Awww. I got all warm and fuzzy watching that opener. Haven’t seen it since I watched the show as a kid on weekday afternoons. The original hosts were Meredith, Dave and Space Ace the pelican. Dave left fairly early on but the show ran for quite a few years. It had ended by the time aggregation started. I’m still confused about what a pelican has to with space but I guess a pelican was used because they were a common sight around Wollongong harbour and Lake Illawarra. I still remember where to send my entries for their competitions- ACE WIN TV, PO Box 4444, Wollongong 2500.
Even as a kid I think I recognised some of the content was a bit cheap and nasty. We’re talking the early days of Bruce Gordon’s ownership so you can imagine the cartoons weren’t as cool and cutting edge as the shows name. “Ace” was a word used by kids at the time to describe something that was excellent. I think I moved on fairly quickly to “Wonder World”, “Wombat” and “Shirl’s Neighbourhood”.
Bruce probably thought it was still a hit with the kiddies…
Mind you i probably can’t be too judgey about regional TV cartoons. I remember in the early 80s watching on HSV7 the same episodes of Crusader Rabbit that my parents probably watched as kids 25 years earlier
We had “Ace” as kids but also “grouse” which I think was more a Melbourne thing.
Media was in overdrive in the 2nd week of 2011 with round the clock rolling coverage on all of the five primary channels. What was rolling coverage like from 11th to 14th January 2011
It was overkill when the floods hit us up here a couple of days before flooding hit Brisbane. Once it hit Brisbane nobody gave a stuff about Rockhampton which shouldn’t surprise, however I couldn’t care less because my grandmother passed away around that time and I had no way of getting out of work and up to Mackay in order to fly down to Melbourne for the funeral (the roads south were blocked causing much panic, but my old man at the time worked in the transport industry and knew there was a barge coming with supplies, not that anyone really cared as they panic purchased everything). Personally I think nothing has changed with overkill coverage of events but I guess some big wig thinks the world needs to know the same details repeated from 2 hours ago over and over ad nausea.
Looking back on it, the Queensland Floods pretty much began a trend for Seven & Nine to go into ‘rolling coverage’ for breaking news/major stories far more frequently than they did beforehand
Speaking of regional TV cartoons, in 1968 Warner Bros (then known as Warner Bros-Seven Arts) hand-colorized their originally black and white Looney Tunes cartoons from 1936-42, many of them starring Porky Pig. The original opening and closing titles were plastered with a 1960s animated title card. The end result was it looked cheap and low-budget compared to the 1946-59 WB cartoons. These cartoons were on high rotation on GMV6 Shepparton (as well as many other regional stations) in the early to mid 80s. Other cartoons that had a good run on regional TV include Felix the Cat, Popeye (1960s King Features Syndicate TV), MGM cartoons featuring Tom and Jerry, and Woody Woodpecker.
I do remember WB cartoons were on both Nine and Ten, but Ten would have got the pre-1948 ones (that Turner Entertainment Co owned the copyright to) while Nine had the post-1948. In 1990 when Nine began their output deal with Warner Bros the pre-1948 colour cartoons (including the 1936-39 series which had “Vitaphone” on opening title where the “Warner Bros” usually sits) moved across to Nine and were aired on the Bugs Bunny Show with Sophie Lee. One of these cartoons “Jungle Jitters” had racist stereotypes and prompted someone to write to the Age Green Guide complaining about it “sure Nine is cleaning out its vaults to find more material for the show but in the process is revealing an ugly side to cartoons”.
Those old cartoons were often used as filler although Ten also used to run Rock Profile which were just music videos. They had a limited library of clips I seem to recall you’d see the same clips over and over
Sometimes Rock Profile would even be played in commercial breaks… i guess if the sales team hadn’t sold enough advertising
