For all you baby boomers out there, here's your chance to go back to a more innocent time. Back before things went all glum, serious and threatening.

Next Tuesday Classic Media Video will release, for the first time ever, all 46 episodes of the early 70's Saturday morning cartoon, The Jackson 5ive series, in a special four disc DVD set, continuing both standard and blu-ray versions of the shows (2 discs each).

The show was produced by Motown and  Rankin/Bass, which, back during the 70's and 80's, was one of biggest producers of family and animation weekly and holiday entertainment for television. The show premiered on ABC in Sept 1971, but only lasted a year, until October 1972. Though the series has, in a sense, "lived forever" through syndication and on cable TV on various networks, including MTV,  VH-1 and TV Land.

The show was designed to capitalize on the success of The Beatles cartoon show, a joint Australian/British production which aired on ABC during the mid-1960's and was a huge hit for the network. Though The Jackson 5ive didn't feature any of the real voices of any of the Jacksons on the show, all their real music recordings were sung in every episode. Though there was a controversy regarding the use of a canned laugh track on the show, which most people found annoying and intrusive.

Still, it is fun to see a program with the (pre-plastic surgery) Jacksons, back when they were, as one wanted to imagine, so young, carefree and full of youthful exuberance. 

That is before everything got all weird, creepy and tragic.

Here's a clip from one of the programs: