As my wife and I sat watching Dr. Chris Pet Vet this morning on CBS it suddenly occurred to me that there were few if any cartoon shows for kids on Saturday morning.
Having myself grown up watching Saturday morning cartoons it seems that these days there are mostly animal and informational TV shows on Saturday morning, presumably for kids.
What caused TV cartoon shows to go away? I remember watching Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with my daughter some 30 years ago. Did the cartoons disappear all at once, or was it a gradual thing? I just noticed they were all gone. :smack:
I believe Saturday Morning Cartoons peaked in the late 90s and then died off for two specific reasons. Most importantly was the rise of cable and networks like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon offering kids stuff all day so there was less of a motivation to actively seeking out Saturday Morning Cartoons if they were run all day anyway on cable.
Secondly it was a cost issue. The moment Japanese anime imports started showing up in the mid-90s (Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, and Pokemon) the networks realized it was far cheaper to license these shows to air than it was to pay for American cartoons. It was a win-win for the network, cheaper shows and they were much better animated than the American stuff at the time. At one point Fox Kids stopped airing American cartoons and switched to an all anime Saturday morning cartoon block as a result.
Once anime started to wane in popularity though in the mid-00s cable had basically already taken over for kids cartoon watching, so the few Saturday Morning blocks basically gave up and rather than invest again in cartoons sold their timeslots to infomercials.
Several things led to the decline. But almost all of them came down to money.
Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel drew an increasingly large number of kids on Saturday. Nickelodeon became the top-ranked Saturday morning choice for kids in 1998.
A few years earlier, the networks decided they could squeeze a few more bucks out of their morning news/talk shows by running a Saturday edition. This did not provide a smooth transition to cartoons for young children. In 1992 NBC dropped its animated kids programming in favor of live-action shows targeted at teenagers like Saved By the Bell.
In 1990 Congress passed a law, which was implemented by a 1991 FCC rule, that the broadcast networks had an obligation to provide “education/informative” programming for children. They tightened the rules in 1997. That made producing much less expensive reality-based shows about animals and the people who take care of them a lot more appealing.
The last straw might have been the Shuttle Columbia explosion in 2003. ABC was the only broadcast network that was still running kids’ shows early Saturday mornings. After the Columbia disaster, affiliates complained about ABC’s lateness in getting the news on the air, which gave NBC and CBS (not to mention the cable networks) a huge ratings win. ABC caved and finally started a Saturday-Sunday version of *Good Morning America *.
And finally Fox and the CW dropped programming aimed at young kids in favor of the teenage-oriented shows that could still count as E/I, but could run a few more ads than programs explicitly aimed at the 12 and under audience.
well one thing is when turner bought Hannah-barbera that killed off most of the sat morning cartoon mill and what they did make was blech
even before that cbs ran nick jr programming and nbc had discovery kids when they weren’t running college sports
fox and saban sold most of their properties to Disney when they sold fox family
but when the wb became the cw and decided to be “serious” the last remnants of Saturday morning died and that was just pokemon yu gi oh and a couple others
There have been kid shows on major networks in the past 8 years or so- NBC had “NBC Kids”, with LazyTown, the Floogals, Terrific Trucks, etc…
And CBS at one point had the Doodlebops and Busytown Mysteries (think Richard Scarry cartoons) on early- like 7:30 or so back in about 2012.
Cartoons aren’t really where it’s at nowadays though- all the shows I mentioned, except for Busytown Mysteries were sort of a live action/cartoon hybrid sort of thing.
To combine your points #1 and #2, nowadays a big chunk of cartoons shown on U.S. cable channels are made in Canada and run under license. Why? Because Canadian channels have Canadian content standards, and they make perfect fodder for U.S. channels because an English-language Canadian cartoon doesn’t need any dubbing or rewriting to be shown in the U.S.
well something else to consider too a lot of countries had media development funds/tax breaks for public kids programming that made a glut 9 or 10 kids cable channels possible …… and in the last 4 or 5 years they’ve pulled back a lot of it…
i mean even things like Johnny test and anything made by the people who made the total drama series has "made with the help of Canadian media funds and tax credits "….
Although germany did the world a favor when it ended its tax credit program because it meant that uwe boll couldn’t massacare more video games he had the movie rights too ….
By coincidence, I happened to see a YouTube video on this subject yesterday. It brings up a bunch of relevant points, such as the growth of cable, streaming content on the internet, and the 1990 FCC ruling.
About the time Hanna Barbara started showing its dopey primitive dreck, we lost interest or more likely just aged out of cartoon-watching. I never really noticed cartoons weren’t on on Saturday mornings any more till I had my own kid years and years later. When I was young, we watched Warner Bros. cartoons and Rocky and Bullwinkle, and kids tv shows like ‘Sky King’ and ‘My Friend Flicka’.
The 1980s
This website also has the 70s, but many years are missing.
Wikipedia used to have pages of listings by year, but they seem to have been disappeared. The links are redded out.
And we’ll have none of this “Hanna Barbara et al was crap” blasphemy. Who cares how they compare to adult standards of quality. We loved that stuff as kids. Just this morning, I watched an old Hot Wheels episode (1970). The animation was piss poor. The show was a thirty minute commercial for Hot Wheels. And we all loved it when it was new. And that’s all that matters.
Part of me wants to say, kids are missing out to having Saturday mornings to look forward to. It was the grade school equivalent of water cooler talk on Monday, what shows were good, who watched what. What we have now gives more choices, but it creates more isolationism.
And the other part of me wants to tell that ^^ part of me to live in the now.
It’s worth noting that a number of the cartoons which wound up getting shown on Saturday mornings – Warner Brothers stuff, Tom & Jerry, and the Pink Panther – were originally created to serve as short subjects in front of movies, and thus not purely written with an audience of kids in mind.
Those old listings don’t show Jonny Quest, which with BB/RR and Fat Albert (my mom loved my “loooove to play tackle” impression) were the pinnacle of Saturday Morning TV for me.