Edoropolis Emporium

I looked around and didn't see any thread like this, so I thought it would be kind of neat to start one.  For me, it was WTTE 28 in Columbus, OH and it aired at 3:00 p.m. in the afternoon, before being moved to a 6:30 a.m. timeslot near the end of its syndication run.  I can't remember what years exactly, unfortunately.

If it helps, SPC was syndicated in the 1996-1997 TV season, premiering on the week of September 8th, 1996, and ending early September of '97.

I was able to get it on two different stations, each from a different city depending on the outdoor antenna's position.  (Living in the sticks, it's on a tower and must be turned by use of a rotor box).

The show started on Saturday AM for me, 10:30Am timeslot on WVTV 18 out of Milwaukee WI, but was soon given a daily strip at 2:30pm, Mon-Fri, which it held onto until cancellation.  It was the lead-in for the Kids WB afternoon block.

I'm not sure where it initially started on WACY 32, the UPN affiliate out of the Green Bay / Appleton WI market, but by the time I found it there in January 1997, it was slotted at 9:30am....the last show of the morning cartoon block.

I was lucky for this setup.  Not a baseball fan at the time (I am now), I would be stuck with the 9:30 morning showing during the summer months if the Brewers were playing an afternoon game.....WVTV was their carrier of games at the time and preempted all afternoon programming if they were playing.  Made me want to explode in classic Big Cheese fashion.

First episode for me was "Candid Kitty".  Won't forget that.

Yeah, you can say, i was doggone obsessed with the cats, that's for sure.

(Edit: Forgot to mention the first episode I saw in full)

It was probably our local FOX affiliate (WSJV), but I can't remember for sure. It aired during the school day, so I set the VCR to tape it. I remember taking a tape with some episodes on it to a friend's house, although I don't remember him caring for it much.

1991 for me in Canada. Dunno the station, but it was on balls early in the morning.

Let the Cellar Beware, will never forget.

~Burkey

Most likely YTV, unless you were like me and was the only kid in class without cable. I got my fix with a homemade antenna, picking up WNYO from Buffalo at 6:30 AM (which was hard at the time, as WNYO did not appear on the TV listings in the paper).

That was the worst part about it. I used to DX a lot when I was younger (try to pick up TV / radio stations from far away places thanks to my homemade antennae). The problem was that as dawn approached, the signal would degrade - which usually happened about halfway through the show.

Homemade antenna huh?

Like Canada, unless you had cable or (since I'm going to go by when I first saw SPC, circa 1996-1997) highly-expensive satellite services hooked up, you were stuck with what the antenna pulled.  Sure, today's digital broadcast methods now allows more 'channels' with many main stations having 'sub-channels' (drives me nuts how the affiliate stations always 'tweak' the strength of their signals), but back then, as it is now, you were stuck with the major networks (for the U.S., that's ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox), the public-paid PBS station, and one or two 'independent' channels (which have all since gone to CW and MyTV (nee: WB and UPN, respectively).  That was literally it!

I know just what you're getting at with weather patterns too.  They can affect an over-the-air analog or digital broadcast signal greatly.  My VHS full of SPC episodes has varying degrees of degradation....some are quite clear with just a hint of snow, others are like trying to watch the show through the fog.

It was especially irritating when the last two minutes of Tom and Jerry was clear, and the start of the show was good...but then the snow kept getting worse and worse. I remember after I finally got a TV and VCR in my room, I could just tape SPC and did not have to get up at 6:30 AM - only to find the last 10 minutes is all snow

That really stinks, felineki!  I guess I was fortunate; my best friend throughout school was a huge SPC fan also, and so was one of friends in college.  The two of us actually rewatched the entire series when we were staying at school through the summer and taking classes (when the campus was deserted).  Also, one interesting tidbit:  My affiliate didn't always use the Saban bumpers; they had a local fox host (similar to the CW Star nowadays) who did intros for kids shows, and had some for the Pizza Cats.  If only my old VHS tapes hadn't been thrown away, I could post some for you to see.

All those bumpers for Saban's shows were all for a childrens' block the company packaged for syndication between 1995-1998...."Saban's...something-or-other" (it's name basically has escaped me).  The problem though was many stations broke it up, airing some shows on weekdays and some on weekends.  Usually those with only 13-26 eps were tossed to weekends, shows with more (like SPC) were turned over to weekdays.

This would explain your affiliate splicing their own bumpers over those Saban had made.  I don't think the indie/WB station to my south did it here, but I recall once in a while, the UPN one north of me did.

Aside:

Finding info online about that mid-90s programming block is insanely difficult, but my memory recollects these series airing on it at one time or another, in no particular order.  They all featured those bumpers you speak of....I honestly found them annoying, so I often in recording SPC, did my best in 'editing' them out....crudely of course, not knowing when commercials were going to end half the time.

• Eagle Riders
• Adventures of Oliver Twist (E/I)
• Adventures of The Little Mermaid
• Masked Rider
• Why Why Family (E/I)
• DBZ (Started in 1996 in some markets.  Co-produced w/ FUNimation)
• SPC (Goes w/out saying)

(Those that were Saban's offerings to stations to fill in the then-new E/I requirements I've marked as such.  These were most often slotted on weekends.  Also why Dragon Ball is not on this list.....Saban didn't distribute it....it was packed with Sailor Moon by Seagull Entertainment in the prior (1995-96) TV season.)

The only things Saban did NOT air in this block that was their property was Power Rangers, and any Marvel comics adaptions they produced, most famously known being their X-men series that has a cult-following with cartoon fandom.  Those were still exclusive to Fox's kids lineup.

Of course, we all know now that Saban has come full-circle, now manning the weekend animation block for The CW, though they source programs from third-pardy companies, including former co-producer of DBZ fame, FUNimation.

As they say, small world.

I didn't have the spliced bumpers or bad connection issues. I had some Fox Kids moron running when and which episodes aired. I don't recall the exact timeslot, but I always had to leave for school in the morning halfway though the episode. I would start my VHS and leave, let it record until it ran out of space, then get home from school and rewind all the way back.

But the episodes weren't every day, they were only aired MWF. AND that moron I spoke of previously would air the episodes in order, as if the show WAS aired every day. In example, Monday would be episode 001, Wednesday would be episode 003, Friday would be episode 005. That means I never saw 2/5ths of the entire series, including the last episode.

I have all the episodes now, but at the time it was a complete downer.  :/

I watched on YTV, it came on after Big Comfy Couch

I would have given the director of programming at said affiliate a jingle.  The only time that should be happening is with preemptions, or emergency situations (EAS bulletins and the like), like in my example where the local station that ran SPC, also was the carrier of professional sports events (NBA and MLB) in the city it was located in.  Thus, if the start time for those ran into SPC's timeslot, the show was just nixed for that day and they would just run the next episode in the running order the next day (or whenever there was no need to preempt the regular schedule of programs).

Me'thinks that director was smoking something and forgot to hit the 'play / on-air' button, really.  :P

This'll all be moot with the forthcoming DVD sets.  Though I know for sure, when I get my hands on my copies (especially of SPC), I'm going to watch them at the times I watched them when originally aired.  Yeah, that's how horribly nostalgic I am with this show.  :)

UPN here
I've pushed it out of my brain, but there was some show on after SPC that I really hated, and I used to change the channel or turn off the TV the moment SPC was over.  But during the SPC credits the station announcer would talk over the music to say that show was coming next, and I hated him for it.

Send that announcer to Prisoner Island.
:violet:

Pretty sure it was Kids WB for me. They played it at 7am or so, I think, Monday to Friday. As I mentioned in the first SPC experience thread, it was on at the same time as Beast Wars where I was, which I was pretty obsessed with at the time, so I only watched it on days Beast Wars was a repeat (they were only showing new episodes 2 or 3 days a week when they had them, so I still watched SPC pretty frequently).

I watched it on two stations over the years: ITV in 1991, when it first aired on Motormouth on a Saturday, and then on UTV (Ulster Television, Northern Ireland) when they decided to repeat it during the day in the summer of 1995.  As far as I know, it's never been on TV over here since.

I was 4 but I remember it well since that was the year Carlo started co-hosting telekids lol. 1993 on rtl4, though I forgot which day and time. Might have been wednesdays  ;)

As with LadyFlame, I first saw our crime fighting felines August 1991 on Motormouth (ITV). I certainly remember watching the show at that time, but it was the later showings in 1995 where I got hooked. However, after checking some archive newspapers, it looks like these 1995 showings were not networked all over ITV; you only got to see Pizza Cats if you were lucky enough to live in a region that showed it.

Later on, if you had satellite TV or a cable company that carried it, the Fox Kids Network (later just Fox Kids) launched in the UK October 1996, and they would show SPC everyday at 7am to begin with.

Going back to Motormouth, this show was produced for ITV by Television South (TVS). In August 1991, they were feeling confident of securing another 10 year ITV franchise by bidding just under £60 million. They made the highest bid, but lost (see  here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kH2rlGPUAr4#t=633s) for the gory details). The year after, TVS was bought by International Family Entertainment who were themselves bought by Fox Kids Worldwide in 1997.

.....and it was Haim Saban himself who helmed Fox Kids starting in 1997 as well.  Except for DBZ, starting in the 1997-98 season here in the U.S., most Saban Entertainment programs were exclusively on the Fox Kids block.  This included their last real big 'hit', Digimon.

Hopefully it's not too off-topic, since we're talking of where and when we first saw the show, I've wondered for some years now, why it wasn't until the 1996-97 season when the U.S. finally got SPC?  While I'm glad it 'did not' come here until then (otherwise I wouldn't have paid attention or known...wasn't watching much for 'cartoons' in the early 90s; it took SPC and anime in general to rekindle my interest in animation), it's just always been a nagging curiosity.

As far as I understood it, it did run briefly in the US in 91, but did not gain much traction going head-to-head against the Ninja Turtles cartoon. They brought it back in the mid-90s because it fit in well with their live-action block of Power Rangers, Samurai Syber Squad, and Masked Rider.

Nothing could beat TMNT until it went off the air.

Probably was only in select markets then, or as you said for a very brief time, because I don't remember it airing anywhere around me....and I have two markets to tap from.  Maybe it aired too early (ie: 6 AM).  Still, news to me 

If I may digress.....SPC did ultimately fit in better with Saban's roster of live-action and other animated series (all Japanese-made) they put together at the time, circa mid-1990s.  Add to it Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball / DBZ starting to gain a small but loyal following despite the crap timeslots they all got.  I do think the contemporary 'anime' craze that was getting underway at that point also gave it a better shot..even if just for that one year.  At least here in the U.S., it would take two more years, DBZ making the move to Cartoon Network, and this little thing called Pokemon to catch worldwide hype for anime to really boom.  I'd say SPC, Sailor Moon, and the time Dragon Ball / DBZ was in syndication, planted those seeds.

That said, it's interesting the choices some TV execs and programming directors make...what to air and what time.

It was also an unfortunate time for rival superhero team cartoons. Remember "Stunt Dawgs" and "Biker Mice from Mars"?


Sailor Moon's commercial success really kicked off the import boom of the 90s. It most likely pushed Saban to resurrect the show, even just to break up what would have been 90 minutes of teens fighting robots. Too bad SPC was never big enough here to spawn much in the way of toys and merch for the North American market


I'll say. I had to get it via antenna from WNYO in Buffalo at 6 AM, but my friend (who had cable) got it at 3 PM from Fox Rochester. Even after it went off-air in the US, it ran at 2 AM on YTV in Canada for another lap of episodes before it got canned there too. If they ran at 5:30 AM instead of Tom and Jerry, I'd be much happier... sun wasn't up, so the signal was much clearer.

I believe it was on UPN, which was channel 31 for me. This show was airing in the Summer, which is when I discovered it. I'm not sure if it was airing beforehand, though. But what I do know is that the show stopped airing in syndication in early September of '97. I remember that was the time in which I began 4th grade. The last episode that I saw was "Samurai Charm School" on a Thursday.