I realize this is going to age me, talking about waiting up for Saturday morning cartoons when kids today can turn on the tube anytime and watch them on cable kinda gives it away, but oh well.

 When I was little, you got one day a week, Saturday, to be inundated with cartoons. From the crack of dawn till late afternoon when the sports shows came on, the day belonged to you and your brightly hued, animated friends.

  My cousin and I used to spends summers with my grandma in the country and we'd plan every week to stay up all night so we wouldn't miss one second of cartoons. It didn't matter that the earliest shows pretty much sucked big ones, we still felt robbed if we raced into the living room and turned on the set to find them going off.

  We almost never could stay up that late, but on rare occasions we did. It was with unbridled glee that we would hear the cheesy music to the old 'Batman' tv show, because that meant our time had come. After the Caped-crusader finished off the bad guy, with the help of his trusty 'friend' Robin, the cartoons would come. And we sat through all the crappy ones, enjoying them nonetheless, knowing that around 10 the good stuff came. 'Thunder Cats', 'The Smurfs", Yogi Bear, 'G.I. Joe', 'Transformers', 'My Little Ponies', 'Justice League'....you know, the good stuff.

   And each Saturday that we made it through the night, waded through the badly drawn, crappily written, out-of-date cartoons, and were about to plunge into the good stuff, we'd look up to see a furry-haired, blanket-cocooned beast come stumbling out of her room to kick us aside and burrow into the sofa. My Aunt, an 18 yr old who we otherwise worshipped, but despised on Saturday.

  The first thing she'd do after staring comatose at the wall for a good half hour would be tojab one of us in the back or back of the head and grunt, "turn it."

 We'd wail, "No! The good ones are coming on!"

 She'd jab and grunt, "Turn it. Star Trek is on"

 You can't imagine how that sent shivers down our little sleep-deprived spines.

 Eventually she'd wair herself out poking and jabbing and waddle to the set, shoving us out of her way like bowling pins, left floundering in our bowls of soggy Cap'n Crunch,  and turn it to Star Trek.

 "Do you brats know how hard it was for me to get up to watch this? Shut up and go outside to play."

  I still hate to see Captain Kirk's smarmy face late night on tv. Bastard stole my best Saturdays.

Hoosier~