Captain Noah and His Magical Ark

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Captain Noah and His Magical Ark was a television program for children and was generally broadcast around the Philadelphia area.

Captain Noah and His Magical Ark, produced by the Philadelphia Council of Churches, starred W. Carter Merbreier and his wife Patricia, known as "Mrs. Noah," airing from 1967 until 1994. It was on WPVI, channel 6 (WFIL when the program started) in the Philadelphia area, rumors are that it was syndicated on 22 stations across the United States, this however is false.

[edit] Background

Started as a religious oriented program, Captain Noah and His Magical Ark became a daily children's program in 1970. The show itself beginning in 1970 would run from 7:00 a.m. to 9 a.m. on weekdays and for 30 minutes on Sunday morning leading out of ABC Sunday morning cartoons and into the Al Alberts show. The show also featured four cartoon shorts per day during the week. These included Gumby, Popeye (the made for TV cartoons from the 1960's only), Porky Pig (pre 1940 and post 1947 episodes), and Bugs Bunny (post 1948 episodes).

In 1975, when ABC began their morning show Good Morning America, WPVI-TV opted to preempt that in favor of Captain Noah and His Magical Ark. Starting in September of 1976, though, WPVI began running the 7:00 a.m. hour of Good Morning America and scaled Captain Noah back to the 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. slot. The format remained the same.

In 1978, when the Popeye cartoons moved to WTAF-29 (now WTXF, Fox-29) and the Warner Brothers cartoons moved to Channel 17 WPHL (later to 48 WKBS and then back to WPHL), WPVI dropped the weekday edition of Captain Noah and began running Good Morning America in its entirety. Captain Noah continued as a weekend program. It would run an hour on Saturday mornings and on that showing often contained the 8 AM cartoon (when it was a half hour offering) offered by ABC within the show. On Sunday Mornings it now ran for 30 minutes before Kids Are People Too. For a while a 15 minute edition was inserted into the showing of Kids Are People Too. In 1981, Captain Noah was scaled back to 30 minutes on Saturday mornings and ran this way until 1994 with no cartoons inserted.

The theme song was, "I Can Sing a Rainbow sung by Andy Williams". Another notable song that was played every episode was "Send Your Pictures to Dear Old Captain Noah". The show had some famous guests, such as Elvis Presley and Charles Barkley, but the staples of the show were the puppets, the cartoons and the songs. The Philadelphia Phillies mascot, the Phillie Phanatic, debuted to the public on the Captain Noah show in 1978.

Captain and Mrs. Noah were both inducted into the Philadelphia Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2001. A 35th anniversary show was aired in 2005 on WPVI from the Please Touch Museum.

While Captain Noah, a Lutheran minister, was the main "host" of the show, Mrs. Noah was the puppeteer and a trained singer. Famous Philadelphian entertainer Larry Ferrari provided the music. Favorite puppets included Maurice and Wally.

The set of the show will be incorporated into Philadelphia's Please Touch Museum's new home at Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, scheduled to open in 2008.

The show is now repeated every Saturday at 8 am on one of Channel 6's (WPVI) digital feeds.