Saturday Morning Forever

Over the last week on this blog, I have written a few articles on the old HB website of the 2000s. Now, I figured it was time to showcase this site's final and most intriguing area: Saturday Morning Forever. What's that you may be asking? In short, it was the video section of the website. Launching in late 2006, the service allowed users to watch full episodes of classics like Space Ghost, Jonny Quest, and many more, all for free. Two hours of shows were available each week, so there was always a new set of episodes to watch for the site's user base. 

Now, if that's all that Saturday Morning Forever was focused on, I'd probably not be talking about it now. You see, existing episodes were only eighty percent of the content offered on the service. The other twenty percent was made up of original content. According to a press release about the site featured in Animation World Network, these videos "re-imagined the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons with a nod to the media-savvy teen/tween audience." This is where I'd show you some of that original content, but unfortunately, it seems to have completely disappeared off the internet. Though the website has been archived on the Wayback Machine, all captures of it are essentially broken, as the site relied heavily on Flash to run. As a matter of fact, throughout my search of these original videos, the only thing I could find that was preserved from the site was the logo you see at the beginning of this post.

Though I couldn't find any of the original content hosted on Saturday Morning Forever, I discovered one type of video that might've been featured on the service. That, my friends, is a series of shorts titled The Great Gazoo's Flying Factoids. These videos repurposed clips from existing Hanna-Barbera shows, but with a few twists, like pop-up trivia or small tweaks to the scenes. Like the rest of the site's original content, these also appear to be lost to time. This, again, comes from an article posted on the AWN, and while I cannot verify that these videos were included on Saturday Morning Forever (the article discussing these videos predates the announcement of SMF by a few months), I would be very surprised if they were not, as they seem to fit the site's idea of new content perfectly. But I am interested in hearing from any of you reading this. Did you visit this site back in the day, and do you have any memory of what some of these original videos were? I would most definitely love to hear any stories you all have about them, and the site in general!