This chart traces the Monday, Tuesday, & Friday ratings of the WCCO-TV program Axel and His Dog from January 1959 through December 1961. Ratings for the competing programs on KSTP-TV, WTCN-TV, and KMSP-TV are also included. The rating is the percentage of all television sets in the metro area (whether being watched or not) which are tuned to a particular show.

The Y axis shows the timeline, and the X axis represents the average rating that each show achieved for that particular month. The vertical lines that occasionally bisect the chart indicate points when the schedule of Axel and His Dog was changed. This usually resulted in the show facing different competing programs.

For some reason, WCCO-TV ran Axel in slightly different time slots during this era. This meant that he faced different competition, and consequently got different ratings for different days of the week. The Wednesday and Thursday ratings for this period can be found on the next chart.

As you can see, Axel utterly destroyed his competition during most of 1959-1961. In January 1959, for example, he scored a rating of more than 20 while his nearest competitor garnered a measly 7. The loser that got a puny rating of 7? American Bandstand!

The large fluctuations in the ratings over the course of a year seem to have been a normal variation due to the changing seasons. Ratings were highest during the winter months, when Minnesota children had little to do but watch TV; ratings fell as the weather improved until they hit their lowest in the summer months.

However, Axel finally met his match in a guy who thrashed pretty much every contender: Superman. The Man of Steel had been a successful network program, but apparently he felt the need to beat up some locals because he went into syndication and quickly took the ratings lead in the Twin Cities (and elsewhere), as shown by the chart.

Unfortunately, the details of the next part of the ratings story are not available, but enough information is extant to say that Axel did regain his place at the top of the chart eventually, probably by moving to a different part of the TV schedule.

Want to see some more ratings? Click here!