Strange, Sweet Serials: 'Hiya, Kids!!'

POUR YOURSELF A BOWL of sugary cereal, get your feety pajamas on and settle in for "Hiya, Kids!! A '50s Saturday Morning" (Shout! Factory), a four-DVD set collecting 10 hours of children's programming from TV's early years.

Several of these shows, like "Lassie" and the long-running "Howdy Doody," will be familiar to even the youngest viewers, but others were popular only at the time and have since languished in obscurity.

Dr. Frances R. Horwich hosts "Ding Dong School" with gentle grandmotherly authority, and "Winky Dink and You" was an early interactive show, allowing children to participate with their own Winky Dink coloring kit. It's doubtful either show inspired its own lunchbox.

Rather than present these shows in dry chronological order, "Hiya, Kids!" organizes them as four blocks of programming, with each DVD representing a different Saturday morning. Younger children wake up early for puppet shows like the still-weird "Kukla, Fran & Ollie" and the zany "Time for Beany," which featured clowns, live audiences, and not much in the way of a plot.

As each disc progresses, the shows become more mature and involved, with shows like "Sky King," "Annie Oakley" and "Sheena, Queen of the Jungle" appealing to older children. Resembling the old serials that played before movies, these shows, mostly sci-fi and Westerns, had bigger budgets, more pronounced plots and a strong emphasis on action, yet still sought to impart strong moral lessons.

Like the Internet, television in its infancy was trumpeted as an educational tool, so each episode, even of manic fare like "The Rootie Kazootie Club," is packed with a moral of some kind. Howdy Doody exhorts viewers not to charge exorbitant rates for marbles.

Honor your contracts, says "Lassie," even if it means your friend's basset hound keeps you up all night. And according to "Kukla, Fran & Ollie," don't categorize people, no matter what Life magazine tells you.

Granted, then as now, no one watches these shows to learn anything. For older viewers, "Hiya, Kids! "will spark nostalgia for all the Saturday mornings of their childhood. For others, the set offers an entertaining peek into pop culture long past.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Shout! Factory