ISTM that the function of Saturday cartoons was to give early-rising kids something to do while our hung-over Boomer parents slept in to a leisurely 11AM or so.
In our house, that phenemenon seemed to die a natural death as the parents outgrew the 70’s partying life, and I started spending a lot more time on my Atari 2600.
Right around that time it was also like someone flipped a switch and transformed all the cartoons into extended toy commercials. If the toy wasn’t interesting or in your target demo, then the show seemed boring and manipulative. I can’t stand the Transformers for this reason, and I really don’t get anyone who has nostalgia for that particular property.
That was due to a law being changed. It allowed for 30 minute toy commercials so long as they ended in a 60 second lesson segment. This is why G I Joe, He-Man, and the rest included such a segment at the end. IIRC Sailor Moon was originally made in Japan for Japanese audiences and in accordance with Japanese laws. For the American market, the episodes were edited down and a lesson segment added. The lesson often had nothing to do with the plot of the episode.
Here is a blog entry from Mark Evanier, long-time comic book and animation writer, who wrote for a lot of those Saturday morning shows back in the day. He identifies September 2014 as the last time that any of the three networks aired any programming aimed at kids.
Evanier attributes the reasons for that kind of programming ending to it ultimately becoming not cost-effective for the networks. Competition from syndicated animation on weekday afternoons, cable channels like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, and video games made Saturday morning shows less profitable and less worth concentrating on. Today, with DVDs, DVRs, and streaming, there’s no reason to limit your cartoon viewing to just a few hours on Saturday mornings. As he says, “The way we got our cartoons on Saturday morning is incompatible with a generation that wants what they want when they want it.”
I did that, too. IIRC, The Smurfs and Muppet Babies aired at the same time on different networks and I wanted to watch both, so I would use the VCR to record one while I watched the other, and then watch the one I had recorded during a slot when there wasn’t anything else on I particularly wanted to watch.
I heard a podcast make a very convincing argument that one of the main factors of the death of Saturday Morning Cartoons in the late 90’s/early 2000’s was the rise of Japanese anime. Mainly due to the fact after the wild success of Pokemon on KidsWB lead to both KidsWB and later the FOX BOX immediately pivoting to an all-anime lineup. Anime was significantly cheaper since they were literally just licensing material that was already produced and had made a profit in Japan, as opposed to having to pay Western animation studios full price for work. KidsWB and Fox Box were the last two Saturday Morning Cartoon channels that took it 100% seriously and once anime had a downturn in the mid-00’s that kind of killed Saturday Morning Cartoons since by then pretty much all the good Western cartoons had pivoted to just be on the cable cartoon channels.
That could perhaps be considered the beginning of the end. However, see below the Saturday morning U.S. television schedule for the 2008-09 season. There were still animated programming blocks on four networks plus ABC re-running Disney Channel programming for four hours.
Granted, the cultural penetration of those programs was generally much less than that of the Saturday morning fare of the 1960s-1980s.
Looks like the last animated gasps of Saturday morning cartoons were during the spring/summer of 2016 on NBC. By then, NBC had been for two years the only broadcast network showing animated programs on Saturday mornings.
By fall 2016, it was all live-action or documentary television on Saturday mornings. A good bit of it was still aimed at kids, though generally of interest to older children. My son went through a phase watching Jack Hanna and Jeff Corwin’s shows around this time.
I was curious about this and looked it up. Seems like the PLC (program-length commercial) format started in 1969 with Hot Wheels. The FCC eventually added a regulation in 1974 to limit abuse of PLC, but in 1984 they struck it down again. That’s when we got Transformers, GI Joe, etc.
That makes sense to me, since I began watching around '76 and lost all interest around '84. The shows were good and not toy-related. The commercials were short. It seems like the programming ran from 5AM to noon. Like so many good things, Saturday morning was good until Reagan decided to mess with it.
actually, in the 80s NBC who usually had the highest-rated Saturdays was going to have an all morning Saturday version of the today show until Brandon tartikoff who had just taken over NBC became obsessed with a little known Belgian cartoon called “Les tromphs” aka the smurfs and made a deal with HB for a 2-hour adaptation to run from 7-9 am with the today show to run after … it never happened
because Disney also pitched what was one of the most popular cartoons in the early-mid 80s (and what was Disney’s first made for tv shows) the gummi bears which proved cartoons were still viable even if they ended up being mostly the same tripe that had been on for years
fox and the WB and Disney buying ABC kept Saturday cartoons going on about a decade longer than they would have been
But what also killed off cartoons on Saturdays was college football (and MLB on fox) and saved by the bell type of programs and fox and saban getting out of the animation business and selling fox family to Disney
Another thing was the programming of the channels… when pokemon exploded wb Saturdays was pretty much a 6-hour marathon of it …same with yu gi oh and about 2004 when both were in a popularity lull the ratings sank…fox did the same thing with power rangers and its clones
But the wb didn’t end its cartoons (by that time all anime series )until 2009
The last time I had seen any big 3 kids Saturday programming was CBS had a 4 hour nick JR block
and NBC was doing the same with discovery kids and animal planet
Ironically discovery and Hasbro launched a station that was pretty much an infomercial for hasbros toys and games with the "my little pony friendship is magic "reboot being its most popular show until hasbro sold their share and its now “discovery kids” and shows mainly reruns of discovery programming
I find most of those programs I loved as a kid to be absolutely unwatchable today. Around 1999 or 2000, Cartoon Network started running the original Thundercats cartoon, a show I had to run home after school to watch, and it was terrible. I finally figured out why my other hated that show. I don’t really care what they do with the intellectual property of those shows. When so many people voiced their dislike for the latest Thundercats cartoon it was hard for me to get upset. Like you say, it was just an extended toy commercial. I’m not going to get upset about anyone changing a toy commercial.
Wow, you learn something new every day. I didn’t know Saturday morning cartoons weren’t still a thing. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have children, and don’t live near any of your relatives who do.
I’m also surprised some people see the decline as occurring in the 1980s, and that even the Wikipedia article pegs the early 1990s as the beginning of the decline. I religiously watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Garfield and Friends on Saturday mornings well into high school, which was the early 1990s for me.
I think I was watching Saturday morning cartoons until '96 or '97 or so. I remember watching the Fox Kids block of programming and also Disney’s One Saturday Morning. That was right around when I began to grow out of watching cartoons.
although occasionally a cartoon does transcend its toy commercial origins, see the above my little pony friendship is magic which was a phenomenon right up to the end …
Followed by the Farm Report…and that was in the Los Angeles media market. The earliest cartoons were usually Scooby Doo and Groovy Ghoulies around 7am and then it was clear sailing until the cartoons petered out around noon with The Cosby Kids. Then it was time to get dressed and go outside to play unless the Jackson Five were on the aforementioned Soul Train.
When I was a little kid, and lived in suburban Chicago in the early ‘70s, on weekday mornings, I’d be up by 6 a.m., and I’d watch "Top o’ the Morning," which was the daily farm report on WGN, hosted by Orion Samuelson, before the Ray Rayner Show (a kids’ cartoon show) came on at 7. I’d watch the farm report because it was the only TV show that was on, on any channel, before 7.
Decades later, I got to meet Mr. Samuelson, who was really an awesome guy. I told him about the above, and he laughed. “You can’t believe how many people who grew up in Chicago watched me talk about pork belly futures while impatiently waiting for Ray and the cartoons.”
I tried posting that link on FaceBook. I got a message about the site being Australian and that I was not allowed to post such things.
I edited my post and included a link to the awful rendition of Jesus Loves Me on YouTube. That performance may be the greatest argument for atheism I’ve ever encounterd.
