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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
More than meets the eye!, December 3, 2000
This review is from: Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon Culture (Paperback)
I echo the majority of reviews here. The lack of photos for a book chronicling and analyzing such a VISUAL medium is odd: though I would guess that the licensing costs (or whatever these fees may be called) would have been prohibitive. The strength is the authors' discussion of some of the less famous citizens of Saturday Morning: Hong Kong Phooey, the menagerie of Sid & Marty Krofft, Wacky Racers, etc... Strikingly absent from the book are any significant references to The Pink Panther and Aardvark, a LONG-standing Saturday morning staple on, I believe, ABC affiliated stations and, perhaps worse, only a passing mention of The Transformers. The book discusses He-Man at some length, despite that it was a toy tie-in and was a weekday syndicated show. Transformers fits this same criteria, was more than just a 1/2 hour commercial for some product but was, in fact, a carefully craftyed sci-fi series that continues, IN-CONINUITY, with Beast Machines/Beast Wars TODAY! Shame... otherwise, a "fun" book though I think I will check-out the text the authors' claim to be a definitive overview of the genre': Saturday Morning TV.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for Fun, Bad for Facts, February 5, 2004
This review is from: Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon Culture (Paperback)
This book has many positive and negative points to it. Let's start off with what's good about it. The authors write with a clear understanding and love for animation. The book isn't a cold text book on Saturday Morning traditions or television shows. They commnet on obscure shows and remind the reader of the reasons why they watched some shows. In the book, there is a loose history of how cartoons migrated to Saturdays, with subtle mentions of struggles between advertisers, networks, and parental groups, also reflective looks on "Generation X" and their love of animation. They even post comments sent to them from internet newsgroups from people recalling their own love and rituals of Saturday mornings. Lots of inside information told in a real fun way. Now on to the bad parts...First off, I will state there is a very clear bias in the writing. The authors make their opinions clear when they write about programs they didn't like. What's worse is that they don't give reasons for them. Their mentality sends the message: "you had to be there to know," which means there is a stark learning curve to this text. The only saving grace, is that the authors admit their bias on the first page. Right from the start you know its going to be an opinionated retrospective look back. The lack of photos in the book is also annoying, especially considering their text on Sid and Marty Kroff's programs, describing the visuals as trippy. The medium of television is very visual, and not being able to make a cartoon character's face with its name, makes looking back 30 years a little tough. The book takes little time to break things into generas or eras. It covers the overall collective of Saturday morning and picks out the most memorible shows and comments on them. This book is great for the casual reader, but serverly lacking for historic or animation enthusiasts. If you do pick it up, read it for fun, not for research.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Uneven but worthwhile ..., March 21, 1999
This review is from: Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon Culture (Paperback)
Timothy Burke is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College; his brother, Kevin, a former editor at Film Threat and Wild Cartoon Kingdom magazines, now works for Quentin Tarantino's A Band Apart production company; together they've written Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up with Cartoon Culture (NY: St. Martin's, 1999), an uneven but nonetheless worthwhile history of and commentary on the unique American insitution that is saturday morning television. While Saturday Morning Fever suffers from a textual schizophrenia apparently brought on by the brothers Burke's divergent backgrounds, wheeling freely between nuts-and-bolts historical accounting, astute critical commentary, flippant asides, blatant fanboy partisanship and generally extraneous, allegedly "comedic" and typically unfunny inserts, it does indeed, as its authors usefully identify the characteristic viewpoint of the saturday morning TV veteran, "mix deep affection, knowing cynicism, and ironic distance" for and toward its subject matter. As such it serves as a playful foil to Marsha Kinder's cautionary Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1993), by giving kids a bit more credit--"granting them a bit more agency," as the pop cultural studies types might put it--than Kinder does, or, at any rate, by demonstrating that saturday morning television hasn't rotted at least a couple of young minds ...
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