Famous Classic Tales is a series that airs cartoons from production companies such as Filmation

Filmation

Filmation Associates was an American production company that produced animation and live action programming for television during the latter half of the 20th century. Located in Reseda, California, the animation studio was founded in 1963...

, Rankin-Bass, Ruby-Spears, API, Hanna-Barbera

Hanna-Barbera

Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc. was an American animation studio that dominated North American television animation during the second half of the 20th century...

, Hanna Barbera Australia, and Southern Star Group

Southern Star Group

Southern Star Group is Australia's largest independent television production and distribution group....

.

Famous Classic Tales was shown on CBS

CBS

CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...

, and distributed by Kids Klassics Home Video and Storybook World

Storybook World

Storybook World is an animated series that was released on video. The opening, showed a castle and zoomed inside the castle which showed an enormous pile of books...

. It had cartoons from API's Family Classic Tales. Featured cartoons included adaptions of classic literature such as Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's Travels

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...

, Treasure Island

Treasure Island

Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island; or, the...

, Black Beauty

Black Beauty

Black Beauty is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate bestseller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, long enough to see her first and only...

, Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, was written by American author Herman Melville and first published in 1851. It is considered by some to be a Great American Novel and a treasure of world literature. The story tells the adventures of wandering sailor Ishmael, and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod,...

, and many others.
The original concept of creating a series of animated features based on classic children's stories was the idea of Jack Thinnes, Media Director, at Sive Advertising in Cincinnati, Ohio. The series was created for Sive client, Kenner Toy Co., and each program was fully sponsored by Kenner on CBS Television Network on Sunday, late afternoon or early evening, during the prime toy selling season before Christmas. The idea to use classic children's books sprang from Thinnes' viewing of a two minute demo of Dicken's "A Christmas Carol," which was produced by Walter Hucker's studio, API (Air Productions International), out of Sydney, Australia. Eventually, API was purchased by Hanna-Barbera Studios after Thinnes introduced the owners of the studios to one another. After the series ran on CBS for nearly ten years, it was moved into local syndication by Sive's syndication department. However, "A Christmas Carol" was such a favorite that it continued to run on the network for fifteen years.

It is very similar to the ABC Afterschool Special

ABC Afterschool Special

The ABC Afterschool Special is an American television anthology series that aired on ABC from 1972 to 1996, usually in the late afternoon on week days. Most of the episodes were dramatic presentations of situations, often controversial, of interest to children and teenagers. Several episodes were...

, the ABC Weekend Special

ABC Weekend Special

The ABC Weekend Special is a weekly 30-minute anthology TV series for children that aired Saturday mornings on ABC from 1977 to 1997. It featured a wide variety of stories that were both live-action and animated....

, and The Saturday Superstar Movie

The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie

The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie — renamed The New Saturday Superstar Movie in its second season — is a series of one-hour animated TV-movies , broadcast on the ABC television network on Saturday mornings from September 9, 1972, to November 17, 1973.Intended as a "Movie of the Week" for kids, this...

.

Partial episode list

• A Christmas Carol
  A Christmas Carol
  A Christmas Carol is a novella by English author Charles Dickens first published by Chapman & Hall on 17 December 1843. The story tells of sour and stingy Ebenezer Scrooge's ideological, ethical, and emotional transformation after the supernatural visits of Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of...
  
  
• Gulliver's Travels
  Gulliver's Travels
  Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels , is a novel by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of...
  
   (1979)
• Black Beauty
  Black Beauty
  Black Beauty is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate bestseller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, long enough to see her first and only...
  
  
• A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court
  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The book was originally titled A Yankee in King Arthur's Court...
  
  
• A Journey To The Center Of The Earth
• From The Earth To The Moon
  From the Earth to the Moon
  From the Earth to the Moon is a humorous science fantasy novel by Jules Verne and is one of the earliest entries in that genre. It tells the story of the president of a post-American Civil War gun club in Baltimore, his rival, a Philadelphia maker of armor, and a Frenchman, who build an enormous...
  
  
• Daniel Boone
  Daniel Boone
  Daniel Boone was an American pioneer, explorer, and frontiersman whose frontier exploits mad']'e him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of...
  
  
• Davy Crockett On The Mississippi
• Five Weeks In A Balloon
  Five Weeks in a Balloon
  Five Weeks in a Balloon, or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen is an adventure novel by Jules Verne.It is the first Verne novel in which he perfected the "ingredients" of his later work, skillfully mixing a plot full of adventure and twists that hold the reader's interest with...
  
  
• Ivanhoe
  Ivanhoe
  Ivanhoe is a historical fiction novel by Sir Walter Scott in 1819, and set in 12th-century England. Ivanhoe is sometimes credited for increasing interest in Romanticism and Medievalism; John Henry Newman claimed Scott "had first turned men's minds in the direction of the middle ages," while...
  
  
• Kidnapped
  Kidnapped
  Kidnapped may refer to:* the crime of kidnappingIn books:* Kidnapped , a book by Robert Louis Stevenson which has been adapted a number of times in different media*"Kidnapped" , a short story by Rudyard Kipling...
  
  
• Marco Polo
  Marco Polo
  Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant traveler from the Venetian Republic whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, travelled through Asia and apparently...
  
  
• Master Of The World
  Master of the World
  Master of the World , published in 1904, is one of the last novels by French pioneer science fiction writer, Jules Verne. At the time Verne wrote the novel, his health was failing, and Master of the World is a "black novel," filled with the fear of the coming of tyrants like the novel's villain,...
  
  
• Moby Dick
• Off On A Comet
  Off On A Comet
  Off on a Comet is an 1877 science fiction novel by Jules Verne.-Plot summary:The story starts with a comet that touches the Earth in its flight and collects a few small chunks of it. Some forty people of various nations and ages are condemned to a two-year-long journey on the comet. They form a...
  
  
• Robinson Crusoe
  Robinson Crusoe
  Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe that was first published in 1719. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and...
  
  
• The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
• The Adventures Of Sinbad
  The Adventures of Sinbad
  The Adventures of Sinbad is a Canadian television series which aired from 1996 to 1998. It follows on the story from the pilot of the same name. It revolves around the series' protagonist, Sinbad. The series is a re-telling of the adventures of Sinbad from The Arabian Nights. Created by Ed Naha, it...
  
  
• The Amazing Bungee Venture
• The Black Arrow
  The Black Arrow
  The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses is an 1888 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. It is both an historical adventure novel and a romance. It first appeared as a serial in 1883 with the subtitle "A Tale of Tunstall Forest" beginning in Young Folks; A Boys' and Girls' Paper of Instructive and...
  
  
• The Count Of Monte Christo
• The Gentlemen Of Titipu
• The Last Of The Mohicians
• The Legend Of Robin Hood
  The Legend of Robin Hood
  The Legend of Robin Hood was a 1975 BBC television serial that told the story of the life of Robin Hood.-Plot:Robin has been raised as the son of John Hood, a groundskeeper, but learns that he is in fact the long lost son of the Earl of Huntingdon...
  
  
• The Mysterious Island
  The Mysterious Island
  The Mysterious Island is a novel by Jules Verne, published in 1874. The original edition, published by Hetzel, contains a number of illustrations by Jules Férat. The novel is a sequel to Verne's famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and In Search of the Castaways, though thematically it is...
  
  
• The Return Of The Bungee
• The Swiss Family Robinson
  The Swiss Family Robinson
  -History:Written by Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss and edited by his son Johann Rudolf Wyss, the novel was intended to teach his four sons about family values, good husbandry, the uses of the natural world and self-reliance...
  
  
• The Three Musketeers
  The Three Musketeers
  The Three Musketeers is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, first serialized in March–July 1844. Set in the 17th century, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to travel to Paris, to join the Musketeers of the Guard...
  
  
• Tales Of Washington Irving
• Treasure Island
  Treasure Island
  Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "pirates and buried gold". First published as a book on May 23, 1883, it was originally serialized in the children's magazine Young Folks between 1881–82 under the title Treasure Island; or, the...
  
  
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea
  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nemo and his submarine Nautilus as seen from the perspective of Professor Pierre Aronnax...
  
  

----

Cartoons associated with this series are Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today...

 (Manga Aesop Monogatari), Charlotte's Web

Charlotte's Web

Charlotte's Web is an award-winning children's novel by acclaimed American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte. The book was first published in 1952, with illustrations by Garth Williams.The novel tells the story...

, Puss In Boots

Puss in Boots

'Puss' is a character in the fairy tale "The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots" by Charles Perrault. The tale was published in 1697 in his Histoires ou Contes du temps passé...

, Tabitha And Adam And The Clown Family, The Velveteen Rabbit

The Velveteen Rabbit

The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real is a children's novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner. The book was first published in 1922 and has been republished...

, and Jack And The Beanstalk

Jack and the Beanstalk

Jack and the Beanstalk is a folktale said by English historian Francis Palgrave to be an oral legend that arrived in England with the Vikings. The tale is closely associated with the tale of Jack the Giant-killer. It is known under a number of versions...

. Both these and the Famous Classic Tales were released on VHS by GoodTimes Entertainment, Fox/Lorber, and Kids Klassics. Several other stories made it to DVD afterwards, including a 2006 release from Southern Star by KOCH Vision. All of these are now out of print.