Ahh! Saturday morning! It wasn't just a day of the week, it was an experience.
Let us take a little trip back to the 1970's, when a young Pre-Fifi Fanatic was a mere grade schooler who still had all of his hair.

There were only the three network stations and one UHF station, but don't let the small number of channels fool you, there was a lot of variety. And remember, in those days it was not just Saturday mornings... weekday afternoons also belonged to animation. There was no Dr. Phil or Judge Judy back then. After school meant cartoons just as much as Saturday morning did.
Like others here, I was up at the crack of dawn come Saturday. Everyone else still asleep; it was just me, Toucan Sam, and the mighty glowing box. :anime: Saturday morning kicked off with various syndicated programs on the UHF station. Here I could find the 1967 Spider-Man who did whatever a spider can. Here also was the wonderfully Scrappy-free world of "Scooby Doo Where Are You?" (The Scrappy episodes would air later in the morning on the networks... it's not just an aging nerd thing, even as a kid I hated Scrappy

). And I was also introduced to the earliest Japanese cartoons... of course, terms like "anime" where not in a kid's vocabulary then, they were all just cartoons. My favorite was Speed Racer. Now there is the quintessential boys' action cartoon: a cool hero with a car that could do anything.
And now we must come to the crown jewel of my Saturday morning. The one and only Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Show. At that time it ran a full 90 minutes and the cartoons were not as heavily edited as they would be just a mere decade later. Needless to say, 90 minutes of Looney Tunes goodness was the highlight of my week and to say that it influenced me would be a huge understatement. :anime:
Well, there's my little trip down nostalgia street.
R.I.P. Saturday Mornings.