I grew up with The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, Jonny Quest, and others. I saw a lot of vintage cartoons from the '30s through '50s that came on before the ‘prime’ cartoons. I’m aware of Smurfs, He-Man, and other cartoons from the '80s. In 1996 I bought Saturday Morning: Cartoons’ Greatest Hits.
So… It’s currently Saturday morning. Scanning through the lower (broadcast) channels, there’s not a cartoon to be found. I see Veggie Tales followed by a puppet show on TBN, but TBN is a cable network. The Cartoon Network seems to be showing a marathon of a cartoon called Teen Titans Go!'. I’m just not seeing a channel with a block of regularly scheduled cartoon shows. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any sort of lineup promo since I was a kid (though I know from looking for that link that there were such promos in the '90s).
So it started in 1992. Longer ago than I would have guessed.
When I was growing up, with only three networks (plus PBS), everyone had ‘shared experiences’. That is, everyone watched the same things. This went for cartoons as well as the prime-time shows. Now ‘kids can get their animation fix any day of the week’. But how would they know what to look for? If they don’t have the shared experience of watching, say, Bugs Bunny, would they seek it out?
And they’re back. KidsClick is a daily syndicated block that ironically may be partially preempted for the required educational shows on Saturday mornings.
I see SonicX will be coming back. It must be available so cheaply there is no getting rid of it.
Wow, I just missed the cutoff I guess. I remember watching cartoons in the 80s and early 90s on saturday mornings. They must’ve started taking them off not long after I quit watching them. Apparently they quit airing Garfield and Friends in 1995.
I remember back when all we had was antenna TV so we only had a few channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, PBS and a couple local channels) they’d have a block of cartoons from 3-6 after school and then they’d have the saturday morning block. I guess with so many channels, DVRs and streaming now that that isn’t necessary anymore.
My memory was being 13 or 14 in 1992 when NBC dropped them and we talked about it at my house. It was a huge change in our little world, even though I was getting too old for them at that point.
Don’t know what happened to good 'toons. I know that when I stayed with my daughter for a few days last year, her son was glued to an extremely annoying live action series about some sort of teen super heroes on an island of some sort. All they seemed to do was yell at each other, which I think is a poor example for kids. I much prefer a coyote dropping an anvil on a roadrunner.
This is an interesting line of thought. I wonder if having an a la carte on demand media culture steers people towards known quantities. Since they get to pick what they want they pick things they know which makes creators less likely to try new things which creates a feedback loop. I really think there is something to this.
Creatively, studios have been uncreative for some time now. We get movies based on successful comic books, followed by sequels of the movies based on comic books, followed by rebooting of the stories. Studios don’t want to take risks anymore. It was different in the '70s when there were drive-ins, and into the '80s when video stores needed a lot of content. Certainly there’s a feedback loop, where people choose entertainment options from an ever-shrinking pool of content.
But what I think about is the ‘shared experience’. Everyone in the country watched Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, The Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, and so forth. Everyone shared the memes. Anyone could talk to practically anyone else and have a point of commonality. Sure, we have popular shows today. But I’ve never seen an episode of Breaking Bad or even Seinfeld. There are series that are only available on channels a lot of people don’t have. For example, I don’t have Netflix or Hulu. Other people don’t have HBO or AMC. A lot of people – perhaps most people – are ‘left out’ of the experiences of one thing or another, and I think that may contribute to the fragmentation of modern society.
As for cartoons, they showed ‘second string’ cartoons before the prime shows when I was a kid. Droopy Dawg and Popeye and Sniffles the Mouse and other ones that pre-dated the '60s. Those were a treasure trove of pop references to classic movies, actors, and personalities that would go over people’s heads today as much as they did when I was a child. The later ones were too. Who doesn’t know ‘I will hug him and squeeze him’? How many young people today know those characters were based on Lennie and George from Of Mice And Men? How many wouldn’t care?
