Saturday, August 1, 2020

It Should've Been on a Saturday: The Yummy Awards (1983)

Traditionally, fall preview specials for Saturday morning freshmen were a half-hour in length. NBC started the tradition, though never on an annual basis, in 1968 to introduce The Banana Splits. 15 years later, they virtually jumped the shark.

The Yummy Awards, an hour-long special that was meant to celebrate children's television's past along with its present (and perhaps, future), was actually a send-up of awards shows, but while it was billed as the "First annual", there was never a follow-up, likely due to poor ratings. In all fairness, because of the size of the show, maybe it should've aired on a Saturday morning, the week before the season started.

Ricky Schroder (Silver Spoons) presided over the event, with Dwight Schultz (The A-Team) acting as a field reporter, billed for some strange reason as an MC. Celebrating the past meant bringing guests who'd appeared on other networks, like, for example, Lassie, while welcoming old friends like Paul Winchell (Smurfs), who brought along Jerry Mahoney, Pinky Lee, and Kukla, Fran, & Ollie, who started on NBC before eventually fronting the CBS Children's Film Festival. Current NBC stars Lee Curreri (Fame), Kim Fields (The Facts of Life), Justine Bateman & Tina Yothers (Family Ties), and, of course, Schultz's A-Team castmate, Mr. T, filled out the bill.



No, they didn't have Eddie Murphy (Saturday Night Live) wear his Gumby costume.

NBC, for whatever reason, didn't have enough 1st run series, hence bookending the lineup with repeats of The Flintstone Funnies (formerly The Flintstone Comedy Show) and the former ABC series, Thundarr The Barbarian (which came as part of a package deal Ruby-Spears brokered to sell NBC Mr. T  & Alvin & The Chipmunks.

There is a video, but the YouTube poster attached some Saturday Supercade content, making it unusable here.

No rating.

4 comments:

Goldstar said...

"The Yummy Awards" aired a year before "NBC's Laugh Busters", which Silverstar and myself wrote about on our blog segment TV Special Showdown.

The Yummy Awards were an odd mix; it was simultaneously a spoof on award shows, a Saturday morning preview special and a celebration of kid vid's past. But as you noted, hobbyfan. I think that it was too long, although there have been 60 minute SatAM preview specials before; the aforementioned NBC's Laugh Busters and ABC's Pac Preview Party, to name just two, but none of those felt as padded and drawn out as this one did.

Silverstar said...

I have a theory about "Yummy Awards" (it's only a theory, so if I'm wrong, I'm wrong and I'll eat a bug :P); I suspect that it was originally going to be two half-hour specials: the obligatory SatAM preview special and a separate special celebrating classic kid-vid (keep in mind that during this time NBC was enjoying the ratings success of shows like TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes and the Television's Greatest Commercials specials), then some exec got the money-saving idea of combining both into a single 60-minute special and thus NBC went for the award show theme. In any event, I see what they were going for, but it didn't quite for. I have to wonder who this was aimed at; kids weren't old enough to appreciate the boomer shows, and adults weren't likely to even be watching a Saturday morning preview special unless it was running in the same room as their kids.

Silverstar said...

*That was supposed to be "It didn't quite work". Sorry.

hobbyfan said...

Guys, with the presence of Kukla, Fran, & Ollie, Bozo, et al, they were looking to make this for the whole family. I don't recall seeing too many commercials before it aired, so when I discovered this, it floored me.