In between Friday and Saturday July 17th and 18th 1969, as Apollo 11 slipped silently from earth's gravitational influence and into the grip of the moon, most 12 year olds across the nation were doing exactly what I was doing- slipping silently from a summer Friday to a summer Saturday.
Saturday found Apollo 11 seeming to have ever annoying high gain antenna problems as they approached the moon and prepared for LOI. Communications were filled with static as the morning went on. Here on earth, the antenna on our family TV was set just right to catch the most important communication that a kid could receive on a Saturday morning- cartoons.
My Saturday's usually started at dawn with a non-cartoon- the Army's morning rerun of "The Big Picture." These were all outdated and often in black and white, but they had tanks and explosions- so what kid could resist? Then Saturdays really kicked in with Go-Go Gophers cartoon on channel 25 (UHF) at 8:00 followed by the Buggs Bunny and Road Runner Hour, which I tried never to miss. At 9:30 the cartoons went into "blah" mode with channel 25 airing Wacky Racers, channel 12 showing the Adventures of Gulliver and channel 5 playing Top Cat. Yet on a summer Saturday this mattered little as normally mom booted me out of the house to "Go outside and play" during the first 15 minutes of Road Runner anyhow.
On this Saturday we all knew that Apollo 11 was up there as the networks were broadcasting "Special Reports" on the LOI and any other activity they could break in for. As I recall, I was still in amazement of the previous day's video showing the inside of the LEM and the crew floating around. Outside, in on kid turff, one of the kids in the neighborhood had a sort of spaceship toy and kept buzzing it around. There was a real scarcity of "realistic" Apollo toys at this moment in history. Most were simply cheap plastic rockets that resembled 50s sci-fi special effects yet had the label "Apollo" hastily pasted on them to spike sales. In retrospect, I don't think any of the toy manufacturers really saw coming the wave "Apollo fever" that was currently sweeping the nation. We kids talked about tomorrow's moon landing, we pretended as best we could to be a part of that upcoming event, and yet we knew very little about what was actually happening. Still, some of us were beginning to deeply sense the importance of this moment and instinctively know that the next moment would be even more important. Perhaps it would be even more important than today's episode of "The Archies" cartoon... perhaps.
Of course the real classic season of 60s Saturday morning entertainment would not begin until the Fall of 69 when the three networks would release shows like "Hot Wheels" "Scooby Doo" "Banana Splits" and my personal favorite "The Pink Panther" which I liked because it was the sickest. There would also be the return of "The Monkees" to Saturday morning just to expand our horizons. All of these shows, however, would be a side bar to Apollo 12 rather than Apollo 11 but, by that time, Project Apollo would be well on its way to cancellation.
Showing posts with label early cartoons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label early cartoons. Show all posts
Friday
The Klyde Saga, part 2
Sketched within remarkably small frames and done totally in pencil, the strips were crude and contained both off-color language, and sometimes humor that only Wes could understand. The story was that of a miniature submarine and its crew of ants that sailed from the creek that ran behind Wes’ house in the farm-town of Freeland, Michigan to another creek that ran near his old neighborhood on the east side of Saginaw, Michigan. Interestingly, if you follow a map, it is indeed possible to connect the two locations by way of water, so long as you can sail in depths of less than three inches. Once back in Wes’ old neighborhood, the submarine ants engage in a fictional havoc.
Once Wes began writing his cartoons, it was like opening a flood gate, and his pencil began producing a number of off-beat ant adventures as his style began to improve. In fact, he produced such a large quantity of cartoons that soon even his own family grew tired of reading them. Eventually, Wes was making cartoons that would be read by no one but himself! These early works are a bit painful to read. Wes’ primary fault being a learning dysfunction which caused him to be “over-phonetically” trained in the first grade. As a result, he tended to spell nearly every word the way it sounded right up until he went to college. Of course, being a product of the public school system, having such an English dysfunction was seen as no obstruction to his completing high school. By the time Wes was ready to go to college, he had a scrap book pasted full of cartoons that no one had ever read.
On August 28th, 1977, Wes stepped onto the campus of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for the first time. The school was over-flowing with students that year, and Wes along with several hundred other students had to be housed in the Royal Scottish Inn, or translated into aviation terms- “the R.S.I.” which was a motel converted into a dormitory. During that first term at college, he drew a number of large single-frame cartoons depicting life at the R.S.I. These cartoons were used to decorate room 182 where Wes and his two roommates Jeff and “Chuckles” were housed. Soon the cartoons caught the attention of other R.S.I. residents, and one in particular, Dan “the man” Karger encouraged the cartoonist to bring his scrapbook back with him from Michigan after Christmas break so that the guys could see all of his cartoons. Wes did just that and the book was passed around the R.S.I. the following spring and gained far more laughs than the author had expected.
Once Wes began writing his cartoons, it was like opening a flood gate, and his pencil began producing a number of off-beat ant adventures as his style began to improve. In fact, he produced such a large quantity of cartoons that soon even his own family grew tired of reading them. Eventually, Wes was making cartoons that would be read by no one but himself! These early works are a bit painful to read. Wes’ primary fault being a learning dysfunction which caused him to be “over-phonetically” trained in the first grade. As a result, he tended to spell nearly every word the way it sounded right up until he went to college. Of course, being a product of the public school system, having such an English dysfunction was seen as no obstruction to his completing high school. By the time Wes was ready to go to college, he had a scrap book pasted full of cartoons that no one had ever read.
On August 28th, 1977, Wes stepped onto the campus of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for the first time. The school was over-flowing with students that year, and Wes along with several hundred other students had to be housed in the Royal Scottish Inn, or translated into aviation terms- “the R.S.I.” which was a motel converted into a dormitory. During that first term at college, he drew a number of large single-frame cartoons depicting life at the R.S.I. These cartoons were used to decorate room 182 where Wes and his two roommates Jeff and “Chuckles” were housed. Soon the cartoons caught the attention of other R.S.I. residents, and one in particular, Dan “the man” Karger encouraged the cartoonist to bring his scrapbook back with him from Michigan after Christmas break so that the guys could see all of his cartoons. Wes did just that and the book was passed around the R.S.I. the following spring and gained far more laughs than the author had expected.
Thursday
The Klyde Saga, Part 1
The question has often been asked, “Where did the Klyde Morris cartoon come from?” The answer is interesting.
In his youth, cartoonist Wes Oleszewski was a space-buff and model rocket enthusiast. At age 12, launching rockets with no one aboard seemed fairly pointless to Wes, after all, there had to be a crew otherwise what was the fun? With that in mind, the little 6th grader went out into his back yard and selected some common “cornfield ants” and routinely blasted their helpless little butts into the sky in balsa wood spaceships. Wes, being the strict non-conformist, never built his rockets according to the packaged instructions so every flight was some sort of contrived design that he had dreamed up. Violating every rule that the manufacturers could print, he tampered with engines and re-rigged recovery systems, the result being lots of spectacular disasters and lots of lost ant crews. In 1970, after a series of disastrous launches, Wes drew a few single-framed cartoons spoofing his wayward rockets. Unfortunately, these first cartoons have not survived the passing of years.
By early 1975, Wes again felt the urge to do some cartooning, and it was logical that his ants and their ant world that exists among, but un-noticed by the humans, would be the setting. Inspired by the old television series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, Wes began work on “Forage to the Bottom of the Sea” which featured not only the ants, but Wes’ boyhood best friends Jim and Ken.
In his youth, cartoonist Wes Oleszewski was a space-buff and model rocket enthusiast. At age 12, launching rockets with no one aboard seemed fairly pointless to Wes, after all, there had to be a crew otherwise what was the fun? With that in mind, the little 6th grader went out into his back yard and selected some common “cornfield ants” and routinely blasted their helpless little butts into the sky in balsa wood spaceships. Wes, being the strict non-conformist, never built his rockets according to the packaged instructions so every flight was some sort of contrived design that he had dreamed up. Violating every rule that the manufacturers could print, he tampered with engines and re-rigged recovery systems, the result being lots of spectacular disasters and lots of lost ant crews. In 1970, after a series of disastrous launches, Wes drew a few single-framed cartoons spoofing his wayward rockets. Unfortunately, these first cartoons have not survived the passing of years.
By early 1975, Wes again felt the urge to do some cartooning, and it was logical that his ants and their ant world that exists among, but un-noticed by the humans, would be the setting. Inspired by the old television series, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, Wes began work on “Forage to the Bottom of the Sea” which featured not only the ants, but Wes’ boyhood best friends Jim and Ken.
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