Recently I caught a member of “Generation Z” on TV arguing about global warning with, honestly, more emotion than facts in their arsenal. It was merely background noise as I ate breakfast in my hotel room until they declared “Older generations don’t know what it is like to grow up knowing the end of the world is coming!”
I laughed so hard hotel coffee came out my nose (it hurt but frankly it smelled better than it tasted).
Being born in 1972, I am firmly Generation X. I can’t really speak to how the Greatest Generation felt as they went through World War II and saw the first, and thankfully only, uses of the atomic bomb in war. Nor can I really cover how the Boomers felt growing up; that is my parents’ generation. They grew up in the shadow of the atomic bomb, though, and lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis and both the Korean and Vietnam Wars. But Generation X I can speak about: my generation ate the apocalypse and crapped Armageddon.
No, seriously. This isn’t just a “Shut up, kid, your generation sucks” moment. Let’s turn our sensors to television, specifically Saturday moning catoons, Gen X grew up with. The end of the world loomed large when I was growing up. Older Gen X kids grew up with Walter Cronkite reporting casualty numbers on the news every night and nuclear attack drills at school. Before Gen X all hit college the crack epidemic and the violence it came with took over the nightly news. Kids were carrying guns and killing each other, sex had become potentially lethal with AIDS and there were still enough nuclear weapons around to destroy the world something like 250 times over. We were assigned reading such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Hal Lindsey had prime time specials and a feature film documentary. Music would lead you to suicide. Playing Dungeons and Dragons would also lead you to suicide, possibly after being possessed. Pop music like 99 Luftballoons by Nina and Prince’s 1999 added a beat to our impending doom. It was hard, very hard, for kids like me to imagine getting as old as I am now.
And television reflected this reality in many ways. Sitcoms like Mr Belvedere had very special episodes about children with AIDS. What are you, eight years old? Hey, you could get this terrifying new lethal disease, too but be nice when you meet other kids who have it! AIDS was also covered in afterschool specials along with teen pregnancy, suicide, date rape and “The Day My Kid Went Punk.” I went punk… I am literally wearing a Black Flag t-shirt as I write. Maybe I should get my parents to watch that one and see what they say about it. Anyway, TV movies such as 1983’s The Day After examined what would happen after a “limited” nuclear war and schools told parents both to shield kids from the difficult subject matter and make it family viewing. It was so successful (and scared so many kids) in the US it forced the UK to make their own TV movie on the subject, Threads, the next year. Then it turned up on Superstation TBS in early 1985.
That was serious, though, arguably all adult stuff. Our visions of apocalypse came in lighter fare too! As revealed in the surprise ending of the 1968 film Planet of the Apes and its sequels, things would go very poorly for humanity in the future resulting in subjugation by the intelligent apes created to be servants to man. Adventures of human rebels in the ape world would come to the small screen courtesy of CBS in 1974. The 1976 film Logan’s Run, which ended with the main characters venturing out into a post-apocalyptic world, would also come to CBS as a TV series in 1977. Between these two shows Space 1999 followed the crew of Moonbase Alpha as they wandered through space after a nuclear disaster tears the moon from Earth’s orbit. While not directly post-apocalyptic this could not have been good from Earth and we will get back to the loss of the moon theme in a second. These were prime time shows set after the destruction of the world as we knew it… but the apocalypse came to Saturday morning cartoons, too!
A year after its live action TV debut Return to the Planet of the Apes brought the Apes franchise to Saturday morning television. Also premiering that year was the live action Saturday morning series ARK II from Filmation (the same folks who made Shazam, The Secrets of Isis and the ‘70s Ghost Busters with F-Troop’s Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch). It followed a group of young explorers in a sweet Damnation Alley style vehicle exploring the wastelands of 25th century Earth. ARK II, I believe, did not see civilization fall due to nuclear war but because of pollution and disease. ARK II was successful enough for Filmation to release two more live action Saturday morning science fiction shows (all three of which are hard to find today; there were DVD releases several years ago). 1977’s Space Academy told the story of cadets at a futuristic training academy on an asteroid. They often dealt with refugees, lost colonists and planets about to explode. Space Academy featured Lost In Space’s Jonathan Harris as the Academy’s head. 1978’s Jason of Star Command was a spin off which followed a secret agent working out of Space Academy. The first season was a movie serial-like series presented as a fifteen minute segment of the Tarzan and the Super 7 animated series with Star Trek’s James Doohan in the cast. The second season was in a standard 30 minute episode format. While not overtly apocalyptic, Jason usually battled Dragos, played by Sid Haig. Evil clown Captain Spaulding of Rob Zombie’s Firefly Family movie series was a Saturday morning villain for my generation… Think about that: before House of 1,000 Corpses there was Jason of Star Command.
There was also a trend, while not quite apocalyptic, of returning to the prehistoric in 1970s kids’ programming. Best remembered is 1974’s Land of the Lost (the Sid and Marty Krofft production which spawned a 1991 reboot series and the 2009 film) about a family somehow sent back to prehistoric times. David Gerrold, who wrote the Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles, was the series’ story editor. That same year Hanna-Barbera launched Valley of the Dinosaurs, an animated series with basically the same premise minus Sleestaks. Also in 1974, ABC ran the live action Saturday morning series Korg: 70,000 BC. Created by Fred Freiberger, who produced the third season of Star Trek and the second season of Space 1999, this strange offering was also produced by Hanna-Barbera. Korg presented the struggles of a Neanderthal family in a documentary style narrated by Burgess Meredith.
But the pinnacle of Saturday morning post-apocalyptic television combined the prehistoric feel of Korg and Valley of the Dinosaurs, science fiction flair from Star Wars and the actual destruction of the world as we know it in Thundarr the Barbarian. This Ruby-Spears cartoon premiered in 1980 and, at least when I was a kid in St. Louis, was the last cartoon on Saturdays before ABC kicked off its Wide World of Sports. After two seasons, by the way, ABC cancelled the show but NBC picked it up as re-runs for at least another year. The opening of Thundarr explained, over dramatic music, how a rogue planet had smashed into the moon, obliterating it, wreaking havoc on the Earth and destroying civilization. 2,000 years later Earth is full of mutants and evil wizards who wield both magic and science. Thundarr, an escaped slave, rides with Ookla the Mok (a kind of lion-man meets Wookie) and Princess Ariel (a sorceress, not a mermaid) through the wastelands of North America pitting his righteous anger and “fabulous sun sword” (picture a light saber which connects magnetically to Thundarr’s gauntlet when not in use) against pretty much anyone who looks at them funny or oppresses the weak. The show delighted in dropping obvious hints about where Thundarr and his companions were… New York, Denver, Mount Rushmore and even my own home town of St. Louis were shown as dangerous hellscapes.
If you are not Generation X then I want you to think about that for a minute: my Saturday morning entertainment included glimpses of the city where I lived as a dangerous mutated landscape after the world is destroyed by a freak space disaster. Future survivors in the shadow of the Gateway Arch are shown enslaved by the wizard Skullus to fuel his fight against his rival sorcerer Octagon. What is the future going to be like, kid? Bleak and dangerous as humanity tries to pick out a pitiful existence among the ruins of everything you know…
Cartoons are over, now go play!