Yes, but that would have been in the late 50’s/early 60’s. Most of the programming was in black & white.
I grew up in the early 1960s, when color TVs were still relatively scarce, and saw a lot of the old black and white Betty Boops and Popeyes.
The Suoperman cartoons werre in color, and I knew of their existence early on, bt I didn’t actually get to see them until I was in grad school. I don’t recall them ever being on TV (although other folks, growing up elsewhere, saidf they saw them). I finally saw some at an art movie house (at a Fleischer retrospective – they showed a lot of Fleischer cartoons over the course of three months. Drool) and got others at a library (on sound 16 mm – this was pre-VCR).
Just for the record, though, there was one color Betty op cartoon – Poor Cinderella, made in Cinecolor. (As Joe Adamson remarked, this gave you the full range of greens and oranges – light green, odark orange. No blue or red. Disney at the time had technicolor sewn up). They also made a few “good” Popeyes in color – Popeye meets Sinbad the Sailor, Popeye meets Ali Baba. They were in technicolor. Of course, later on, when Fleischers lost control, Paramount continued to make Popeye cartoons at “Famous Studios”, but he had been emasculated by then.
Much later on, some company redrew the Betty Boops and had them done with colored cels out in the orient somewhere. (the VHS box says “electronically colored”, but you can’t fool me – and I heard about it elsewhere). The tip-off that it wasn’t done in the USA is that the Jack O Lantern in one depisode is green. The quality on these is pretty awful.
The Popeye cartoons were redone in the same way as well, as were some black-and-white Looney Tunes. Instead of colorizing the old cartoons, they actually had foreign animators redraw the entire cartoon by hand, thus causing a lot of errors, and also depriving viewers of seeing the patented Fleicher live-action background process. The Looney Tunes were later re-colorized by using a computer to colorize the actual black-and-white original, but the redrawn Popeyes stayed on TV for at least a decade after.
Although I later found out the Fleischer Popeyes had been subjected to an early and horrific attempt at colorization, I remember questioning my memory when I first saw the redone versions. It had been awhile since I had seen them last and, upon view, I was surprised to see that they weren’t in black-and-white and were very cheaply and sloppily animated. Ironically, it was when Ted Turner acquired the rights to the Fleischer Popeyes that they went back to showing the original black-and-white cartoons.
Although Betty Boop was on some cable station (A&E or AMC, not sure which) within the past 15 years.
I’m fairly sure it was AMC (back when it lived up to its name and showed classic movies uncut and uninterrupted). Since then, I don’t know if any cable station like the Cartoon Network or Boomerang has shown them. I would think that the Betty Boop cartoons were part of the same package deal that included the Fleischer Popeyes when Ted Turner bought them (and later acquired by Time Warner) but I’m not sure. Maybe the Betty Boop cartoons are now in public domain?
Cartoon Network used to show really old Warner Brothers cartoons late at night, sometimes colorized, sometimes not. But they stopped doing it after they had a large enough library of their own new stuff.
Don’t recall them ever showing old Fleischer cartoons, though.