Watching clips at Youtube made me so nostalgic for these great little programs--such as "The Winged Colt", "The Ransom of Red Chief", "The Contest Kid", "Litlle Lulu", "Soup & Me",et. al. CBS had a similar program later on called CBS Storybreak Specials. Man, would be nice if these ever came out on DVD or simply got reran!! :)

I remembered The ABC Weekend Specials

http://www.avclub.com/article/cool-1986-adpatation-beverly-clearys-mouse-and-mot-235180

Children’s author Beverly Cleary, now celebrating her 100th birthday, is best known and loved today for chronicling the adventures of the Quimby sisters, rambunctious Ramona and her more judicious older sibling Beezus, not to mention their neighborhood friend, Henry Huggins, and his canine sidekick, Ribsy. But Cleary wrote more than just one Ramona book after another during her long career. In 1965, for instance, she penned The Mouse And The Motorcycle, a fanciful novel about a thrill-seeking rodent named Ralph who dwells within a decaying hotel called the Mountain View Inn and befriends one of its young guests, Keith, risking his own life in the process. The title comes from Ralph’s zippy excursions through the hallways on Keith’s toy motorcycle. Never quite as popular as the Quimbys, Ralph did get two late-arriving sequels in 1970 and 1982, respectively.

Best of all, in 1986, the ABC television network adapted the original Ralph novel, The Mouse And The Motorcycle, into an hour-long installment of its fondly remembered, long-running Saturday morning series, ABC Weekend Specials. Helmed by super-prolific, still-in-demand TV director Ron Underwood, whose recent credits include Once Upon A Time and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., the television version of Motorcycle combines live action (for the humans) with stop motion (for the mice). Since this is a mid-1980s television production, viewers should not expect anything as elaborate as, say, Wes Anderson’s fanciful Fantastic Mr. Fox, but Underwood’s adaptation has an understated charm all its own and is quite attractively filmed. The cast is dotted with familiar faces: Ray Walston, Mimi Kennedy (lately of Mom), funnyman John Byner, Mary Jo Catlett (of Serial Mom), and once-ubiquitous TV pitchman Thom Sharp. The voices of the mice are provided by notables, too, including Billy Barty (of UHF) and Zelda Rubenstein (of Poltergeist). Those looking for a gateway into Cleary’s non-Beezus-related work are advised to start here.

I watched some of the ABC Weekend Specials when I was a kid and I do remember seeing the special of Beverly Cleary's The Mouse And The Motorcycle because at the time I was reading some of Beverly Cleary's books in school and it's a shame that ABC no longer has The ABC Weekend Special anymore because the specials that they had really taught kids good lessons about growing up and about the world today and ABC should revive The ABC Weekend Special along with the ABC Afterschool Specials because I bet a lot of kids today would have fun watching them and learning good lessons from them as well. Here's a fact about the ABC Weekend Specials that you probably didn't know about. When The ABC Weekend Specials debuted a guy named Michael Young served as the host but then was replaced by Willie Tyler and Lester but in 1984 an animated cat named Captain Readmore became the new star. And another surprising fact about The ABC Weekend Special. This was the first kids show to have the specials animated by various animation companies and the very first ABC Weekend Special was animated by Hanna-Barbera
Bestie

I read all of her books and am happy to see she made it to 100. I have a great aunt who will turn 104 in June and is still healthy.

Ok I see this wasn't about afternoon specials.