Scooby-Doo built the decade’s most reusable machine. Teenagers, a mascot, a vehicle, a spooky location and a human unmasking could be rearranged endlessly. The best copycat story is in The Funky Phantom and the Scooby-Doo Copycat Boom.

Music could rescue almost any budget. A great opening made the show feel alive before the first held pose appeared. Hong Kong Phooey, Josie, Fat Albert, Archie and Schoolhouse Rock understood that melody could carry memory farther than plot. For the lessons that somehow survived breakfast, see Best Educational TV Shows and Cartoons of the 1970s.

Superheroes became one giant Saturday team. The action was softened, but the idea was enormous. Best 1970s Superhero Cartoons follows the capes, team briefings and comic-book worlds that took over before noon.

Hanna-Barbera and Filmation never felt quite the same. Hanna-Barbera moved like a crowded toy box. Filmation often felt like a comic-book panel being pushed into motion. The full lineups are in Hanna-Barbera Cartoons of the 1970s and Filmation Cartoons of the 1970s.

A short run could leave a long memory. Hong Kong Phooey, Jabberjaw, Wheelie and Captain Caveman did not need hundreds of episodes. They needed one idea, one voice or one yell children could repeat until an adult asked them to stop.

The schedule mixed generations. New shows ran beside theatrical shorts, late-1960s holdovers and constantly repackaged characters. To the child on the carpet, all of it belonged to the same Saturday morning.

The commercial break belonged to the ritual too. The shows gave us the characters; the ads made the cereal, bikes, dolls and action figures look like urgent business. How Saturday Morning Commercials Sold Toys to 1970s Kids follows the part of the morning that sent us straight toward the toy aisle.

Fifty titles look like a lot until you remember how long the morning felt when you were eight.

The lineup could move from a haunted amusement park to the Hall of Justice, stop for a multiplication song, visit an underwater rock band and end with a giant purple ape leaning on somebody’s building. Nobody asked the schedule to settle on one tone. The change was the attraction.

The top of the ranking belongs to shows that created their own gravity. Scooby-Doo did not merely survive the decade; the franchise reorganized part of the schedule around itself. Schoolhouse Rock! made three minutes feel permanent. Super Friends gave children a shared superhero world large enough to argue about. Fat Albert brought neighborhood problems into a format that could still make room for music and jokes.

The middle of the list may be the most revealing. That is where the networks kept trying variations: another mystery gang, another talking animal, another band, another animated version of a live-action hit. Some ideas were shameless copies. Others changed one ingredient and found a personality nobody expected.

The bottom is not a graveyard. It is the shelf where the weird artifacts live. A cartoon can rank forty-fourth and still be the only place anybody ever decided the Three Stooges needed robotic superhero bodies. That counts for something.

Gen X memory also ignores clean chronology. We watched late-1960s shows beside new 1970s episodes and theatrical shorts made before our parents were children. Network packages kept changing names and combinations. The morning was less a historical period than a pile of everything television thought might keep us seated for another half-hour.

That is why a ranking can be both argued over and instantly understood. We may disagree about whether Hong Kong Phooey belongs above Star Trek or whether Challenge of the Superfriends should outrank Laff-A-Lympics. We still recognize the evidence: the themes we can sing, the characters we can draw badly from memory and the openings that make us feel the texture of the carpet again.

The best cartoons did not need perfect animation. They needed a promise. A mystery would be solved. A hero team would assemble. A song would teach something. A frightened dog would run through the same hallway several times and somehow make it funnier on every pass.

By noon, the spell usually broke. Sports appeared. A live-action rerun took over. Somebody wanted the television back. Chores became unavoidable.

But for a few hours, the whole house operated around the schedule—and fifty years later, a few notes from the right theme song can still put the room back exactly where it was.