Also from around the same time period as Pixanne was Winchell - Mahoney Time. I remember both shows were on in the mornings before school in the St. Louis area when I was a kid.
From the early 70’s there was Make A Wish.
4 Likes
I was just about to bring up Paul Winchell. But before him and Soupy Sales, and before my time, were Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody Time, and Pinky Lee. I do remember Kukla, Fran and Ollie with Fran Allison as the human host, and Jimmy Dodd and Uncle Roy on The Mickey Mouse Club (in reruns by the time I came around.)
2 Likes
The wildest thing connected to these shows is that George Romero - yes, that George Romero, the director who masterminded the zombie genre - got his start on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood!
Interestingly enough, one of his earliest films was a segment in which Mr. Rogers underwent a tonsillectomy. Insert your own horror movie joke here.
3 Likes
I don’t remember there being a Bozo in NYC. If there was, I never saw it either.
2 Likes
5 Likes
Shout out to Reading Rainbow 
.
5 Likes
Also from back in the 70’s, when they were still trying to make the Hudson Brothers a thing.
Kind of a cool cast of 70’s talents. The Bear was perhaps most famous for always wanting a cookie on the Andy Williams Show. Ted Ziegler and Freeman King were both cast members from the Sonny & Cher Show (I’m pretty sure the producers of this show were also the producers of that show). Murray Langston would be perhaps more successful if less well known as The Unknown Comic on The Gong Show. And Rod Hull and his Emu!
4 Likes
When I was in the target demographic, I lived in New England, so I could watch both the US offerings on PBS and the Canadian offerings on CBC. I do remember Captain Kangaroo (The episodes featuring the Hudson Brothers seem to be burned into my long term memory), as well as Mr. Rodgers, Sesame Street, and Electric Company.
But there were also quite a few others that I liked:
Zoom
3-2-1 Contact
Mr. Dressup (Why do I remember this being called Dr. Dressup at the time?)
Fred Penner’s Place
but my personal favorite was Hobbledehoy
2 Likes
Not a Canadian but got the CBC over the air. Watched a lot of Mr. Dressup, Fred Penner’s Place, Under the Umbrella Tree, etc.
2 Likes
CRAP! I forgot to add that!
2 Likes
There’s some more puppet lovin’ shows I remember.
Kukla, Fran & Ollie I saw in reruns and another favorite was Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop.
I still love lamb chops to this day 
2 Likes
Michael Keaton was also a Mr. Rogers Neighborhood alum. Mr. Rogers, unsurprisingly, spoke very warmly of him.
4 Likes
No love for Pee Wee’s Playhouse?
5 Likes
I lived outside of NYC, but within its mediasphere. My town supposedly had its own Bozo, but I don’t remember ever seeing it.
2 Likes
Theory: Like horror hosts, the appeal of these local icons is generally quick content on the cheap. They emerge in places where demand is high and funds are low. So the early TV stations gave birth to Vampira, Ghoulardi, Zacherle alongside of Bozo and Captain Kangaroo and the like.
Potentially supporting this theory would be seeing local hosts for radio, horror and kiddie, as the technology expanded and smaller stations popped up hungry for local content ('40 and later?). I don’t know enough about local radio to say if that’s true. (There were certainly many national horror radio shows with hosts but kiddie shows tended to be more narrative or gag driven, less variety. Edgar Bergen, maybe?)
Definitely supporting the theory: When syndication and cable exploded, what did we see? Elvira, Joe Bob, Rhonda Shear, and the Nickelodeon type hosts, a la Steve and Loonette.
Will they return? It seems unlikely that they’re return in any local form. But if they were to exist at all, it would be on YouTube.
They can’t really have the same impact, though: They don’t have a local market to capture. They don’t have timeslots. Nobody is constrained by a lack of choices to watch them, so they’ll have no generation with common ground.
We bought his album when he left. 
Pee Wee was, I think, first a meta-reference to the old school shows (and the old-school man-child schtick) and almost accidentally a kiddie host.
2 Likes
I’m always fascinated by this connection, and especially when spotting Bob Trow in Season of the Witch and Neighbor Aber in Creepshow.
And Betty Aberlin was famously Romero’s first choice for the lead in Night of the Living Dead - before Mr. Rogers stepped in and prevented it.
4 Likes
I have to bring up Whizzo the Clown.
I recently watched the Rifftrax of his Christmas Circus and it broke me.
5 Likes
(Warning: this will be an extremely dated reference for younger people.)
When I watched the Whizzo show, I noticed that Wiziardi is basically imitating the vocal style of Red Skelton’s “Mean Wittle Kid” character. Made the show a little more interesting, watching for that.
4 Likes
Here in the Ohio/Kentucky/West Virginia tri-state area, for several decades we had Mr. Cartoon and Beeper (no relation to KTMA-era Tom Servo). Mr. Cartoon was a pretty beloved local figure, and I was of the last generation to see him on the air in the early to mid '90s. Beeper still shows up as a mascot for WSAZ in Huntington, WV from time to time; he appeared in a commercial just the other day.
The original Mr. Cartoon was George Lewis from 1957-1969, and the second was Jule Huffman who took over in 1969 and retired in 1995. I feel pretty lucky to have grown up when he was still on the air. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, in the late '60s, before Beeper was added, the sidekick was one of the Banana Splits! Beeper himself is a bit similar to the look of the Banana Splits.
Aside from him, growing up I adored Mister Rogers. Some find his show dull but especially for a kid constantly inundated by flashy shows, Mister Rogers Neighborhood was sort of an invitation to be meditative and very intentionally slow. Shari Lewis and Lambchop was another favorite, and it’s a shame she’s not more widely remembered. Pee-Wee’s Playhouse was like the opposite side of the coin from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, but despite the different presentations I always felt there was a shared set of values there. And we also had a local Bozo affiliate show into the mid-90s.
4 Likes