Graham Crackers & Flight

As a boy in the early 1960s, my Saturday morning routine was to get up, fill a bowl with graham crackers (crumbled, naturally) covered with milk, then sit down in front of the television set to watch the kids' shows.

My all-time favorite show was Fireball XL-5. Set in the year 2063, this series charted the interplanetary adventures of a spacecraft and its crew: handsome pilot Steve Zodiac, glamorous space doctor Venus, a math genius and a robot. It was filmed using a "new" process called "Supermarionation"--which was a faux scientific name for using puppets. While this may seem a little silly today, in the 1960s (at least for a kid) it made for a gripping program--so much so that I did not remember (until reviewing the show recently on YouTube) that it was filmed in black & white.

My flights of fancy were not limited to space. Another favorite show of the time was Sky King, the adventures of Arizona rancher and aircraft pilot Schuyler "Sky" King. Although it had strong cowboy elements, King always captured criminals and even spies or found lost hikers using his plane.

Looking back, I would add the following footnotes to my Saturday morning experience:

I'll bet my parents were very glad that I made my own "breakfast" and kept quiet for a couple extra hours on Saturday morning;

Fireball XL-5 was made in 1962 by the husband and wife team of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who later used real people in the production of arguably one of the best sci-fi shows of all time: Space 1999;

Sky King apparently was based on a real-life person: Jack Cones, the Flying Constable of Twenty nine Palms during the 1930s.