Why Saturday morning?
When did Saturday morning programming get dedicated to kids?
Who started this?
Why?
And finally, what was the first animated cartoon series to specifically be produced for television? (No live segments.)
I can’t answer your first, fourth, or fifth questions, but, with the others:
Saturday morning programming has been aimed at children since the days of radio broadcasting, and I believe that it was started by local radio stations.
Maybe I’m the only one who remembers this but in the late 60’s and early 70’s, there were attempts by the networks to set up blocks of children’s programming on Sunday mornings (in particular, I recall seeing Bullwinkle shown then). ABC had the biggest block of shows (although that was likely due to the fact that, unlike NBC and CBS, didn’t have broadcast rights to show pro football on late Sunday morning during the fall). However, the practice never really caught on and soon Sunday morning became the exclusive province of religious shows, news and commentary programs like *This Week * or Meet the Press, and the NFL.
-from Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up with a Cartoon Culture, by Kevin and Timothy Burke, 1999
Required reading for the curious.
The authors go on to describe the effect of advocacy groups on television, and in the initial dismissal of children’s programming as inherently harmful, it made sense initially to put the kid’s shows on at a time when the adults were unlikely to be awake to see them.
