Little Rascals and the Three Stooges are back!

When WPIX-TV began broadcasting from The News Building on Tuesday, June 15, 1948, it made a simple promise to New Yorkers, the overwhelming majority of whom did not yet own one of those new-fangled and pricey television sets.

WPIX promised "programs based on a policy of creativeness and tailored specifically to fit the needs of video viewer in this area."

Given that no one in 1948 had any idea how the TV landscape would look in 1958, never mind 2008, WPIX did a remarkably good job fulfilling that promise.

Not that "creativeness" and serving local tastes didn't always took the high-falutin' course the phrase would suggest. At ‘PIX, creativeness sometimes took the form of doing a lot with a little.

Who would have dreamed, for instance, that training a camera on the fireplace at Gracie Mansion would create one of the city's most cherished holiday programming traditions, the Yule Log?

And who would have imagined the devotion a whole generation of New Yorkers would develop for Officer Joe Bolton and Bozo the Clown, or old clips of the Little Rascals and the Three Stooges?

But someone at WPIX figured it out, or lucked into it, and millions of New Yorkers who grew up in the years after World War II will carry Channel 11 around with them forever.

It's the place they memorized all 39 episodes of "The Honeymooners."

WPIX did higher-brow things, too, over the past 60 years, and it will recall many of them in a special at 9 p.m. Saturday.

Hosted by Kaity Tong and Jim Watkins, the special follows nine hours of nostalgic "birthday bash" comedy programming that starts with the Little Rascals at noon, followed by Abbott and Costello at 1, the Three Stooges at 2, "Superman" at 3, "Get Smart" at 4, "My Favorite Martian" at 5, "I Dream of Jeannie" at 6, "The Odd Couple" at 7 and of course "The Honeymooners" at 8.

The special itself touches on dozens of highlights through WPIX history, including:

The special also takes viewers through popular shows like Officer Joe, Chuck McCann, Shari Lewis and "The Magic Garden," and emphasizes news coverage of events like the 1956 sinking of the Andrea Doria.

It also, of course, recalls the 47 years (1951-1998) when Channel 11 was the home of the Yankees - even though WPIX's first baseball team was the Giants, in 1949, and since 1999 it has carried what is now just a handful of Mets' games every year.