This chart traces the Wednesday & Thursday 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 Monday, Tuesday, and Friday ratings for this period can be found on the previous chart.

This particular chart shows how extreme the fluctuations in Axel's ratings could be; he usually crushed his competition during the winter when his ratings were highest, but as his numbers declined in the spring and summer he could be beaten. My Little Margie sometimes won the time slot in 1959 and 1960. Axel triumphed over American Bandstand pretty consistently until it switched from WTCN (channel 11) to KMSP (channel 9) in the spring of 1961, just as Axel's seasonal slump began.

By the fall of 1961, though, Axel was battling a new foe: Rocky the Flying Squirrel! As the chart shows, Rocky quickly took a strong lead. In March of 1962, however, Axel co-opted the plucky rodent and began featuring the Jay Ward cartoons on his own show.

Detailed ratings data for the remainder of Axel's tenure on the air are not currently available, but the scattered information that has been found indicates that Axel continued to win his time period (though perhaps less decisively) until he and the other WCCO-TV children's shows were removed from the afternoon block altogether.

Want to check out some Saturday ratings? Click here!