the words "Saturday Morning" without recalling what Saturday Morning used to mean to me. Saturday Morning was when I'd get up early — earlier than my parents, at least — and go into the living room. I'm thinking back to when we only had one TV set in the house and that's where it was. I'd turn on the set, adjusting the volume to a level where I could hear it but they couldn't.
My parents' chairs for TV-watching were too far from the set for me so sometimes, I'd sit on the floor. Most times, I'd move a chair from the dining room into place before the set and put a TV tray in front of it. At some point during a commercial, I'd run into the kitchen and get a bowl of cereal or something else for breakfast, then eat it in front of the set.
What I was watching was, of course, Saturday Morning Television which was mostly cartoons. Three networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — programmed for my demographic, my demographic being anyone who was likely to ask his mother to buy whatever cereal I favored at that moment. At various times, it was Sugar Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Sugar Rice Krinkles (they don't make that anymore), Sugar Smacks or a few others that were only favorites for about one box or so. Often, one would be a favorite because there was a much-desired prize in the box.
My true favorite, if I was being honest and I occasionally was, was Cheerios. I loved Cheerios — the plain kind in the yellow box, not any of the inane variations now available. It was one of my favorite things to eat and still is. I swear on my oath as a 24-year blogger that I'm eating Cheerios — dry, which is how I like them — as I write this. I'm so glad they've never really changed them. If they'd had cartoon characters on the box all the time, I might never have eaten anything else ever.
Not all the shows I watched were cartoons. For a while, the local CBS channel ran a film show starring Buster Keaton. I don't think this was network. I think it was just the L.A. station filling the time slots before the network feed kicked in. Whatever it was, it was my introduction to a magical person who would become one of my favorite performers. I had no idea at the time that I was watching one of the low points of his career because he was still, to me, pretty funny.
Not a whole lot is known about this series so here's what I understand: Keaton's first TV series was called The Buster Keaton Comedy Show. It was done live in 1949 and only watchable in or around Southern California. Live shows then were only repeatable if someone made kinescopes of them — literally pointing a movie camera at a TV screen and capturing the image on film. If anyone made any of The Buster Keaton Comedy Show, they've never been seen to this day.
A year or two later, someone said to someone else something like, "It's too bad we didn't do those shows on film. We could make some money syndicating them." So they then made filmed episodes of The Buster Keaton Show, using much of the material that had been used in the live telecasts. Both shows, of course, relied heavily on gags and ideas from Keaton's earlier, better work.
A writer-producer-director named Clyde Bruckman was heavily involved with them. Bruckman was a colorful gent who worked with many of the great comedians of the silent era and early talkies, including Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and the Stooges. In later years, he was sometimes hired to work on comedy films and then sued for passing off script material from earlier films as new, never-before-filmed material. This new Keaton show was filled with jokes that Keaton and others had done before.
The Buster Keaton Show was syndicated in 1951. Two years later, its producers redid the opening titles to name it Life With Buster Keaton and they syndicated them again, reportedly representing it as a new show. That's why when you see surviving prints of the program, some have one title and some have the other.
Also reportedly, only thirteen half-hour episodes were ever made. I do not think the local CBS channel had all thirteen. I think they had six or seven and would run them over and over and over as long as they ran the program at all. The episode embedded below is the one I remember most vividly. I may have seen it ten or more times. You may have seen it on this site about ten years ago.
Don't think of it as a great comedian at his worst. Think of it as a guy who was still pretty good at the age of 56…and yes, I know he may look older in this but that's the way a lot of 56-year-old humans looked back then, especially if they'd had as rough a life as Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton. I think of it as a fond memory and one of the things that got me very, very interested in the kind of people who did the kind of films he did…