CBS Storybreak

CBS Storybreak is a Saturday morning, animated, literary, anthology television series. It is a co-production between Hanna-Barbera Australia, Southern Star Productions, and CBS Entertainment Productions. It ran between 1985 and 1989 for three seasons.

Overview
The episodes are adaptations of various, popular children's books of the time, such as How to Eat Fried Worms, Dragon's Blood, and Ratha's Creature. The episodes featured open captions, courtesy of the National Captioning Institute, for the hearing impaired to follow along with the stories, which was unusual for an American television series. Captain Kangaroo's Bob Keeshan was the host during its initial run before being replaced by actor Malcolm-Jamal Warner in the mid to late 1990s.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) A great, memorable, instrumental, hard-rocking theme song.
 * 2) The wraparound, live-action segments originally featured Bob Keeshan (of Captain Kangaroo fame), who made a great host. His successor, Malcolm-Jamal Warner (of The Cosby Show and Malcolm & Eddie fame) was just as great at hosting.
 * 3) The art and animation are worlds apart from the majority of Hanna-Barbera cartoons from the late 1950s, '60s, and '70s.
 * 4) The writing for the teleplays is better in some episodes than others and do justice to, at least, some of the books on which they're based.
 * 5) Many talented names in the voice cast over the course of the series and great voice acting.
 * 6) Several of the characters are great as well.
 * 7) Fulfilled its purpose in encouraging or inspiring kids to get into reading literature more.
 * 8) It provided an alternative to the toy-based cartoons also from the 1980s.
 * 9) Despite its similarity to the ABC Weekend Specials, it still had its differences as well in its own right, such as none of the episodes being split into two or three parts nor having any sequels. Also, the studios that produced the episodes aren't as varied and all the episodes in this are exclusively animated.
 * 10) Although the episodes are adaptations of books, the nature of the variety format makes it a welcomed breath of fresh air from the Scooby Doo and Smurfs clones of shows.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Some episodes, such as "The Monster Ring", are weaker than others.
 * 2) To date, a couple of episodes remain lost: "Raggedy Ann and Andy and The Camel with The Wrinkled Knees" and "What Happened in Hamelin".

Trivia

 * It was nominated for an Emmy during the 1985-86 season for "Outstanding Animated Program".
 * Former crew member, Sander Schwarz, would go on to become the president of WB Animation in 2001.
 * It was the first animated series to be produced in-house at CBS since the original Terrytoons.
 * This series's adaptation of "Raggedy Ann and Andy and The Camel with The Wrinkled Knees", is the only episode to be spun-off into its own T.V. series.
 * Although co-produced with Southern Star, it's one of the few Hanna-Barbera productions not to feature the Swirling Star logo, but rather the former company's logo only.

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