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The Disappearance of Saturday Morning
Ant writes "Saturday morning no longer means kids in front of TV sets across the country, glued to the latest in hip cartoons. Why? Gerard Raiti investigates the death of an era." As a former Saturday morning TV addict, this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
I fought with my sister over whether to watch Garfield and Friends or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
though I enjoyed my fair share of carttons, I have to wonder who realy loses here. I don't think it's the 'viewers'
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
I never slept in on Saturday mornings and they were the best thing on TV from 9am-12pm. I recently checked that time slot on the channels I used to watch and there was very little kid-oriented in this time slot. It used to be kids Saturday morning and Christian Evangelists on Sunday morning... so at least one of the two days was ok.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
If kids in America arent watching cartoons on Saturday mornings (I did!), what are they doing?
My guess is that they're sleeping a lot more due to increasingly hectic schedules. For those who arent sleeping, god knows! And, what age of kids still watch cartoons to begin with?
Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about!
Children have more to do these days on a staurday mornng....like go look at porn on the internet...download illegal moveis off irc, ddos amazon.com...or the favoriate american passtime...crack cocaine!
Then agian, some kids just sleep in
I don't know about anyone else, but I still wake up early every Saturday morning to watch cartoons.
Forget Saturday morning, what has bugged be for a long time is the disappearance of the classic Chuck Jones-style cartoons...
When was the last entertaining Bugs Bunny cartoon made? Around 1960 or so?
I can't help but wonder what happened. Sure, anime is good and all, but not as a replacement for classic cartoons. Why did it die out? They were infinitely more entertaining than anything recent. Did some Texans raise a stink about Yosemitie Sam, and PETA about talking animals being shot at all the time?
Come on... What happened?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I remember, as a child of the late 80s, every saturday morning watching Ghost Busters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, reruns of Transformers, Thundercats, even the old tapes of He-Man. It seems rather depressing that kids these days are not exposed to such entertaining shows. Although, when you look at the popular shows, maybe kids these days just don't have any taste. Who would rather watch Pokemon and Hey Arnold than Transformers or Voltron? I truly believe that my saturday morning cartoon experience shaped me in many ways, one of which being my love for artistic anime. I wonder how the shows nowadays that kids watch will shape them?
[...pre article reading rant...]
Maybe it was just the time I grew up in, but the good shows aren't on anymore.
(And by the good shows I mean Rocco's Modern Life, Garfield and Friends, and other such shows that were a satire of current popular and political views [hey, maybe I was an overly smart nerd as a young'un too].)
Nowadays, the stuff on TV just isn't attractive. Not on Saturday mornings, afternoons, or even nighttime (except for toonami midnight run, which is pretty old stuff anyway). It seems as though there is less and less of a reason to watch TV at all anymore. The only things recently that I've even remembered the show times for were 24 (the drama that takes place one hour per episode) and Trigun (toonami).
Maybe it's just me, but TV doesn't hold my attention enough for me to keep watching it.
[...reading atricle...]
Ok it says the internet is a major factor in the decline of TV viewing. They have me on that point (damn you slashdot). Also, I forgot to take into account the whole "job" thing with the working or sleeping through the mornings.
[...last attempt at being right the first time around...]
Meh, I still think if they put something on that captivated me enough I would make time to watch it.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
I know I'll sound old for even reminicing about this, but Saturday Morning Cartoons used to be great.
Now they are crap.
Gummi Bears. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Garfield. Pee Wee's Playhouse. Fraggle Rock....etc
Have you checked what's on TV on Saturday mornings now? - All I usually see are some Anime-esque shows, maybe a cartoon here or there, but nothing like the way it was back in the 80s and early 90s.
Anybody remember those computer-animated shows that were way ahead of their time? Must have taken months to render.
I have been scouring Kazaa, DC, etc for cartoons and shows, just so I have a record of them. They were so cool!
And yes, I am guilty of sitting down every now and then and watching some Fraggle Rock. Gotta love those Doozers - they are my favorite engineers.
I remember Saturday mornings .... I used to JUMP out of bed, grab the Cap N' Crunch and plop down and watch Saturday morning toons until I was ready for a nap.
These days, you're lucky if I get out of bed, much less JUMP out of bed. Breakfast no longer happens either. Eh, I guess I grew up.
I wish they got rid of Saturday morning cartoons back when I was a little tyke. I could never wake up in time to watch any of the ones I wanted to. Believe me, I tried... but it just wasn't happening. Saturday afternoons or evenings would've been much better. =)
The article lists "poor animation" as one of six reasons that kids are watching less cartoons, but in my opinion it's more basic than that. They suck. Several years ago the producers started concentrating more on marketing toys than entertaining the kids and when less kids watched (and bought toys) they just increased the marketing until they left out the fun. Several years ago I tried to watch some cartoons with my kids. Except for the classics like Road Runner and Johnny Quest they suck.
Why get up one day a week for a morning of cartoons when you can get them on multiple channels all the time?
Okay, maybe it wasn't me, but when I was young, I thought it was more fun staying up all way until MIDNIGHT and then sleep in until 10:30 or 11:00, by which point, i'd missed the cartoons. The saturday morning cartoons were way to overrated in my opinion compared to sleep. Hmmmm... sleep... maybe that's why I'm 6'3". :)
Another bonus is that since I slept so much when I was younger, I can get 4hrs. a night in college now to make up for my overages when I was young...yeah...that's why I don't get any sleep now... really!
ikeya
---- Move SIG...For great justice!
The Disappearance of Saturday Morning
Saturday morning no longer means kids in front of TV sets across the country, glued to the latest in hip cartoons. Why? Gerard Raiti investigates the death of an era.
April 30, 2003
By Gerard Raiti
In a time not so long ago, Saturday mornings were indicative of one and only one pastime for children -- watching cartoons. Throughout the '70s and '80s, the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC dominated the Saturday morning airwaves by inundating children with cartoons. Cartoons on these networks used to earn ratings of more than 20 million viewers. Today, network Saturday morning cartoons only exist on ABC Kids, FOX Kids and Kids' WB!, the latter two networks either did not exist or did not air cartoons two decades ago. Current successful cartoons on FOX Kids or Kids' WB! can garner a mere two million viewers. That statistic does not even take into consideration that the population of children in the U.S. has increased by approximately ten percent over the last 20 years. Due to this precipice in viewers, network cartoons are left struggling to make money while advertisers remain befuddled without a mainstream channel to promote new toys and products to children. Why have children stopped tuning in on Saturday mornings to network cartoons and what are the ramifications of this change?
Six key factors have led to children watching less Saturday morning cartoons: more recreational sports, the introduction of cable and satellite TV, the Internet and video games, a poorer quality of animation, and a greater emphasis on family time. These factors are rather self-explanatory with the exception of the latter: the divorce rate of Americans now stands at 49 percent, and time on the weekends has become more precious for children as many commute between parents' houses. For parents who only have limited access to their children due to either divorce or career advancement, plopping them down in front of the television for five hours on a Saturday morning is no longer a viable option. Among most parents, divorced or not, there is a new emphasis on "quality" time. Consequently, taking one's children to the theater, mall, museum, event, zoo or beach on the weekend is deemed more appropriate to being a "good" parent, than letting kids sit and watch cartoons. To this effect, American society has changed substantially enough over the last two decades to the point where Saturday morning cartoons are less important to our culture.
The Biggest Change of All
Today, cartoons are no longer on the major three networks that dominated the preceding decades. Although ABC technically still airs Saturday morning cartoons, its relationship with Disney distinguishes it from ABC's past programming during the '70s and '80s. When NBC and CBS began reducing their children's programming on Saturdays in 1988-1990, FOX jumped aboard the bandwagon and laid the cornerstone for its FOX Kids Network. NBC chose to delve into live-action teen entertainment, hallmarked by Saved by the Bell. Presently, NBC is in partnership with Discovery Kids; a Saturday edition of Today either precedes or follows Discovery Kids. CBS initially chose to replace its cartoons with news from local affiliates and now airs a national morning show, which is either preceded or followed by children's content from Nick Jr. Disney acquired ABC, so their relationship has stayed relatively constant over the decades and still continues to air its One Saturday Morning, recently renamed ABC Kids. Linda Simensky, vice president of original programming at Cartoon Network, feels that, "Children's television was never the strength of broadcasters to begin with. There were some good shows in there, but kids' TV was the department where executives at the network would start their nephews out in. [Kids' TV] was never the primary goal of a network." Children's entertainment on Saturday mornings is currently such a liability that local affiliates in markets such as Baltimore choose to air local news in lieu of Discovery Kids, Nic
Oh how I miss Screech and the gang!
The college years starring that oaf Bob Golic weren't the same *sigh*
I am over here... now I am back over here!
What will they do with the the huge warehouse bulging with all sorts of explosive devices?
:)
We'll never know if the coyote caught the roadrunner!
And most importantly, kids won't know that if you walk off a cliff, you magically levitate until you look down
My only gripe is now that things like cartoon network is available 24-7, the specialness of saturday morning cartoons is gone. Sure, kids don't sit glued to the television saturday morning, instead they sit glued to it 24-7.
I don't think cartoons are a bad thing, and I cherished my Saturday morning cartoon watching time. It taught me the value of patience, and the value of privledge. If I was bad during the week, then guess what, my cherished time of cartoon watching would be revoked.
Unlike today, I don't think parents tended to use the television as some kind of electronic babysitter. The television on the whole just wasn't entertaining to children most of the time, so instead of a crutch it was used as a reward tool. In this way, I think the Saturday morning cartoon era was much more valuable to the youth that experienced it than today's pacifier approach.
Don't want to deal with the kids? Turn on Cartoon Network. Yuck.
RFC2119
I wish I had something witty to say, or perhaps insightful, but I don't ...
Anyway, this really does seem like the end of an era to me. Admittedly I was a Saturday morning cartoon addict. I liked Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Inspector Gadget, and all those other great cartoons of those days. What happened? This article attempts to explain what, but I just don't buy it. I don't think that there has been a lack of quality television programming these days. I just think that kids are getting involved in something more immersive - for better or worse - that is taking them away from cartoons and thus drying up the market.
What am I talking about? Videogames! In my youth the SNES was the coolest videogame system anyone I knew had. It was also very expensive. I remember how we all congregated at the house of the one kid in my neighborhood who owned it to play Street Fighter. But that wasn't Saturday morning - that was weekdays, after school.
Nowadays, however, videogame systems are cheap and prevalent. Heck, my SIX YEAR OLD nephew has a PlayStation and a GameBoy Advance. I would estimate he plays games at least two hours a day. That's time he probably would've spent watching TV anyway. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? All I know is, kids these days are getting exposed to videogames very early on in life.
I was babysitting my cousin recently. We were playing Gauntlet: Dark Legacy together on my PS2. I thought he would suck. I was wrong. He wasn't amazingly good, but he's better than my father. This, from a kid who can't really even read! The kids these days, they're just intuitively "getting" videogames. My dad sucks at action games. He's very good at strategy games though. And this new generation, for better or worse, is highly trained in electronics.
I suppose the electronizing of our nation's youth is a good thing. That's the way the future's headed. I just feel sad, though, that the closest thing they'll experience to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are the cheap knock-off games for GameBoy whose sole good quality is the license they obtained. The cartoons, even though non-interactive, were at least better.
Any thoughts?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
I'll always have fond memories of Saturday morning cartoons, right up until SOul Train came on, telling me it was time to go play video games.
Course, these days, I don't think I'veseen a Saturday morning in a few years, unles you count the time between Friday at midnight and when I crawl into bed.
I used to watch anything I could as long as it was animated. GI-Joe, He Man, Garfield, Thundercats... It was all my favourite escape on those early Saturday mornings. Many a morning were wasted on the boob tube. Afternoons were spent outside whenever possible, but the mornings were holy. Up early to see the latest adventures in cartoon land.
These days I find myself facinated with Anime. I have a moderate collection with a vast range of genres. I read the various magazines dedicated to the topic, and I have a very good relationship with my local Suncoast. I still love animation, but now I can see more serious stories than the latest Cobra plot to foil the intrepid GI-Joe heros. I also enjoy the work of Ralph Bakshi and his rotoscope visions of plots humourous and serious.
it is better to light a flame thrower than curse the darkness. -Terry Pratchett Men at Arms
Too many kids reading slashdot? (at least from reading the postings here that's what it looks like...)
From the article:
"Lizzie McGuire is a live-action Ally McBeal for kids on The Disney Channel and it?s a huge hit with girls, and boys oddly enough."
"Oddly enough"?!?!? Hello? Have you SEEN that Hilary Duff chick? The show she's on is aimed at so-called "tweens," so of course a boy in that demographic, who is leaving his "girls are icky" phase and noticing that it sorta feels good when he's washing his twig and giggleberries, is going to watch!
Mark my words, after the Olsen twins turn 18, pages like this one are going to be replaced by similar ones for Hilary.
Now I don't have to fight the kid for the remote so I can watch the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Hour. (It is still on isn't it? I haven't won one of the battles since 1993)
there are no more cartoons worth watching on saturday mornings, just a few good ones, thats why people don't watch! and they end so much sooner than they did back in the day, they show the news most of the morning!
I'm a bit older - I remember watching an hour of Bugs Bunny, plus a number of other classics. Give me the Pink Panther over Garfield any day!
Was this time wasted? Probably. But it's not like I had a lot of options. When I was older and in scouts I would often be hiking on Saturdays, but at that age I was stuck in lower-middle-class suburban hell. Small back yard, no neighborhood park, parents caught up in their own crap. Maybe the Beav could grab his mitt and head out to a pickup baseball game, but that was the mythical 1950s.
(And let's be real - how many people got interested in engineering or physics because of the Road Runner & Coyote shorts?!)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
"As a former Saturday morning TV addict, this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me."
:)
:)
You're not a parent, are you?
Seriously. I never used the TV as a babysitter but the Glass Teat did have it's use on Saturday morning. After putting in an 80 hour, five day week an extra few hours to sleep on that one critical day was, well, critical. The Saturday morning cartoons were something for my little sweetie to do instead of prying my eyelids up and asking me to entertain her at six in the morning. And I didn't have to worry about what she might be watching because I *knew* what was on, on every channel ( we didn't have quite so many of them in those days).
In times when I wasn't working quite so hard, or at all, we'd watch Danger Mouse together every afternoon, then go out and play, and read books after dinner and most Saturday mornings would find us in the car going somewhere neat.
But in those times when I was working that hard Saturday morning cartoons were a gift from God and the only thing that kept me alive, and sane. Probably kept her alive too.
KFG
I am 17. While I was never a fan of GI Joe or Transformers, I did watch Garfield, Battlecats, Ren and Stimpy, Rocko - remember Rocko? ;) - The Real Ghostbusters, X-Men, The Tick, and legions of others.
These cartoons were interesting. They were entertaining. They were fun, though some may have been a bit mindless or a tad offensive. Try to get a show like Rocko or R/S on TV today, and some self-righteous parents group will cry foul.
What killed Saturday Morning? Parents. I'm glad I had my fun before the era of "Save the Children" began in full force.
It's usually because you drank too much Friday night.
The truth is, they're sleeping a lot later due to being up playing CounterStrike all night.
either ultra slick computer generated crap such as Cubix, or shitty 20 years old Transformers in "new series". All nothing more than 22 minutes long advertisments aimed at kids.
Maybe kids ARE getting smarter and are refusing all this utter bullshit. Good for the kids then i say!
I don't seem to understand. Cartoons are still being played on Saturday morning. WB 7:30am to 12pm. They play new episodes on that day.
Am I missing the point? Is it they don't play old cartoons on Saturday? Good, they shouldn't.
anime
At the top of my head I can remember Saturday mornings watching: Garfield and Friends, Looney Tunes, TMNT, Mario Bros., Inspector Gadget (not sure if it was on in the mornings), and probably more that I can't remember now. I also used to watch Transformers (which I own on DVD now), and a bunch of other Nickelodean programs that have vanished. Salute your shorts, are you afraid of the dark, hey dude, etc.... Anyways, at that age I would have been playing NES games. Now, kids at that same age are playing UT2k3 online. They grow up too fast to enjoy kiddie cartoons. Probably kids nowadays know more profane words than I do lol.
"As a former Saturday morning TV addict, this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me."
For crying out loud, and just to sound really pissy, did you read the bleepin article? The reasons WHY they are not watching TV is not all good. Divorce, schedules, parents that don't see their kids much during the week, the only time to pick up clothes or groceries, etc. is hardly a good thing.
Yes, TV generally sucks. Cartoons generally suck. Spending more time with the old man is a good thing. But exchanging Saturday mornings for divorced parents is not necessarily a good thing (and not necessarily bad either, considering that not all divorces are bad, but making a generalized statement is crappy on anyone's end).
I gave up hope on the saturday morning cartoon on the channels that they focused on... even when I was younger.
Myself, I like watching YTV on saturday mornings (it's a Canadian kids channel, for those who didn't know). The line up includes Transformers Armada, Transformers Beast Machines, He-man, Justice League, Jackie Chan Adventures and X-Men: Evolution. (a few others that I don't tend to watch much as well).
It's probably the most time I spend in front of a TV all week that little block.
But why would most kids want to spend saturday mornings watching cartoons? When I was younger, cartoons only happened in the early mornings, before school (forbidden to watch them by my parents at that time, or I'd miss the bus), a couple shows after school (normally the disney ones of the year) and saturday mornings.
Now, with 24/7 cartoon (or others with kid focused programming) networks, they can get their fix anytime, and plenty of households have multiple TV's, so parents and kids can each watch what they want. So there's nothing really special about saturday morning cartoons, at least to the average kid who watches cartoons (unless they realise that Saturday is when the new episodes come out... but there's always reruns, and multiple airings..)
1.) Bad cartoons. I loved Bugs Bunny, but I couldn't stand most of the new crap that the networks kept throwing at me. With the exception of Captain Planet. :oD
2.) Short runs. Those new cartoons usually had runs of one season or less (Remember 'Hypernauts'? Didn't think so). Not much room to get into it, and took no time for it to fade away. Its pretty hard to get interested in anything that way.
3.) The computer, the internet. Completely took over my mornings and days. I replaced one addiction with two more...and now I spend my Saturday mornings compiling custom kernels.
Whups, maybe I've said too much!
Check out the "Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits" It's a "Various Artist" type album with covers of old cartoon themes by the likes of Helmet, Juliana Hatfield, Butthole Surfers, Ramones, Toadies and lots more. As strange as it might sound, it quickly became one of my favorite albums. You can to a lookup for the album on the All Music Guide website.
Saturday morning used to rock when I was a kid. Now they suck. Cartoons are too PC these days. I miss the violence (Road Runner) and cigarette smoking (Bugs Bunny.) Not for the sake of those things alone, just the fact that they could make the shows the way they wanted without being scared to offend someone.
Six key factors have led to children watching less Saturday morning cartoons:
- more recreational sports,
- the introduction of cable and satellite TV,
- the Internet and video games,
- a poorer quality of animation,
- and a greater emphasis on family time.
That's five. What's the sixth?
I suppose you can split up "Internet" and "video games", but the punctuation seemed to lump them together as a single factor.
The
Basically, a few reasons: internet, soccer, declining profit incentive for networks.
(can't read other three pages:(
This is not necessarily a good thing, despite what timothy implies. One of the reasons cited for the decline is parents having to 'fill' the time. Why are they doing that? Divorce. Each parent is trying to make up for only having half time with their kids. For some reason, other parents feel that Johnny and Susie have to be in soccer (scouts, swimming, etc.) as well. Having overly complicated lives is something that adults can barely cope with without the use of alcohol, Prozac, and other drugs. Why should we expect 8 year olds to be able to cope?
Oh, they're going to learn socialization skills. Bull. Did everyone forget 'Lord of the Flies'? Those are the type of socialization skills kids learn when left to their own devices. What's wrong with a bit of leisure on the weekends, particularly for children? 'All work and no play...'
So let them play outside, whether it's ball, gardening (some kids dig it, no pun intended), or whatever. But why not wake up Saturday morning and decide what to do? That's fine, for the more temperate months. But in the depths of summer, hiding out in the basement is a good thing. In the winter, sitting in front of the fire isn't bad. But what to do?
Read? That's nice, but do you *always* feel like reading? No. Look at the number of people already who have lamented the loss of classic WB cartoons. There's something there. It's simple entertainment. What's wrong with that?
Internet? It's just as non-interactive as the TV.
Video Games? Not sure how this is a better use of time. Perhaps timothy can fill us in? (Note, I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's no better than TV.)
The death of Saturday morning cartoons is not something to necessarily cheer about. Look at the causes ('non-traditional' families, turning kids into little adults) and lament the occurence.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The Saturday morning cartoon disappeared when the all-day cartoon networks reached cable and satellite TV, and indeed, when cable and satellite TV achieved dominant market penetration.
In the 80s, cable TV only had what, 30 channels? Nowadays the numbers are in the low hundreds and growing. Since there were so few channels to serve such a broad spectrum of interests, the 'Saturday morning' was born to cater to kids who'd be up early while their parents slept in. Later on in the day, they'd switch over to '100 Huntley Street' and all the boring 'grown-up' religion shows.
Nowadays, there is no need for this. There are several all-day cartoon networks, and dozens of kid-specific networks. On-demand Pay Per View kid movies help too. Cartoons are no longer limited to Saturday morning because there's more channels, more availability, and more kids watching all day long.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Id have to agree. I think a big part of the problem is a lot of censorship in cartoons these days. Part of what made great cartoons great was that they hit both children and adults on different levels. But with some of the censorship in the Bugs cartoons, the jokes are kind of lost on children, and most adults remember that something else was there that was cut and usually just get turned off.
The second thing I feel leads to their demise is just the lineup. When I was a kid the Sat. Morning Cartoons had a basic layout, the lame cartoons early, the "hip" cartoons, or whatever cartoons fit the trend, and finally you could round out the morning with the timeless cartoons such as Bugs Bunny. In my eyes, things got bad when some jack ass executive decided that they needed to take the classics and change them into kid versions of themselves, such as the Tom and Jerry Kids (although I will excuse Tiny Toons, but thats my opinion). These crappy cartoons just took up air time.... then the Power Rangers came out and to me, thats when I feel Sat. Morning lost its apeal.
Looking around my neighborhood and at my friends and their children, Id have to agree with the divorce notion on the demise of these cartoons. Most people I know who get the kids for the weekend make plans with their children, like going to the zoo or the pool, or camping. Its sad, I remember waking up in my PJs to watch cartoons, and those will always be some of my fonder memories.
once eek! the cat was gone, it just went downhill. anyone know where i can find eek! the cat?
I write code.
Everyone loved Bugs Bunny and Road Runner. All the rest of the Warner Brothers characters had speeth impedimenths but we loved them anyway. "Oh, that makes me so aaaaaangry!"
Kids' shows featured casts of kids doing silly things. Nobody remembers what, but we all remember enjoying it just the same. Nobody ever figured out how to talk like the kids on Zoom did. We remember the other more useful things instead... Box 350, Boston Mass, oh-two-one-three-four.
Why can't my self-addressed, stamped envelope get me that fan stuff back the next day? ACME always gets the Coyote's packages delivered in seconds. Anyone that says today's television is more violent than it used to be has never seen what happens to the Coyote several times in any five minute stretch. I bet he's got a lot of 'frequent flier' miles built up, mostly vertical, down to be specific.
Popeye was cool, but never did persuade me to try spinish. Mickey Mouse and crew were probably the ideal cartoon, leaving out the violence and still keeping us smiling. Donald Duck had all sorts of issues. Taz wasn't cool yet.
We remember all those silly repititious cartoons that we never got tired of watching. Scooby Do, Space Ghost, Super Friends. I was always in awe at how the Mystery Machine crew spotted minor details I missed, detailed later in the show in a flashback... only later with repeats did I notice that they cheated us by not actually showing the minor detail in the earlier part of the show.
While I certainly don't blame any psychotic behavior on Road Runner, I would pose a few questions about how cartoons may have affected us. How many kids tried dog biscuits after watching Shaggy on Scooby Do? How many kids expected more of the Post Office after watching Wiley Coyote? How many of us thought you couldn't fall unless you made the mistake of looking down?
It's a shame these are very rare to see now on Saturday morning. Closest thing I've seen recently would be Animaniacs - characters being silly for sillyness' sake. Isn't that what being a kid is all about?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think a lot of posters are missing out on something here. Cartoon Network isn't doing something astoundingly new by having cartoons on all day. Kid's oriented programming was around most of the time back in the 80s as well. Saturday mornings were still important though. I wanted to watch the new season and scoped out the various shows to find out what was good and worth my time and what wasn't. I watched almost every week despite Nickelodeon and afternoon cartoons (duh... He-man was a weekday cartoon, not a saturday one). Even as I got older I would watch X-Men and Spider-man and such while I was in middle school before it eventually got canceled.
We had Nickelodeon, we had Nintendo almost everything that exists now existed back then. The only real difference is the complete lack of cartoons (and the lack of major action figure lines as well... do kids not play with them anymore? What's the deal?!?). I think it's the networks trying to save money by not putting into shows that they state don't make a great deal of money. They ignored the cartoon departments and now they've just more of less given up on it and blamed cable as the reason.
I think a fair comparison would be a local theater. They got rid of student and military discounts a few years back in a small town (Manhattan, KS) that exists mainly due to Kansas State and nearby Ft. Riley. They jacked up adult prices at the same time. The cited reason for the lack of discounts was that dollar theaters covered this market. Ignoring that the same company then bought and quickly closed the only dollar theater in town they cite something vaguely related that doesn't compare (I want to see a first-run film, not something that I didn't want to see or already saw four months ago) as an excuse to make more money.
Who needs saturday morning cartoon with Cartoon Network 24/7. Tell ya the truth, I watch far more "Cartoons" now, then when I was a kid. I've got DirectTV. I never miss "Samurai Jack" and enjoy "Dexters Labratory" and even "Powerpuff Girls". Plus they show a lot of cool anime. My neighbor, who is a single mom ( I'm a single dad, though my son is now a young adult), is more practical then me and does not have anything but broadcast. Her son, who is 10, comes over to watch "Pokemon" and "Yu-Gi-Oh". I'm not realy into these, but started watching them with the boy. Even these are better then anything I can remember from Saturday morning during the 60s and 70s, though I liked "Scooby Do" and the "Star Trek" cartoon had realy good stories( but lame animation). Right now I have been following "Rurouni Kenshin", one thing good about being unemployed!
I've seen them from time to time, and they just don't match up with what was around when I was a kid in the late 70's and early 80's.
Cartoon Network doesn't seem to run a lot of the old Bugs Bunny stuff that I remember-- the cartoons where the characters smoke or get killed seem to have been phased out, since kids these days are dumber and their parents are more sue-happy and ready to point fingers. But I did actually watch an entire 30 minutes of Tom and Jerry, and at age 29 they were still making me laugh out loud. I tried the same with an episode of G.I. Joe, but that didn't work. My suspension of disbelief no longer works when I see the Cobra jets blown into a few million dime-sized pieces but somehow the pilot always manages to get out successfully.
~Philly
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Now, my kids like the DirecTivo a lot, and may be moving into anime rather than what's actually on Saturday morning, but I insist i'm right.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
I think the real issue is how horrible cartoons have become. Back when I was a kid, we had shows like the Adventures of Batman, X-men, EXO squad, and stuff like that.
Today's cartoons are too bizarre and uncool. Spounge Bob Sqaure Pants? Give me a fucking break! I would have never watched anything like that, and I watched Doug for crying out loud.
Its like the decine in Star Trek. Cartoons and TV are afraid to have any sort of heat on them anymore. Kirk and Riker were total womanizers. Archer and Trip are pussies. Wonder why ratings decline? Same reason why kids don't watch these "healthy" cartoons -- they're boring.
I hate to say it, since it'll date me as a crotchety old guy, but the Golden Age for me of Saturday morning cartoons was the short period (in 1978 or '79, not sure which) when the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show went for three hours (9:00am to noon). There have always been bad designed-for-Saturday-morning cartoons, but that was one time one of the major networks (CBS, in this case) seemed to admit it. The old Warner Bros. cartoons provided much more entertainment for me as a youngun than anything else that was on the time.
It doesn't seem a big surprise to see Saturday morning TV cartoons imploding, since 25 years ago the best things on were from 30 years before that, and not designed for TV.
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For anyone who remembers the paramount of Saturday morning cartoons, they can keep those memories of childhood dear in their hearts along with other great relics from the '80s including parachute pants, Pogo balls and saying "Have a nice day!" because Saturday morning cartoons are gone for good on broadcast networks.
This is perhaps a little off-topic, but... Saying "Have a nice day!" is a relic of the 80s? I grew up in the 80s, but I'm lost on this one... Does anybody know what this is a reference to?
From viacom's fact sheet:
"With programming that appeals to audiences in every demographic category across virtually all media, the company is a leader in the creation, promotion and distribution of entertainment, news, sports and music."
Viacom controls what we watch on tv and see outside our own little worlds. Blame them, they decided saturday morning could no longer exist.
My childhood memories were of Saturday morning cartoons from the sixties. The author of the article mentions that as a 70's and 80's thing only.
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When I was a kid the idea of a child being able to use a computer was so hard to believe people would suffer shock and denial when presented with proof of the exsistence of a 9 year old programmer.
The idea of BBSes and online shopping was such an amazing thing people couldn't believe it.
When Byte ran an artical about how computers would replace TVs eventually people were sceptical. The pet rock of the 80s or so they belived.
For kids today computers have already replaced TV. They probably don't even know what radio is. Music comes from MP3s and CD players. Books are PDF files.
Bugs Bunny has nothing on Neopets.com
Yugi and Pokemon... and while the cartoons exist as 30 min daily ads for the card games it seams more and more kids only watch them becouse of the card games.
Now a days the Yugi and Pokemon video games are ads for the TV shows and card games.
Willy Wonka candys advertises by having a website filled with games and runs ads on Neopets.com.
It's not just the kids. Thow they lead the way.
CNN Headline News already knows the future. CNN.com. FoxNews has it's website. and when NBC looks for a partnership it looks to Microsoft.
People complain less about the crap on TV... Not becouse there is less crap. All the good shows are going away or going to hell leaving nothing but crap. But it's the crap that people who won't go online like.
It's the digital age. I just gave a 7 year old a Knoppix CD and then the topic of upgrading ram came up... (The Bosses son.. His computer need more memory)
The next generation understands Rinkworks Computer Stupidities.
For them Google is the place to look up information not the public libary.
The idea of sitting around watching TV for 30 minuts seams.. alien.
My boss dosen't worry about her kids watching to much TV. She worrys about them playing to many video games.
I don't actually exist.
Anybody else see that miscaptioned picture? They had a picture of the girl from Lizzy McGuire with a caption referencing a "Brian" that was supposed to be on the left. At first glance I thought the (left) was to make sure nobody confused the real life person with the small cartoon character to the right. It made me chuckle.
Screenshot of it here
Don't tell Meatloaf or Richard O'Brian
njordThe best cartoons were never taken seriously because they are the cartoons of a violent nature. And I'm talking about silly violence, not realistic violence. Arguably there is no such thing as realistic violence in a cartoon (none that I know of anyway)
things like bugs bunny and yosemite sam blowing holes in each other's hats, then running from each other and bugs beating the crap out of sam through various dirty tricks.
the late 1950s was the end of the great cartoon era. They were written for an adult audience, and often shown before movies to get folks' attention on the screen. Movie trailers now do this.
[offtopic]
I long for the days when there were still parts of one's life that were not saturated with advertisements. the only part of my life not saturated with ads is my dreams, and as soon as the technology exists to put ads in my dreams, they'll be there. I hope I'm dead.
[/offtopic]
When cartoons were not taken seriously, and considered entertainment only, is when cartoons were great. Nowadays cartoons like Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls are good cartoons, but they'll never be as good as the WWII and babyboom era Warner Bros cartoons.
I saw an interview once with some animators from that era of Warner animation studios' life, and they all said that they wrote and drew the cartoons that *they* wanted to see, not what someone else wanted to see. Nowadays executives decide what is written and drawn, in an attempt to please the most people possible, and keep their ad revenue up. it is my belief that all bad decisions are based on the desire for more money, and this is yet another example of that form of decision making.
Anyway, ranting off. The cartoons will get great again when they study what psychology made the old warner bros cartoons great, and reproduce it. talking rabbits, ducks, dogs, roosters, squirrels, etc, with jokes and situations written for adults and silly fake violence written for children. then they'll be great again. I would love to see one cartoon character jump into a freaking burning coal stove on a train and find a huge party inside just one more time. I would also love to see a good old fashioned shootout in a dusty old frontier town, between a talking, wise-ass rabbit that walks on two legs and a stupid gun-happy gold miner just one more time. "i dare you to step across this line" said 4,000 times until sam is led into walking off of a cliff. doesn't get much better than that.
oh, the good old fashioned crazyness will never be repeated!
In the 1980s, after the FCC officially deregulated most rules surrounding programming and advertising, the animation and toy businesses were able to partner up and create a new tradition of half-hour commercials to sell toys. He-Man kicked it off, followed by G.I. Joe and Transformers, MASK, Sectaurs, the list goes on. Before long, this became such a common and profitable practice that it was nearly impossible to get a show on the air that wasn't some sort of a tie-in.
Then along came the NES, which truly revolutionized the home gaming phenomenon and became as commonplace as toasters in many households. Kids started spending more and more time with their came consoles and less with their toys, and this phenomenon continues to the present day, when video games continue to take up a larger and larger portion of floor space at toy stores every year.
It's especially pronounced in Japan, where, through the 60s, 70s and 80s there were jillions of live action and cartoon shows produced to serve as vehicles for promoting superhero, monster, and robot toys. Nowadays, there are only a few core brands left that have any kind of sustainability, with very few newcomers to the fold. Some companies like Takara have tried crossover products like Web Diver Gradion, but they haven't caught on as much as they'd like. Kids there are just having more fun with their Playstations and Game Boys.
Of course, there is the occasional Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh that achieve breakthrough success, but one could argue that these are pretty heavily game-based properties as opposed to toy-based.
I remember the heyday of cartoons, when everything was a clearly delineated, toy tie-in. Well, okay, other than Looney Tunes, which was simply fantastic.
Cartoons were clearly tied to gender. There were boy cartoons (GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, M.A.S.K., that one with the light gun plane where you shot at the screen, and so forth), and girl cartoons (Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, etc.). These were genuine, good quality shows that were obvious toy tie-ins, but kids loved them. See, toys provide something tangible, and the easiest way to generate toys is to not have character development. If I want to add a character to Spongebob, I have to have a meaningful purpose for that character, because said cartoon is primarily narrative and dialogue-driven. Transformers is also arguably narrative-driven, although the narrative consists primarily of Autobots vs. decepticons, so adding a flying plane or a dinosaur is trivial.
It seems a bit rambling, but I'm bringing it together here. I can remember watching kids play Power Rangers at the park. Power Rangers is easy to play. You choose your ranger, you go off and battle "evil". How the hell do a bunch of kids play Spongebob? What, you pretend to be some crab and exchange half-wit banter while simultaneously apppealing to an older demographic?
Basically, it's a lack of conflict. Every solid cartoon show revolved around the simplest of ideas, good vs. evil. It might've been that the evil was Decepticons, or the wicked Voltron queen, or Cobra, or that Rainbrow Brite villain who was only drawn in shades of gray. A dialogue-driven children's show is going to have to be pretty damned well-written to appeal to kids, and hiring good writers costs good money. Cartoons exist primarily because they're cheap to produce, so any gain from choosing the medium is eliminated when you have to gety talented writers on board. Maybe it's a reflection of our values as a society (or more particularyl, young parents' values) , or maybe it's Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, as other posts have mentioned, but something's just missing there.
Alternately, it could simply be that the plethora of cable networks broadcasting cartoons has taken the profitability away from the format.
...seriously. Go back and watch some of those old shows you so fondly remember. They're not nearly as good as you remember. The voice acting is often terrible, the writing is shallow and the plots are painfully predictable. Quality in network programming really hasn't changed all that much.
I think the comments that cable has killed Saturday morning cartoons are more on the mark. Not just because cable offers 24/7 programming, but because what is on offer is really first rate in comparison. Nickelodeon, for instance, has brought us such gems as Rocko's Modern Life, Ren and Stimpy, and Invader Zim to name a few. There is just no comparison imo - the programming the cable channels are offering up is much classier and proves you don't have to pander or use sledgehammer wit to produce children's programming.
Why get up all early on a saturday morning when you can sleep in then download your cartoons via Kazaa whenever you want? Indeed the death of an era.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The reason is really very simple - no Pinky and the Brain on saturday mornings. That was the best cartoon ever concieved of by the mind of man, no argument. They had megalomaniacal mice, for Pete's sake! It doesn't get better than that.
I'm the stranger...posting to
I remember anxiously awaiting the debut of "Hammerman", MC Hammer's animated masterpiece. I remember "The Ghostbusters", and "The Real Ghostbusters". I remember "Garfield & Friends", and I remember that duck who wore the innertube and the duck head on the inner tube always did exactly what the duck's head did. That was clever. I remember never getting up early enough to see "The Snorkles". I remember that one cartoon with Butter Bear. I remember the crazy crap they had on nickelodeon on saturday mornings too, "The Sun Beneathe The Sea" or something, that one with the Prince who catches comets in a net and flies from planet to planet and talks to the bitchy flower, and that one about the kid and the dog. I sadly remember "Bill & Ted's Excellent Cartoon", and the Pac-Man cartoon, and I vaguely recall a cartoon about the video game Pitfall. While we're talking video games.. I also vagely recall a Q-Bert cartoon. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course, and WWF Superstars. I particularly remember the episode where Andre the Giant (may he rest in peace) was going on a date, and he had to wear rubber tires as shoes. And I'm not too old to admit that I watched "Bill Nye the Science Guy" and "Beakman's World", neither of them hold a candle to Mr. Wizard though. Even though you had to get up at 4am to see Mr. Wizard, it was always worth it. The Chuck Jones genius of "The Bugs & Daffy Show" was always pleasant. I think "Ducktales" was an afternoon show, but I know "Tail Spin" was a saturday morning show. So was "Denver, The Last Dinosaur", and "Dennis The Mennace". "Dennis the Mennace" is hilarious to watch now as an adult. Dennis wasn't a mennace at all, Mr. Wilson is just an asshole. And do you recall that TMNT spin-off with the frogs? WTF was that? I think all Hanna-Barbera had to offer on Saturday mornings during my youth was "The Grape Ape", "Manilla Gorilla", and "The Flintstones Kids".
Perhaps I watched a little too much TV as a kid. Like Pavlov's dog, I flip the TV off every time I see "Meet The Press" cause that means the cartoons are over.
I was a TV kid; a real obsessive little dweeb. I watched far, far too much kiddie crap, and for too long. (Think Milhous van Houton.) But I was also an observant, skeptical, and curious little dweeb. (Good training for my career in QA!) I recognized before most kids the difference between first run and syndicated shows, film and video tape, and the value of different time slots.
Well, my point: There is a conservation of crappiness in Saturday Morning TV. Most of it has always been awful. Much of what we liked as kids was awful. It wouldn't hold up if you saw it now. At least, if you've grown up even a little.
The bright lights, then as now, were few, and usually died quickly. (There was a whole slew of live-action poetry-and-storytelling shows in the early 70s; well-meaning post-hippie artiness like "Animals, Animals, Animals." Anyone remember an early-90s FOX show called "Nightmare Ned?" Or the artsy, weird, "ZaZu U?")
If Saturday Morning dies, I can't feel too sad. Give the kids books, or video tapes, or shove them outside so they can build up their immune systems by rolling in the dirt.
Stefan
I do remember however getting up really early and watching the end of the color bars and then drudging through the national anthem to watch wonder dog at 5:30 because that was the only time it was on.
However I don't buy the quality time crap though, Kids probably don't watch too much TV because they are busy at the mall doing nothing, adn trying to be more adultish or something. Which is why I think kids now a days are trying to be adults faster or something because kids mimic that of adult ones, like the lizzie mcguire that was mentioned.
Finnally a slight OT rant about the advertising portion of the article.
<rant> However when it comes to advertising and targeted marketing, it still sucks even today. For example how on earth do you get pixie pocket or other strange girl toy commericals during DBZ ? (* Not that I watch DBZ :-) *)
</rant>
last but not least if i ever ever get an anime channel, adult swim probably won't be a thing on my TODO list either.
Star Blazers and Battle of The Planets
I miss the sound of those 70's/80's era lasers.....
/me wipes away tears
Burma?
How can you talk about Saturday Mornings without invoking the "Smurfs"? 1983 8:00am NBC.
I guess I just replaced Transformers, MASK and TMNT with Simpsons, Futurama and Family Guy.
Saturday mornings are crap nowadays. It used to be watch ABC's friday night lineup (family matters, step by step, some other crap and perfect strangers), go to bed, wake up, watch saturday morning cartoons, then sit around and play nintendo all day. Watch SNICK at night and then sunday was here. Ah the good ol' days.. now papers for school and this internet thing suck up all my time.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
While Saturday morning cartoons are definitely more or less dead, don't confuse that with all cartoons in general being dead. Cartoon Network airs a 7 hour block on Saturday night unofficially dubbed the "Saturday Video Entertainment System", an obvious throw back to the 80s. Looking at the current schedule, they have Pokemon, the new He-Man, Samurai Jack, Transformers: Armada, X-Men: Evolution, Yu-Gi-Oh, Jackie Chan Adventures, G Gundam, Dragon Ball, Samurai Jack(again), Hack/Sign, GI Joe, Batman: The Animated Series, and Superman on, in that order. Some of this stuff is obviously junk(Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh), and the anime stuff not everyone will go for, but in between that, you get gems like the new He-Man series, Transformers, and reruns of GI Joe and Batman. If you're feeling adventurous, Jackie Chan isn't too bad(it's Kung-Fu, you know someone's going to get hurt), and neither is the new X-Men series. A lot of people speak highly of Samurai Jack, so I'll leave it at that. Perhaps it's not correct to say that Saturday morning cartoons are dead, perhaps it's better to say that they've been shifted to Saturday nights?
Cartoon Network!
Cartoons 24/7, why the need for afternoon and saturday morning cartoons when we have them all day and night long.
We could put Bill G.'s face onto the commie characters, and get NEW cartoons that relate to modern issues WITHOUT drawing anything or paying the Flash MX registration fee.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
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Clue us in so we can grab 'em.
gracias
And anybody remember Mr. Bogus?
incripshin
I fail to see how the act of fishing is moronic... or how watching coartoons on a saturday moning is pathetic...
both these activites were the basis of just about every saturday in my childhood...
though admittedly, some would call me a pathetic moron...
5468652047616D65
Huh. Who'da thunk?
But seriously, if this is in fact what's happening, what does that bode for the future? A generation or two isn't in the habit of being an ad-vertainment couch potato? All those museums and theatres can do strange things to impressionable young minds.
Wow, they used to have 20 million viewers? Then why were the shows always so lousy? I'm not just talking about the stories, I mean the animation itself?
Dudes, I'm 18 now, and I swear the only thing I remember about Saturday morning TV growing up is that it had always had the worst, lamest crap of the week. I remember thinking "why the heck do they save all the good shows for school mornings?" I don't remember what WAS on, but I distinctly remember thinking that quite ofte. So... no, it never made any sense to me when people would talk about them great "Saturday morning cartoons..."
Property is theft.
I used to listen to Saturday AM radio too. My favorite show was "No School Today" with Big John and Sparky. I loved the radio serials too like Sky King, Lone Ranger, Straight Arrow, and when I was younger The Shadow and the Green Hornet.
These shows played in the "theater of the mind" and IMO much better fare than what is/was on kid TV.
I guess I sound a little like the Grumpy Old Man when I say "And We Liked It"
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
*Mighty Mouse was cancelled by the PMRC, because of a flower sniffing episode.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
Name one type of entertainment you can't get at any time of day. News, cartoons, drama, movies (even porn) are on-tap 24/7.
Hell, the only the reason the big networks still do "news-at-six" is tradition.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I remember waking up at like 5:30 in the morning just to catch Mr. Bogus...that show was the bomb. I hated Bogus' nephew Brattus though, he was such a dick head. Mr. Bogus rules!!
Who here can honestly say that anytime you see the Warner Bros. logo, you don't think of an old, powerful movie studio but a Saturday morning?
Anybody "grown up" after about '91 doesn't really know what we're talking about. Kids used to get up early on Saturday just to watch cartoons! Usually, flipping between the 3 channels to be sure not to miss any! Most houses still didn't have cable either, so Saturday morning was all most kids got. Everybody watched them! Quite often it was the only day most kids watched that much TV all week. While the marketing is more extensive now, the mania for items was more then--it was much more important to have the "right" lunchbox than it is now.
It was a Saturday morning ritual for kids of that time. I've found kids after then really don't have much in common anymore. I think kids today are much more responsible and careful about what they do than we ever were, but I'm not sure if that's because they have so many more demands, or because they really aren't given the chance to figure things out for themselves anymore!
"Six key factors have led to children watching less Saturday morning cartoons: more recreational sports, "
Gee, the country is being destroyed by jocks? Who woulda thought?
Now kids spend their Saturday mornings sleeping in as they usually have been out smoking bongs and having sex the night before.
Their role models - Eminem and Christina Aguilera, Brittney, Holly Valance etc. You get the picture.
It had nothing to do with cartoon quality, changing demographics or the alignment of Jupiter and Mars. The FCC used to require a minimum number of hours of children's programming. They stopped requiring it. Hooray for deregulation, sure glad I can watch golf and infomercials on Saturday morning now. I'm not sure which is more boring, btw.
What was the mystery again?
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
The idea of sitting around watching TV for 30 minuts seams.. alien.
:)
Ya no kidding... when Buffy and Angel are 60 minute long shows... 30 minutes is a bit strange..
For those that don't know, Reg Hartt is a Toronto landmark who loves animation and old films. He runs a number of film showings out of his house. (He sells memberships rather than tickets, probably a law dodge. Members can bring wine or food if they wish. Bring enough for everyone. :^) If you're in Toronto, check it out.
Heh, "Chuck" Jones? The cartoons I saw tonight had Charles Jones in the credits. (Voices by Mel Blanc. All of them. *sigh*)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
There is one thing that the article is not completely clear on, and that is whether or not there is a definite drop in the number of children watching cartoons at all. In other words, is it just that they can now watch cartoons anytime they want, or are they also watching less?
From other trends I have seen, it could very well be that the current generation of children are too busy doing other things to look at TV (something that the article does mention), at least not as extensively as the generation before them. But if this is true, think of this: Today's cartoon-watchers are tomorrow's primetime TV watchers. If they're not watching TV much now, will they suddenly turn around and start watching it when they get older? I think not.
So we could be seeing the beginning of the end of the era of television itself. It will be a very slow death, but it may come nevertheless. Even now primetime TV is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for fresh ideas. I doubt the next generation of potential TV watchers will be satisfied with this.
This makes me think of a throwaway line of dialogue from an episode of the original Star Trek. I forget the name of the episode (it was the one where they get zapped back in time to 20th century Earth and accidentally beam the Air Force pilot on board). At one point Spock said something like (paraphrased) "Television died out as an entertainment medium sometime in the 21st century."
Life imitating art, perhaps?
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
I am more surprised that a seven year old want's a linux cd than that a seven year old can program. I was programming at eight so I know that it is not a big deal, but the environment that I used was tiny by any unix standard. I just can't see a kid wanting to use sed.
But I do remember it, and I thought I was nuts because nobody else I knew remembered it and I did.
because they suck. The quality of saturday morning catoon entertainment isn't nearly what it used to be.
i have a roll of electrical tape.
Even better than the Warner Bros. releases, however, were the Fleischer Studios offerings. Betty Boop has become a global cultural icon in a way that Bugs Bunny and Company - let alone any of the current crop - simply can't touch. (And nobody but nobody could get away with naming a character "Bimbo" these days, unless you're a Mexican bakery.) Fleischer Studios did several musical numbers themselves, many starring the vocal talents of Cab Calloway. Max Fleischer and his brother also invented a piece of technology that's still in use for animation today - the rotoscope. It allowed them to capture real motion, which is why so much of their animation had a "surreally real" look and feel.
Personally, I think that the demise of Saturday Morning Television has less to do with the internet, cable, or "quality time" than with the fact that even 20 years ago, people gave kids more credit for intelligence and mental toughness. We are seeing the most rabid romanticism of childhood to occur since the Victorian era. On one hand, children are being painted as delicate little creatures with easily damaged psyches; and heaven forbid that they should be exposed to anything that could mold them in a disturbing way. On the other hand, you have advertisers who pander to the pre-pubescent smartass by portraying kids as being infinitely wittier and more intelligent than any of the adults around them (if you buy X product.) [aside] And people then wonder why their precious child pops off to Grandma. Why? because the commercials, obnoxious as they are, are more fun to watch than the PC pap that passes for a cartoon these days.[/aside] Kids should have things filtered, to an extent. But don't insult their intelligence. They're lots smarter than people think.
I watched all of those violent cartoons, and not once did I try to bicycle off of the roof, or drop an anvil from my perch in the tree onto my cousin's head. (Blocks and Nerf balls are another story.) Heck I even read my father's National Lampoons, although that might not be the best example to use if I intend to paint myself as a reasonably well-adapted adult.
In a nutshell, I am going to find as many of the old cartoons as I can. That way, when I do have kids, we can sit and watch them together. I'll get to re-live some darn good memories, and the munchkins will have an appreciation for what the good stuff looks like.
Another Merrie Melodies link.
And a very well done research book.
Further information about Max Fleischer's early work.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
There are only three networks that carry cartoons on Saturday mornings?
Excuse me, but this is EXACTLY what it was like in the 1970's. We had ABC, NBC, and CBS. PBS didn't have any cartoons worth watching.
So why is this news again?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The author missed one part about why children spend less time watching cartoons... Children today are being hurried through childhood, rushed into taking on adult tasks at a very early age.
Anxious parents overload their children, pushing them too hard, too soon. It is becoming increasingly common for parents to enroll their young children in after-school activities (sports, music, ballet). Here is an interesting quote from Time magazine: "Kids who once had childhoods now have curriculums; kids who ought to move with lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee."
I do not know what the author considers to be quality time, but taking kids to ballet school and driving together in the car is definitely not quality time.
Any article that starts out "there are six reasons" and lists five reasons is not worth the download entropy it expends.
Merrie Melodies:o dies/
http://www.toonzone.net/early-years/
http://www.bcdb.com/pages/Warner_Bros_/Merrie_Mel
The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartons at amazon.com:6 038325/103-1349286-7639828?vi=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/081
Fleischer Studios and Max Fleischer biographical information:a tors/fleischer.htmld ios/
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/archive/innov
http://www.toonopedia.com/fleischr.htm
http://www.bcdb.com/pages/Paramount/Fleischer_Stu
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
Have they actually seen the latest crop (or is that spelt with an 'a') of cartoon shows? I could have told them this a few years back.
:o(
Almost all current cartoons are utter rubbish (like much of normal TV these day) -- mostly trashy "Japanese" Poke-formers-Z clones with zero storyline and hopeless quality drawings and 'animation' (often half the show isn't even animated at all, it just slides still frames past the camera, eg. Samurai Jack).
Reminds me of my old favorites, in no particular order:
The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda
Fantastic Max
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Voltron
Gummy Bears
Midnight Patrol (does anyone else remember this one?)
Sonic the Hedgehog (That's Sonic SatAM, the cool and well animated one, not the crappy ones)
probably a bunch more I can't remember anymore
And possibly my worst favorite SatAM memory:
the death of Gargoyles...why did they ever move it out of the afternoon lineup? grr
It also is interesting to see some of the old classics (for me anyways...I know that's a relative term) being brought back, like the new He-Man cartoon (not to be confused with The New Heman, which sucked) and the new Turtles cartoon.
I think part of the problem nowadays is that kids shows are too 'kiddy.' With a renewed emphasis on parental involvement, there seems to be a bit more time spent together as a family. And since parents control the remote and are actively watching with their kids, are they going to want to watch mindless garbage like Hamtaro or Pokemon? I think not. In my mind, the best cartoons are the ones that can appeal to everyone. And I'm not just talking the classic classics: Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, et al. I'm also talking Animaniacs (loaded with political satire for adults and slapstick for everyone) and Batman (violence for the kiddies, anti-hero engaging plots for the adults).
Just my two cents. Gods bless the Cartoon Network for saving a lot of these shows.
first off, i'm 21, watched all those good old shows... we get nostalgic though, tons of junky shows too, we just don't remember. i have (much) younger siblings so i watched cartoons with them all the time and cartoon network is still my fav station (who wants to hear about the economy and iraq anyway?). first, i'd like to make a point... most of the shows now are MUCH better animated. go pull out the transformers classic DVD sets, still not as good looking as the new transformers, but still cooler (because that's what we watched) but my little siblings thought the stuff i watched was dumb. kids watch cartoons for a little entertainment... but also for social reasons. same as video games. not following me? let me explain... just look at this whole post, everyone is talking about their fav shows and the glory days. kids do the same thing now. i coach soccer, but when the kids are on the bench, know what they do? talk about cartoons, yu-gi-oh cards, and playing video games. (we did the same thing, and we still do the same thing) the kids that aren't allowed to partake in these forms of entertainment just sit quietly, completely out of the circle. odd how solitary events can affect our social events. sure, it would be better if kids socialized about a book or something, but get real, not gonna happen. so the next person that thinks "kids shouldn't play video games, they should socialize with other kids" should smack themself. what the heck are the kids gonna talk about?? kids socialize more than adults anyway, they have school and recess, not cubicles. cartoons are different today... whatever. they are a form of entertainment and a social topic. our parents thought we had no taste, why are you allowing your nostalgic bias to blind you to the fact that you're doing the same thing again. there are quite a few good cartoons out now anyway, powerpuff girls is cute in its own way (kinda violent for a flowery cartoon too) dexter's lab, hey arnold is funny at times, yu-gi-oh can get distracting at times... the whole dragonball thing is a cult thing... it's repetitive, but you HAVE to just watch for the sake of watching. plenty of other decent ones. i mean, voltron was cool because there was a big robot with a sword and it chopped stuff up (hmm sounds like animated power rangers) but the plot was awful. same with gi-joe, transformers, and a bunch of other goodies. i love them for what they are, my childhood entertainment, but they were far from some sort of "pinnacle" and if you don't believe me, go buy the DVDs of some of the series and try to watch them purely for entertainment and remove your nostalgic fondness... plot is cheesy, voices were wrong sometimes, some of the guys were colored wrong in certain frames (happened a lot in transformers) i mean, this is not a "high quality" cartoon. just cool :) and the messages haven't changed too much either... old ones focused on good guy and bad guy many times, value of friendship, blah blah. powerpuff girls... same baddies come back, girls work together to fight bad person, beat him up, share a good laugh and learn a (weak) lesson too. heck fraggle rock didn't really even have bad guys (just the big ogre things that would eat them if they left the rock) all about friendship and stuff. that seems pretty darned PC to me. anyway, bottom line... early cartoons were stupid but entertaining, 80's cartoons were stupid and entertaining, current cartoons are stupid and entertaining. some were dumber than others, but they were never meant to be great, they were cartoons! leave the kids alone, and leave the 'toons alone too!
There are still a few shows that come out which are meant for older audences as much as kids. Animaniacs, Rocko's Modern Life, Invader Zim (in my opinion), Ren and Stimpy.
Thank Ghod Cartoon Network has figured out there is such a big audience for Cartoons among adults, although I wish they would put more effort into making cartoons like Rocko that have jokes that are clearly engineered to be equally funny to small children and adults, but for different reasons. I have infinite respect for scriptwriters and animators who can pull that off well.
let's hear it for patience and the value of privelege!
20 sec fucker
I'm from India. Sunday mornings used to be kids time on television cos' many schools worked on Saturdays. Usually consisted of Disney cartoons (dubbed into Hindi) and mythological serials. (Where kids programs in the US show technologically advanced robots and gadgets, kids programs in India had all powerful gods and godessess with tantrically charged bows and arrows fighting against demons and beasts. :-))
Funny how everyone perceives the 'heyday of cartoons' simply as the time they themselves watched cartoons as a kid, with everything after that being crap. Different generations - different 'heydays'.
JP
Now that we all have flying cars and robot housekeepers, it's just not relevant any more.
I'm going to go back to work pushing this button now...
The latest Slashdot meme.
I noticed the downturn of Saturday morning even as I was growing up. When I was young it was great and as I got older it got worse and worse. For a while I thought it was me but then I noticed I still liked cartoons. With the coming of Cartoon Network and similar channels I knew that it definately wasn't be that'd changed. The cartoons they push at kids these days just tend to suck - especially the Saturday morning crap. Worst they've replaced most these time slots with news and religious shows. Sure the kids go to other channels and time slots to find cartoons but that is only because the Saturday morning as we know it has been flushed completely down the toilet.
I think network tv is missing the real market for Saturday morning cartoons - adults that grew up with it. I think a lot of us would tune in (with our own kids) to watch good cartoons. We could be spending a couple hours every Saturday morning with our kids just having a laugh. Some good cartoons like Looney Tunes. Toward the middle of the day fade the programming from animation into more grow up stuff. Bill Nye the Science Guy, Junkyard Wars, etc.. sort of educational things children and parents might watch together.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Basically two things have happend
i, cartoons have become very PC, mostly because of concern over toy manufactors marketing to kids, by using violence as a quick out, ie TMNT, and any of those shows which run the some transformation sequence every week like Power Rangers. - not sure if this is a good or bad thing as they have just replaced violence with obessive (gotta get them all) collecting like Pockemon and its knockoffs prove.
ii, The demographic has shifted due to the creation full time cartoon channels on cable and ofcourse video games.
(Most of the posts that people are making pretty much break down to these two points.)
Personally, I feel that anything which may have kids getting off their fat arses and atleast spending some time outside, ala Simpsons style when marge made Ichy and Scartchy suck, has to be a good thing... maybe there's a massive PTO letter writing conspiracy with just that goal in mind.
However we all know that the networks will just fill the slot with hour upon hour of clip shows trying to sell the latest backshreets boys CD to childern too young to remember New Kids on the Block.
Never let morality stop you from doing what is right
> so most are 100+MB MPEG1/2 files
They might be in VCD format so you can burn and watch on a real television with the help of a DVD player.
Sure, an uber-hot divx formatted cartoon would be great and all, but I doubt these people have access to the originals and it would be a waste of effort to take low-quality television video (or more likely second or third generation VHS as these episodes are no longer broadcasted) and put it in huge high-quality divx-like formatting.
When it comes to television broadcast stuff, VCD is a good way to go. A simple burn and off to the TV you go. Yeah, you can take divx or whatever and reformat it or you might might own a nice videocard that does NTSC output, but my shared folders on P2P are usually for me first and others second.
Be glad you're able to get anything.
>Anyhow, classic cartoons are still aired on Cartoon Network.
True, but the WWII ones certainly are not getting played on CN.
I agree. Older cartoons did keep adult audiences in mind by including humour that kids don't get. Cartoons became more targeted toward children once Hanna-Barbara started making cartoons.
Compared to classic Warner Bros. cartoons, the shows created by H-B were bad. The animation quality is lower, the characters are almost interchangable, (e.g. the plot/sight gags of a Yogi Bear cartoon could easily be done using Huckleberry Hound) and the humour was often shallow.
I'd speculate that these cartoons became "popular" because they're cheaper to produce than other types of childrens' programming. The plots don't require great writers, the animation is somewhat crude, and I believe one guy did a large number of the voices.
Eventually, cartoons became accepted as entertainment "for kids." Some recent cartoons also have some adult-oriented content, like Animaniacs, which has many jokes that I didn't get as a kid (e.g. the "Goodfeathers" being a direct rip on Goodfellas).
I'm glad that anime is finally beginning to overcome the "for kids" stigma.
or "When they came for the cartoons I did nothing because I wasn't a cartoon"
Weren't there some government hearings on cartoon violence a few years ago? Didn't the television folks agree to straighten up and fly right? It sounds like that's about the time cartoons started getting lame. Coincidence? I don't think so. I got curious about what happened and did some googling....
STEP 1. OMG! Marvin the Martian just blew up the Earth, and that's supposed to be funny?
from TRUCE - Teachers Resiting Unhealty Children's Entertainment
"Too much of what children see on television is violence as entertainment. It undermines lessons we teach at home and school about how people treat each other, and encourages the use of violence to solve problems and to have fun. We have seen the effects of this glamorized violence in such events as school shootings."
STEP 2. I am shocked and appalled and am going to do something about it.
from lionlamb.org
"The mission of The Lion & Lamb Project is to stop the marketing of violence to children. We do this by helping parents, industry and government officials recognize that violence is not child's play - and by galvanizing concerned adults to take action."
"Lion & Lamb works to reduce the marketing of violent toys, games and entertainment to children in two distinct ways. We work with parents and other concerned adults to reduce the demand for violent "entertainment" products, and with industry and government to reduce the supply of such products."
"We believe that attitudes about violence as "entertainment" can be changed over time. Just as attitudes about drunk driving and smoking have changed, we believe that Lion & Lamb can help forge a national consensus that violence is not child's play. Just as it has become "uncool" to pollute and to litter, we are working to change the tolerance level for violence as a "cool" theme for toys and other entertainment products for children."
STEP 3. Well, if you think about it, we can't do it ourselves, so we need the government to force everyone to do the right thing.
"Too often, both government and the entertainment industry place all responsibility for monitoring the games children play on the shoulders of their parents. Certainly, parents need to be vigilant and provide their kids with guidance. But in a culture where $1 billion a year is spent by industries of all sorts to advertise their products directly to children, parents can't stem the tide of "entertainment" violence on their own." - snippet from an article at LionLamb.org
STEP 4. The Government is only too happy to oblige. Who could vote against protecting children?
"Senator Paul Simon, speaking to a conference organized in Beverly Hills on August 2 by the National Council for Families and Television, told some 650 representatives of the broadcasting business who were present that he was giving them sixty days to come up with a plan to regulate themselves with respect to the portrayal of violence--or else they would face some sort of government regulation." - from newcriterion.com article archived from Sept. 1993
Step 5. Mission Accomplished
"Culminating a protracted campaign against TV violence, both Houses of Congress have passed legislation requiring that new televisions be equipped with the so-called v-chip -- a computerized chip capable of detecting program ratings and blocking adversely rated programs from view." - from an article in the ACLU Archive
My son (4) is totally hooked on boomerang (Cartoon Networks 'classic toons' channel) we are quite happy about this and regard it as less mentally corrosive than most of the other childrens/cartoon channels, apart from cbeebies with is more or less a clone of how BBC did childrens programs in my day
do you guys get Boomerang? Just, this is a channel devoted to showing old cartoons, here in GB i get at least a good hour of WB cartoons (of all ages) every day, so they havent gone off telly completely.
Cartoons during the 80s anyway (when I was watching them) typically had very morally absolutist/dualistic themes permeating their storylines. You had a group that was identified as "good," another group that was identified as "bad," and the line between the two was very clearly defined. This of course was before the advent of postmodernism, which includes among other things the concept of moral relativism...ergo, the concept that there's no such thing as moral absolutes. The other thing that was different is that back then the entire concept of political correctness didn't exist either. Society now is so inundated with the clamouring cries of this or that minority group that it's virtually impossible to conceive of a storyline for just about anything without the risk of offending *someone*. I'm not sure why it's happened in the last 20 years, but before about 1990, people used to be nowhere near as easily offended as they are now. There's talk of releasing watered down versions of The Lord of The Rings, the Bible, and pretty much everything in between in order to make them bland and as inoffensive as possible.
The bottom line is that if you can't say something without having to worry that it's going to bring all sorts of crap down on your head because of possibly offending the gay movement or some other equally paranoid, emotive, and fanatical minority group, you most likely will end up not saying anything at all. To me, this has far more wide-ranging implications also than just the death of cartoons...we're talking about freedom of expression as a whole.
I don't really agree with the reasons laid out in the articles. Some make a bit of sense but likely aren't the big cause, while others (divorce? sudden increase in sports? what?) are just silly.
I grew up in the 80s, and I never actually stopped watching cartoons. I watch old GI Joe and Transformers episodes whenever I can, and am always tuned to the new shows on Cartoon Network when I'm not watching the History Channel.
I remember watching Saturday morning cartoons die. As a teenager with no social life that spent way too much time at the computer, I would often stay up Friday night and turn on Saturday morning cartoons the next day. I watched as they became less targeted and less well written (I don't mean Shakespeare here, but they seemed to forget how to write toward kids).
You didn't have as many cool action shows, or witty comedies. You got a lot more patronizing or uninteresting marketing shows. There were still great shows like Animaniacs, but they were on in the afternoon as well so you didn't have to get up to see them.
Pretty soon, everything was Pokemon or a rip-off of a rip-off of some previously popular show. Even the later Animaniacs spin-offs lost their humour. The concepts they gave them were just dumb. Pinky, Elmira, and the Brain is a perfect example.
After a while, the only shows I could stand watching were Batman Beyond and Men in Black. Batman Beyond is just damn cool, as is expected from the guys that created the Batman: The Animated Series, and Men In Black was a lot like the Real Ghostbusters. Other than that, I can't even remember what they showed. I think two episodes of Pokemon, two episodes of some show a whole lot like Pokemon, then two episodes of Pokemon again.
Pretty soon, there was just nothing left. The people that made Batman Beyond moved to Cartoon Network for Justice League. Men in Black stopped airing. They were on the right track with Jackie Chan Adventures, but it can't carry things on its own. Other than that, they just lost the knack at making kids' shows.
So I think that's pretty much it. Due to budgeting, misplaced priorities, or better deals at cable networks, the broadcast networks just lost the ability to make shows that kids watch. Kids started watching less shows, Saturday became less important, broadcast networks stopped focusing on them as much, causing even less good shows to air. Now, there's just no point.
It is a little sad. Children will no longer experience the thrill of waking up at 6am on Saturday, grabbing a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, and sitting in wrapped in their blankets to see the newest superheroes or wisecracking animals. But with all the quality cartoons shown on other networks, often written as much for adults as for kids, it's not a big loss.
[insert witty quote here]
"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too."
(Source: "Dave Barry turns 50" - "Things it takes most of us 50 years to learn")
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
I think the reason why kids don't watch Saturday morning TV anymore is that well, its rubbish!
I live in the UK and I was brought up watching a program in the late70s/early 80s called TISWAS. It was totally revolutionary at the time. Basically the program was based around total anarchy, where kids could gunge adults and the presenters went mad along with the kids in the studio. One thing this program was noted for was as amany adults as kids watched it and there even a late night adult spin off called OTT, which went too far and had to be pulled. TISWAS was fun and I would never ever miss it. It knocked the socks off the BBC's effort of Noel Edmonds Multi Couloured Swap Shop, a kids TV show based around the concept of kids swapping things!
When it was taken off the air in the early 80s, it was replaced by programs that wanted to be like TISWAS, but where the presenters and producers didn't have the will or the guts to pull off some of the stunts that were frequent in TISWAS. As time went on Saturday morning TV got more and more sterile, instead of letting kids let off steam on a Saturday morning, these programs started lecturing kids on how they should live their lives, but more importantly they became big long adverts for the latest band/toy or TV show.
I grew up and stopped watching Saturday morning TV in the late 80s. By that time Saturday Morning programms seemed to be based around modern cartoons made only to get kids to buy the mercandise or having the presenters lick up to some new pop star. That would have never happened on TISWAS, if a pop star wanted to promote a record, they would have to get a soaking and stay in the cage for the duration of the show. Nowadays the PR people would never allow that. There have been a few bright lights since TISWAS I can think of Paralell 9 and No. 73, but on the whole most programs were rubbish.
I put the decline in Saturday morning kids TV down to the gradual commercialisation of the format and the lack of willingness to innovate, simple as that.
now that is a cartoon I miss...
it's a very good thing... I am a crack dealer and my market share increased by 56% on Saturday mornings, principally thanks to new young customers!
new scooby doo, there used to be a haunted house game from the 70's, but I can't find a link.
Care Bear Shoelaces - Click for a larger picture or to add to your basket
Care Bears
Strawberry Shortcake, I remember my sister collecting some of thease.
My Little Pony, I had to watch the film... ahhhh...
Rainbow Brite
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
> doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
One part of the article struck me first as interesting and then, after thinking about it, as sad. hen a child sees the color orange, the first word the child associates with that color is "Nickelodeon." Today's children are being raised as brand loyal to Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network's signature checkerboard. These brand loyalties form as early as two years of age.
As a kid, I recall playing all week. Then spending a couple of hours on Saturday morning watching TV. As soon as the Loony Toons came on, the TV went off, and I went back outside
From reading the article, it looked to me like there has been a net increase in TV watching. I mean, two years old, and you see orange and think Nickelodeon? WTF?
My point is that Saturday morning cartoons mean something to some of us younger than twenty-five, despite what the article stated.
This sig was generated by a barrel of trained kittens for SeXy_Red (550409).
the Barbarian 0wn3d 411!
I live in Greece and Weekend mornings (up till afternoon) used to be the whole tv experience, so I'll speak about it.
The weekends does not mean anything anymore because I believe that tv is missing originality, when it comes to cartoons. Nowadays the Japan imports are better, but they start to deteriorate too in the mainstream tv (for example Pokemon was great but it's turning lame). I like watching cartoons even though I am 24.
We don't have cartoon network (like others have) and the subscribing cn is a very lame cut down -- no violence programme.
When TV in Greece started we had Transformers, Mask, the appropriate WB classics (Buggs Bunny etc), and about 120 shows that were just great (the great 80's - 90's shows). Nowadays what tv is all about is some lame-o cartoons that do not provoke violence and are clean deep to the bottom of everything. Ok, tv is supposed to promote role models but this has gone far too much.
The only resort is Japanese Animation that has been popular to some channels, and are the only shows that have been continued (even though there are reruns every month instead of new episodes) that can be watched smoothly. Dragonball, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh even Digimon.
Actually, Greek TV has no respect for the children. The channel owners think that everything animated is for children. They just give big fat checks to people to organize children shows and stuff but instead they create monstrocities that no one can watch.
The same goes for the tv series. We had Sci-Fi and now it's been cut down to series that have been plugged off from the networks and are being sold for ballast. There is no viewer's opinion, just fake results (like Bush's elections one stuff)....
I Still remember my favorite show... i haven't seen it in ~14 years so I dont remember the name.. can someone help me?
It was about bears in an airship exploring the world and an evil king (I think he was a lion and he had a snake advisor but I'm not sure) and he was defeated in a coup during the series.
The reason kids aren't watching Saturday morning cartoons is that those 5-12 year olds can now be found raving the night away with those damn light sticks and rolling on e in some abandoned warehouse in the middle of nowhere! You think they can wake up in time after partying until 8am?! Sheesh!! The last rave I went to about a month ago (and never again) was seriously like a middle school dance, about 5% were dancing, the other 95% were either too fcked up or just too embarrassed to hop around like idiots. Most of the people there couldn't have been older than 15. kids these days... If they only watched cool shit like kissy fur and the smurfs, they'd be normal, but c'est la vie.
In Australia, for god knows how many years (1971-83 with a brief hiatus in '78, thanks google http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/H/htmlH/heyheyit s/heyheyits.htm) there was a live (and _oh_ yes it was live) TV show that was from than venerable classification "variety". Called "Hey Hey It's Saturday" it eventually capitulated to it's adult following and went to an evening timslot and then died the horrible death of a show without ideas. But when it was on in the mornings, from 8am to 11am, preceded by an hour of cartoons, which in turn was preceded by "The Thunderbirds" on and endless cycle of reruns, it was a truly bizarre combination of a guy behind a desk, an ostrich puppet (don't ask) and a female offsider for comedy value. Hard to describe really, but the point was that it did some cartoons, severe double entendre, comedy, sketches, popular music and competitions. Basically it was the show's cast having a party and we were invited to watch and participate. The same idea still exists in the UK, with competing offerings from the BBC and the commercial networks, directed at kids, much slicker and with a huge emphasis on pop music (the evils of which, here in the UK, are legion and these shows probably create the pathetic buying public that feeds the wicked industry to deprive us of our rights of fair use, but I digress). By slicker, I don't mean better, I just mean more scripted, and more polished, live studio. The Saturday morning shows in Oz disappeared with the death of HHIS back in the late eighties. Now there is the "computer driven" 3 hours of music videos or some branded cartoon show "Saturday Disney" for example.
So the experience in Oz would support the original articles position, but the UK does not, perhaps it was never quite the same. But what is interesting is the disappearance of the market (advertising that is). I had never really thought about it before, but I always used to decry that I was just too old for Transformers, and none of the stuff we used to watch never had the good toys. Being oblivious to the fact that the tie in might be a bad thing, in itself. I don't mean in the sense of a barely disgused advert (He-man for example was never that, nor Transformers really) but in terms of making the industry think that the tie in was the way to boost profits and therefore change the commissioning motive. Once the market went away (for wahtever reason) the content too disappeared.
Having said that, I would have said that the "Dexter's Laboratory" or "Cow and Chicken" school, along with the newer CGI stories are actually very good, so I am not sure that the quality is worse, but it is hard to argue that the Saturday moring market has certainly gone away. Perhaps there is space to bring it back in due time, for as we all know, everything old is new again (eventually)
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
I can still watch Pinkie and the Brain, or some of Animaniacs... both were loaded with adult humour that kids-couldn't-get.
Brain: "Pinky, are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
Pinky: "I think so Brain, but... burlap CHAFES me so."
How many kids even know what burlap IS?
Saturday morning cartoons suck. Hell, REGULAR cartoons ( for kids ) suck, period. I've watched a few for as long as I can stand it ( read: 5minutes ), the only thing that's a mystery is who keeps giving those idiots money to make shit.
No, where you will find the classics is where they've always really been: Where people make cartoons for adults.
Powerpuff girls, Jonny Bravo, and especially Shrek come to mind ( of the american populars ). These were cartoons that were not made for children, tho they are typically harmless enough to be viewed by kids. They were made for a more mature audience ( well, sorta anyways ), and thus have that timeless quality that the old Looney Tunes has.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The Ralph Bakshi years.
(Ok so I wasn't a kid then but those were funny)
Remember kids:
Force doesn't work on a crustacean
The truth about Led Zep should never be told on
Why the decline is Saturday morning cartoons on network TV? Simple..they all suck! Ever since Reagan "deregulated" the industry, they have all become just half-hour long cartoon advertisements for toys etc. So instead of having toys that sprang from cartoons...you know, Bugs Bunny Lite Brite sets, Snoopy toothbrush holders, Mickey Mouse watches etc...the toy appears first, with the show later on (if not concurrently) to advertize it.
When I grew up, cartoons were based on real people, or were even animated versions of the shows the grown-ups watched. I remember things like the Scooby Doo gang meeting Laurel and Hardy, or the Addams Family, something called Emergency Plus Four, Bill Cosby's Fat Albert...much earlier there were cartoons based on the Beatles and other pop groups. Does anything even come close anymore?
Actually, the answer to that is a resounding YES, and it certainly isn't springing from the commercial networks or even cable channels. The new Saturday morning catoonfests are on some of the public channels...PBS in the states, TVO and CBC here in Canada, with shows like Arthur or George Shrinks, which are far closer to the Sat AM shows I used to watch than the Pokemon crap that's on now. They're very popular...Ontario viewers of TVO witnessed an uproar recently when TVO axed hugely popular (and cute) TVO Kids host Patty Sullivan for doing a show on a different network.
And they're funny, too! Chock full of the same sort of pop culture references that the Simpsons are famous for. Just watch Arthur's rabbit friend Buster Baxter, who will eat anything, is paranoid about aliens and is just as much an underachiever as Bart Simpson ever could be. Or George Shrinks' inventor/musician dad, always looking for that new, cool sound. Buster Baxter and Harold Shrinks both crack me up! These shows also have their fair share of guests too...Fred Rogers, Yo Yo Ma, Art Garfunkel to name just a few.
So I would suggest that he only place that Saturday AM programming has ceased to really exist are on the dumbed down schedules of American network TV, the same people that have dumbed down and killed off so much other innovative programming in favour of cheaply done reality TV and advertising revenue
As we're talking about old cartoons and stuff, maybe this link can be amusing to you.
And Inspector Gadget came on right after Robotech. When I was very young, I loved to watch Get Smart. With Don Adams voicing Inspector Gadger, it was just like a Get Smart cartoon.
So there was not need to get up and leave just because Robotech was over.
What was totally lame is that I watched it on UHF TV-53 in Fresno California. They did a comerical for the station where someone gets up to have breakfast, pours a bowl of cornflakes and there are nuts an bolts mixed in with the cereal and the anouncer says "New and Improved TV-53, now fortified with Iron". This station made the station that Wierd Al worked in in UHF look normal.
vi +
I went to bowling every saturday, and the time that wasn't spent bowling in the morning and spending time with my pop in the afternoon was spent playing videogames.
Now when I turn on the tele, for cartoons that is, pretty much it's nothing but potty humor and pokemon-like cartoons that dominate the airwavs. I don't enjoy watchin those atall. There are No gundams, no transformers, no reboot, no tom n' jerry n' friends, roadrunner, none of that anymore. Now it's utter shit and networks are wondering why the morning soapoperas that air every day of the week are doing better than cartoons.
UT2K3, tribes2, counterstrike, postal 2(heheeee), and other games are obviously more entertaining and/or educational than the tele ever was. Every night I get on with a couple of guys to play tribes2 and we talk for hours on end about strats, life, other games, cooking recipies, etc. I wouldn't be suprised if some kids spent their saturday mornings doing the same, or sleeping in from being tired from the adrenaline of a late friday night match, starting at 8 and ending at 10, then partying with your team over voicechat on the public servers or trying out new games. Any game that allows 40 and 60 year old people to talk to 10 to 20 year old people is definatly a game that rocks, and you certianly do learn a lot from the older people I'll tell you that much.
I was actually kind of suprised they took down cartoons on the weekdays as well, I mean, what else am I supposed to get ready for school or work too? The news? don't make me cring and throw up,. It's still more entertaining to watch pokemon or some really fucked up disney cartoon than it'll ever be to watch news stations that not only report on trivial bullshit before important bullshit, but are also afraid to offend anyone.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
There is a wide, yawning gulf between a father who takes an interest in his child's life in order to be a part of it, and a father still plays with (today they call it "collecting") toys because he never grew up in the first place.
This isn't anything modern though -- model train sets have been popular gifts for children for decades, and then as now, the fathers always seem to get more enjoyment from them than the children do.
I grew up in the hey day of quality cartoons such as Tranformers, Maks, Thundercats, Voltron and my favourite Robotech/Macross. I still watch cartoons but they are terrible. They are all nicklodeon clones. They are all cutsy and nice. Kids don't watch that. They want shooting and things blowing up. Remember how cool Transformers was (and the toys). I am no fan of violence etc but its harmless in cartoons. This link between TV and violence is wrong. My friends and I all watched them and we are normal. Bring back decent cartoons.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Before the first slew of early morning cartoon, but right after fadeout of the test pattern and the National Anthem sign-on (with Air Force jets) came AgDay, the nationally syndicated program for that *other* Oh-Dark AM Early Riser Demographic -- the Farmer. To this city boy, it was a bit fascinating to see how the rural folk live.
These days, I wake up with AgDay only as a companion as I flip to get reports on the early morning commute to work.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Yet the anime and manga industries thrive in Japan. While that industry and our cartoon industry have many differences, I'll bet we're talking about the same demographic.
Children may be evolving emotionally faster, but the blame can be placed directly on American cartoons' coefficient of crappiness. Emotionally mature adults gobble up anime all the time.
I think human beings are very quickly evolving (or adapting- whatever) to reach a state where they in part don't grow up, maintaining characteristics of children through adulthood.
Scientists (yes 'them') reckon that domesticated cats are like this- still in many ways kittens because their easy lifestyle in the homes of hu-mans allows them to.
Er, like, "Discuss!"
graspee
I don't let my kids watch cartoons at all in our house (except for certain, pre-selected "movie-type" videos). When they go to friends' houses, they watch them, but we really don't want them to. We would rather them go to their friends houses and play (non-video) games and build relationships with other human beings.
But, there are several reasons why we don't let them watch cartoons on TV:
1) They are a waste of time.
2) They are "mind-swill".
3) They are a primary means of marketing toys and teaching my kids rampant materialism. I want my kids to want a toy because they see it and think it is cool or useful, not because they were mesmerized by a commercial to buy it.
4) It is too passive. I'd rather have them playing with their toys together inside, or playing with their friends outside.
5) They can always read more books.
I've discussed these things with my kids, and they understand them, but they still want to watch the cartoons. When they do get a chance to watch them (like when they go to grandpa's house... he lives in Iowa, and TV watching doesn't seem to be such a looked-down on thing there), I usually let them get away with watching a few hours of them on a Saturday morning, hoping they will get it out of their systems.
I think my kids have become the better for it. I think they are better rounded than most kids their ages.
dochood
When I was a kid you would have Superfriends, The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show, GI-JOE, and the Transformers.
I enjoyed some of those shows and still do, but todays saturday morning cartoon lineup seems more like a forum for training in political correctness. Cartoons used to be just fun and games, not a way to feed our kids bullshit with a shovel.
It's up to the family to teach values, not cartoons. Period. I don't want my kid to learn her morals from a TV producer and screenwriter.
That's why cartoons today suck.
Please tell me someone out there remembers Ultra Man!!!!!
check spelling.....remember!
1. The new stuff is offensively bad. It *trys* to be insipid - and succeeds. The old stuff was technologically inferior and every bit as formulaic (except for the absolute genius of Chuck Jones), but it let kids use their own imaginations. Consider for example the original Scooby Doo cartoons: the enjoyment wasn't the story because that never changed. Nor was it the "artistry". No, it was the ever-changing venues
that let it capture your interest.
2. There is nothing special about Saturday mornings when you can catch cartoons 7x24.
I find it sadder that the editor of the article doesn't know how to use an apostrophe or inverted commas. What did they do, dictate stuff to their word processor?
It seems more like the article is mourning the "death" of animation on free-to-air TV - are ratings really that important to them any more? Cable TV isn't so widespread in Australia (I know I don't need it - I watch Channel V at the gym and that's about it) so the cable and free-to-air channels double up on the very popular cartoons.
For the record, I quite enjoy Pokemon (both anime and game). It is a very deliberate marketing ploy, but as I now work in marketing I usually just sigh and give up if it's targeted at me.
I can't believe all of the rants about how there are no good cartoons anymore because they quit making them for adults. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the most biting social commentary of our time is to be found on the current "classics", the Simpsons, King Of The Hill, and especially South Park. As political correctness ruled the air beginning in the 80's, people with something to say moved into animation. It's just less threatening to have a yellow, painted cartoon boy comment on the state of the education system, or race or whatever.
As for kids cartoons, there's plenty of great stuff out there, it's just all living on cable now. And there is way less of the mindless crap that so many here have tried to wax nostalgic over, like He-Man and Transformers. Woah! you want to know what killed Saturday morning? Look no further than that kind of "design the toy and then make up a show to market it" junk.
As a former Saturday morning TV addict, this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
I don't know. Early morning cartoons kept me on schedule over the weekends. I would wake up early just to watch them. My sister's 7 and 8 year old kids don't make it out of bed before the crack of noon on the weekend and then have a hard time going to bed Sunday night, and thus have a hard time waking up Monday morning for school. So are early morning cartoons really a bad thing?
It wouldn't be so bad if they didn't hardcode the text size in the font class. At least then I could enlarge it.
It makes it annoying when, in order to read the dang article, I have to move my eyes to 6 inches from the screen.
Am I the only one who has this problem? I can read slashdot, salon, and other sites fine.
That's like a list about the debasement of the kid cartoon, not about the classics. You were on the cusp of the every-show-is-an-excuse-to-push-action-figures generation, but not quite there yet. Transformers was actually over the edge... Not that the production values were so bad, with Orson Welles in the movie and all, but that was well on the way to Pokemon.
"Classics" would be Wagner's Ring Cycle as done by Bugs and Elmer, not Voltron.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I remember Saturday mornings, but what I really miss is Saturday Afternoon - "Kung Fu Theater"
If you have recently looked at Terrestial Television, you will see that the level of broadcasting material is simply infantile. Those kids who grew up with Saturday morning television are still watching dumb shows. Hopefully, the next generation will force better standards later.
Johnny Quest? Ugh!
... I really wish they'd put out some good work in-house work again.
Your "they suck" line, though. That is dead on. I don't put all the blame on Disney... there's simply too much to go around. On second thought, they end up with most of the blame anyway.
Thanks to a string of successful animated features, and widespread popular nostalgia, Disney gained a stranglehold on American animation. Then they decided to drink beer on their sofas until they fell unconscious and use their drool to divinate new shows. Hell, I grew up on their shows... Ducktales, Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers, Tailspin and the like. But they got the industry and then they forgot that they were supposed to do something with it.
None of the other studios did anything about it either. There was the occasional gem, several of the Spielberg branded group, but most all of those were weekday afternoon fare. Shows like Animaniacs take more awareness than can be called upon early in the morning, and shows like Batman get the violent tag that's so talked about in the comments already.
Then Disney started their "One Saturday Morning" thing, for which they created multiple bad shows, as well as appropriating(and/or adaptaing) some good ones and making them bad.
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
As an older hacker, I can tell ya that it's always been a declining artform since about 1966. It started with some pretty good contenders like Johhny Quest, Flintstones and Jetsons and some short-run oddities that were honest, varied shows with some kinda plot, and reasonable at that.
But then the concept original programming gave way to shows with the attention span of a squirrel. Hair-Bear Bunch, Scooby Doo ("And we woulda made it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!") and the truly odd HR Puffinstuff. Everything was canned snippets (standing in the air, feet a-blur and THEN start moving, usually with the sound of a ricohchet)
I think what soured it for me most was that every Saturday morning was just another attempt to take some mindless concept, put sugar on it, and it magically becomes a kids' breakfast cereal. Anything for a buck. Very few of those are still around now, but a handful were good enough to remain 'classic' whereas 'Comet Kehoutek Crisps' or 'Oil Embargo Chews' were clearly designed to capitalize on something WAY too short-sighted.
I'm not in the Madison Avenue family, but from what I've learned since those mind-numbing sessions, it appears to have been the dumping ground for admen. Perhaps it's the 'happy hunting ground' for guys who'd lost it, but were too endearing to fire them. No more originality and no understanding of the kids involved.
Not that it was not all bad.
Some things in my lifetime were actualy BETTER than these days. Everyone knows the extreme coolness of the larger GI Joe. There was more, too...I once had a 1/12 or 1/15th scale B-25 bomber. The beast went together with SCREWS, not the usual glue. It was 4 feet across! I had one of the see-through P-51 Mustang models, and a Texaco truck large enough to sit on, made of steel. as well as the steel 'Michigan Shovels' and dump truck. Both oversized and solid, too. And there were very cool submarine models, Easy Bake Ovens for the girls.
But don't think this is all just nostalgia...I'm keenly aware of how much 'dreck' Gilligan's Island was, and how I used to love it. Same for Dark Shadows and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It's part past-perception, part current-perception, and I was busy much of the time between 1963 and 1978 taking vacations with my parents (46 states in 15 years), so maybe I should count my blessings and just shut up, no?
Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be. :)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
"Fraudulent evangelism".
This isn't the first time Saturday morning cartoons have "disappeared". There was a time when I was in middle school where none of the three major networks were airing cartoons on saturday morning. I think my local Fox affiliate was playing some agriculture show that lasted all morning too. So we had 0 cartoons. A few months later, our Fox affiliate started broadcasting cartoons and then eventually the big three got involved again.
If the networks can find something else that will produce higher ratings on a Saturday morning, it might be a while before we see Saturday morning cartoons come to every station. However, I would have to imagine that at least one network will find that they can make very high scores with toons.
Offtopic, but helpful maybe...
Web site font sizes can be defined in several different ways, the most popular being pixels or points. Points are preferred, because if you use a high resolution display, the fonts will be the appropriate size. Most browsers can also resize fonts if the given style calls for points, but not pixels. Opera, I believe, can resize pixel-set fonts, but I'm not sure.
At any rate, the moral of the story is that the slashdot css monkey specified the font size in points, whereas Animation World Magazine set their font sizer in pixels, naively assuming that everybody else's computers must look the same as their computers.
I'll take the karma hit to spread useful info. That's why they call me webmasterjoe!
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Simpsons, Futurama, Hank Hill... It's the only block 90 block of TV the whole family watches...
Nine year old programmers are like nine year old artist. They can draw, but it all looks like crap. Making a message box or printing the sum of two numbers is not programming btw, that hardly qualifies as use.
Sure you can. He manages to out-macho Conan and Elric combined, but he can't get laid.
TNN now owns the rights to the franchise and they are making NEW episodes. And get this. They got John Kricfalucci (sp?) to make them. He created those characters to begin with and if any of you remember, those were aduly oriented cartoons. I mean seriously adult. And yet, kids loved it too, mainly because they either ignored the "adult" things, or just didn't get them. Then Nickelodeon kicked Johnboy out and started writing "clean" Ren and Stimpy. And guess what happened then? The ratings dropped like a brick and they ended up selling the franchise. Hooray! Now we can get more of the great wackiness of the J.K. days and get those belly laughs like we used to. Just though you should know.
Don't Ask Questions. I don't know the answers and even if I did I wouldn't tell you.
Reading these posts date me big time! When I was growing up, there were TWO stations and both in Black and White. Who out there remembers Sky King?
I used to be an avid watcher of Saturday Morning Cartoons as a child. Now that I'm "all growed up" I watch cartoons all the time EXCEPT Saturday morning...
Cartoons nowadays are complete crap. I've been complaining about this for a long time... Despite being an adult and working full time, the TV is one of my favorite passtimes. I enjoy sitting down, watching a movie, my favorite TV show, or even my girlfriend's favorite TV show. I still watch cartoons, anime or not, and I am addicted to the Cartoon Network (well, more like was, since they changed the lineup). Now, I don't watch Saturday morning cartoons anymore. It isn't because I work, it isn't because I have something better to do - theres always TiVo or the good old VCR. The reason I don't watch them is they are horrible! I get bored within five minutes of these shows. Creativity is lost, theres no real enjoyment in watching them. The started off with the educational TV (which wasn't entirely bad), but the quality of the cartoons went down. Everyone obviously remembers Tennage Mutant Ninja Turtles... I had the whole collection of toys. My sister doesn't have ANY toys related to cartoons. What about Voltron? I had all of those toys as well. The list goes on... I loved plenty of toons. And while Pokemon became a fad for kids for a while, nothing really stuck. It isn't a good show, there's nothing in the episodes, no great story line, nothing to keep the viewers glued... And thats whats killing the Saturday morning toons. Crappy story lines.
It's all too easy to look at the past with rose colored glasses. Speaking as somebody who grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons in the early sixties, I of course remember all the classic Chuck Jones and Tex Avery stuff. King Sized Canary is possibly the funniest film of all time. However, there was a lot of crap. Heckle and Jeckle and Woody Woodpecker were completely predicta ble and boring. The great cartoons were subversive, because the powers that be didn't pay all that much attention to them.
Those days are gone, but it simply is not true that there aren't any good cartoons these days. But the rise of the TV series cartoon has not served the medium well. Instead of producing cartoons with a choice of characters that serve the story idea, creators must come up with story ideas for the same characters week after week. If you took just the shows from mega series such as Sponge Bob or the Power Puff Girlds that did something interesting with the characters, they'd hold up pretty well with the cartoons of yesteryear. However, since they have to create a fixed number of episodes that meet a certain limiting set of criteria that define the show (the essence of al TV series), these characters have a tendency to outstay their welcome.
The other thing that's happened is that the relationship of merchandising to cartoons is standing on its head. Cartoons serve the merchandising, and as such the suits may no longer be giving the artists the kind of benign neglect they used to. That means the subversiveness and downright surrealism of the old cartoons is much rarer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bdbdbdbdbdbdbdbd
That's All Folks!
Jimmy _______ | | | \__/
Cartoon network shows an hour-long block of Tom & Jerry on Saturday mornings. With a few exceptions, none of the currently-in-production cartoons can compare to T&J. I mean, these cartoons were what started the debates about violent cartoons!
There are also the "salute to WB legends" shows, like the Tex Avery and Chuck Jones shows. Those are fun to watch because they address the cartoons from an academic standpoint and you get to appreciate what was groundbreaking in particular episodes.
One problem I've seen with cartoons these days are the music. Look at cartoons from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's and the music is all classical, or even somtimes jazz. The animation is made to work with the music, too. If you watch the current crop of cartoons, it all sounds like an afterthought - a cheap, uninspired afterthought. Oh, the cast is going to a tropical island? Let's play the show's crappy theme song with steel drums! The end result is a cartoon that hyperactive kids can tolerate, but the shows will be completely unwatchable in ten years. Do you think anybody in ten years is going to want to watch old episodes of 'Ed, Edd, and Eddy?' Old Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons can still make you laugh. Seems like everything today is just Hanna-Barbera - one or two good shows if you dig around, but it's probably not worth all that work.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Remember when the Daily Show used to have the "God Stuff" segment? My favorite was the guy who used to yell at the viewers throughout his show.
I understand that that guy is now a hairdresser (his profession before being a televangelist).
I'm talking about Hong Kong Fooy, Grape Ape, Fat Albert, Ant and the Ardvark, etc.... I'm talking about mid 70s. There was one show, I can remember the name, but it had a shark, and was high comedy based in the water. Does anyone remember the cartoon with the dastardly character and his dog "mutley"? All I remember is that there would be a race in airplanes, cars ,or something.
Rant inside (TM).
I had the misfortune of having to spend this saturday morning sitting in a Tires Plus while they replaced a tire which got damaged a particularly nasty pothole. I brought a book, expecting a wait but they also had a TV which had cartoons on. I spent some time watching it and man, I weep for the kids today. Cartoons are nothing like they were in the 70's and 80's. I think the last truely great cartoon I saw was Gargoyles, in the mid 90's. That and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are the only memorable cartoons from the 90's. The 80's were filled with great shows as were the 70's, though I don't remember much of the 70's given I was born in'76, but a lot of the toons from the 70's were still on in the early 80's.
Anyway, I watched Nick on ABC (was the only channel the damn thing would get) and finally had to turn it off before I vomited all over the screen. Crappy near stick drawings for one show. Another was about kids going to school. I mean, WTF? You spend all week in a school as a kid. The last thing you want to see on saturday morning 'toons is kids going to school! I mean, where is the fancy in cartoons anymore? Pokemon seems to be the limit of that anymore. The rest are about going to school, being politcally correct, or watered down stick drawings for 4 year olds. Even the Smurfs is more appealing than what is on today.
What is really needed is some really good writers and cartoons which have a storyline which evolves over time, not just 30 minute sitcoms for kids. That is what I think would sell and sell well. Yes toys would come with it, but hey, if it helps fund a well done show, I'm all for it. Give kids something to take their minds off this shitty world, don't make them watch cartoons about kids in school.
Blah, rant done.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Without Soul Train or American Bandstand?
Thanks, webmasterjoe.
;)
It -IS- useful information. I hadn't realized that pages could even define a text size in pixels. I learn something every day.
The only cartoons I can stand watching on Saturday morning is Yu-Gi-Oh! and Jackie Chan. Everything else sucks. I remember the really good saturday morning, and in some cases sunday morning cartoons. Like Transformers (the original series) and then Area 51 (name may be off) cartoon that aired on the WB for about five weeks on sunday mornings. Now they try to appeal to an audience of a much lesser age, with cartoons like Pokèmon and the ilk. Such as the cartoon about the wrestling school for children, sorry name slips my mind. There would be more viewers if there were better cartoons with oh I don't know, a plot!?
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
don't forget, Flinstones was the first television show to have two adults sharing a bed. Flintsones may have been "family oriented," but it broke ground on manny levels.
Good, I have your attention. But I'm not going to back down from my subject heading; hear me out before you mod me down to the nether regions.
There is always an alterior motive in TV, especially children television programming. Every cartoon, every second of airtime is optimised to sell a product, an idea, a lifestyle. Child psychologists are hired by toy advertisers to help "hook" kids more effectively. It's manipulation and deception of the worst kind, and on our most precious resource - our future generation. And speaking of resources, it's not just the hyperactive psychobabble that is filling up our childrens heads, it's all the Disney toys and Burger King trinkets that end up in landfills after one hour of use. And who has to deal with it? Our future generation!
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
A lot of people rag on the cartoons of the 80's as being nothing more than thinly guised ads to sell product. You're right, they were. But the important element that you've left out of this is that the kids were more than happy to buy those products since it allowed for a level of interactivity with the show. For example, I watched a lot of Transformers / GI Joe / Thundercats in the 80's and I bought a lot of Transformers / GI Joe / Thundercats toys. So not only did I watch the stuff on TV, I interacted with the shows by recreating my own scenarios and tiny plots with the toys. A very early form of the fanfic, if you will.
Nowadays, however, cartoons are far more different. Sure there are product tie-ins but the toons are more dialogue driven and rarely focus on the overall conflict of good vs. evil. Likewise heroes often take a backseat to more identifiable characters with more realistic qualities. When I was a kid the Autobots used to save children from the evil Decepticons, Now as an adult, the children save the Autobots. I think that says a lot about what cartoons as a whole have evolved into.
But moreover it's that lack of interactivity with current toons that send kids flocking to video games and even in some ways to the Internet more so than the tube. I think kids are becoming conditioned to the fact that TV is a passive medium, you sit in front of it and it entertains you and you walk away. And really that's the entire problem in a nutshell. I mean I remember being a good consumer and buying those toys in the 80's, but I also remember spending hours coming up with my own stories, my own conflicts and my own characters through those toys. I don't think children have that now and it's a shame. Those shows in the 80's spawned interactivity (and creativity for that matter) and that element is gone now. Kids are tough customers, you lose their interest for a second and you've lost them forever.
DigiSquid Design.
I'm glad you mentioned the Boomerang network.
Some of the early post-MGM Hanna-Barbera cartoons shown there are often quite fun to watch despite their limited animation--do you remember Huckleberry Hound, Quickdraw McGraw, and Yogi Bear?
The brain doesn't work like it used to.
I haven't seen any mention of one of my favorites: Battle of the Planets (G-FORCE!). I saw a mention of Voltron...
What was the show with the spaceship that vaguely resembled a submarine/turbine engine... Ugh... I call it senility, but senility exactly when I WOULD remember these things.
Anyhow, to stay on topic - times change, things change, I don't see the big problem. I don't think there's a single specific point that has diminished the Saturday morning cartoon, but probabaly a number of things. Quality is one thing, political correctness another, but more likely the things pointed to in the article are correct - parents are again spending more time with kids, and the truth is that kids can watch cartoons whenever they want. Saturday morning, W.R.T. cartoons, is simply no longer "special".
Stupid sexy Flanders.
They still make good shows, they just don't catch on when competeing with the over marketed lowest common denominator. Shows like Eek the cat, or The Tick, or Invader Zim, were all very clever, and aimed at both children and adults. If anything these cartoons are better than 95% of non-cartoon programming.
Heck, I lived for all of those -- cartoons that got funnier and better as you got older! (I can remember a sense of vague dissatisfaction, even at the age of 7, with the Hanna-Barbera offerings.)
Any show that can come up with a character like the pyromaniac "Stokie the Bear" or base an episode of "Dudley Do-Right" on the theme of THE ODYSSEY has my vote.
Anybody here remember the first run of TETSUWAN ATOM (a.k.a. ASTRO-BOY) in the early 1960s, from the guy who pretty much invented anime as we know it, Osamu Tezuka?
... looks a lot like Wednesday nights but for kids.
So long to real kid-oriented cartoons and hello to kid-versions of adult shows. I spent part of this past Saturday watching TV with my daughters (first graders) and what's big on the morning shows now? A kid version of Survivor. Complete with a dumbed down version of paper/scissors/rock that I supposed was intended to teach some sort of strategic thinking; educational only if one considers out-and-out guessing a kind of ``strategy''.
I wonder what the heck ever happened to real educational TV. When I was a kid there was the ``Discovery'' series (Discovery 67, Discovery 68, etc.), Mr. Wizard, etc. Later on there was another show you could catch on PBS (I think) called something like `Physical Universe' (started out as a lecture but had good illustrative CG graphics to demonstrate the principles being talked about). There was Bronoski's `Ascent of Man', Burke's `Connections', Sagan's `Cosmos', and others. True, those last few aren't exactly kid stuff but at least some kids would find that interesting and I can tell you that my two girls would have found much of them interesting. (Actually, they have seen `Connections' before and thought it was very interesting.) Somebody has already mentioned `Biil Nye the Science Guy' and `Beaker's World' which weren't bad but geared more toward the ADD afflicted to allow kids to really learn very much.
Nowadays, we have Disney hawking `Winnie the Pooh' as educational TV (OK, so they call it `illuminating television'; always good for a belly laugh) and, now, the Survivor clones. At least when I was a kid there were choices that included some educational content. It's gotten to where I think the most important thing that my kids will learn from television is how to turn it off.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I think you're refering to the late 80's. Whereas we are discussing the atri generation here, when the only thing on cable was HBO and an atari was something that on;y your neighbor had. VCR's were also something only other people had. Saturday mornings were the only time that a kid had something worth watching. Unless ofcourse smokey and he bandit happened to be show on tv one nite. TV really only sonsisted of Shooting JR and boring Presidential speeches made in front of horid harvest gold curtains.
really should use that preview button more...
Cartoons were almost ALWAYS marketed with the hopes of selling products (GI Joe toys, etc). Nowadays, most children are more interested in buying videogames, or what not. This is why alot of the popular cartoons are marketing ploys for video games (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, etc).
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
My son plays Little League and goes swimming on weekends, because he can watch better cartoons any time he wants.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
If it hadnt been for such rules, things like "Schoolhouse Rock" would never have been made. that "Bill Nigh" (sp?) show was also good, but was a bit past the time I had anything to learn from it =)
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
What about Big Blue Marble? How else would I have learned about cultures from other countries? Like Menudo in Brazil!?!?!
I can't be bothered to read through all those posts. Has anybody mentioned Multi Coloured Swap Shop, or the magical number 01-811-8055?
My dad worked for the BBC, so I was never allowed to watch TISWAS - or anything from the Other Channel, The One With The Adverts - at home. I sneaked a couple of watchings at other people's houses, but never really liked it.
Then they kept trying to pretend it was a different programme: they introduced different presenters, different sets and different features, but you could tell it was really Multi Coloured Swap Shop. Saturday Superstore, Going Live, Live and Kicking, whatever they chose to call it: they were the same programme really. And Sarah 'helicopter' Greene's 'five star' moment was an all-time classic.
Thing is, kids grow up faster nowadays, so they're already drinking by the time they're teenagers, and therefore too hung over of a Saturday morning to appreciate scary beards.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
what ever happened to those miles and miles of "ice highway" that Iceman used you glide on in "Spiderman and His Amazing Friends"???
did it melt or what?
must have been one friggin' big mess...
For every Schoolhouse Rock (did more to help me learn my times tables than my Dad and his flashcards ever did) and Bill Nye The Science Guy there were atrocities like Kid Power and Captain Planet. No, teachers meddling in the one place kids used to go to UNWIND from school only HURT SatAM. It didn't help.
If you want to see what SatAM cartoons would be if the fsckn child psychologists and the teachers took it over, watch PBS' SatAM programming. Or Noggin. Or the second wave (post-"Rugrats Movie") Rugrats. Boring, boring boring...
There is a reason why Japanese series have almost put the entirety of the animation industry in the United States out of business. Japanese TV doesn't mandate the kind of "educational" content rules that US TV does. I don't know how it survives in Canada, other than by the intervention of the Film Board of Canada and the "Canadian Content" regulations.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I remember saturday mornings from the 70's and 80's. ABC, CBS, and NBC would all have cartoons from about 6am til noon (and then the "afterschool specials" would start.)
I won't pretend that it was all great and there were no marketting tie-ins. I don't remember which came first - He-man action figures or the cartoon. I remember the saturday morning supercade - which was Pacman, Q*bert, Dirk the Daring and other video game tie ins when that was hot. I remember several cartoons based around the video craze at the start of MTV.
But it seems that the commercialization/advertising started to come first. Where He-man/GI Joe could probably stand on it's own, now it seems that if there wasn't a product tie in, the show would have never existed.
I don't know why NBC, CBS, and ABC got out of it. Perhaps they figured they'd make more money selling ads to gillette than mattel. Perhaps with the competition from cable stations digging into other profits, funding these cartoons was no longer profitiable.
I do know that while the old stuff may not have been the greatest (THe Snorks anyone?) the new stuff seems to be even worse. The animation REALLY sucks (oh...I suppose it's just being artistic in a way I don't understand) and I really don't like my girls watching too much of the stuff on Cartoon Network. The disney channel has some good stuff on - though sometimes it does get a little to edutainment like. Rolie Polie Olie is probably one of the best shows on now that reminds me of the old stuff...decent animation, interesting stories (well...as interesting as a show aimed for 3-4 year olds can be)
Oh yeah...my daughters current favorite - The Challenge of the Superfriends DVD I found at Wal-mart, followed by Scooby and Tom and Jerry - guess the old stuff still stands the test of time.
Wow...I rambled...
Isn't the VCR part of the reason? Kids are quite happy to watch the same show many times. VHS and DVD make the network broadcast less valuable.
-Dave
the descent of american television quality into the realm of craptitude we see today is entirely due to the PTA and the AARP - the two most powerful organizations in the US other than the NRA, mostly because the NRA has guns. some of us in the underground plan to put guns in the hands of teachers and retirees and see what happens next...
since it was long ago discovered that kids that watch too much TV are less intelligent and less respectful of their elders than quiet kids that read books, the PTAARP quetly infiltrated the american television indistry, specifically the animation production companies, planting ever increasingly insipid, politically correct and above all boring show concepts into the project pipelines. high-level PTAARP sympathizers at the networks green-lit these projects, diluting the quality of child-oriented televised animation and quietly killing off the spirit of america's cartoon-watching youth.
not being the brightest of the teachers and retirees out there (that segment of the PTAARP already having been recruited by the government for thought-control experiments and school-lunch programs) the plan actually backfired somewhat. rather than turn off the TV and read books, or go outside and enjoy nature on saturday mornings, america's youth adapted to and came to accept the new, milquetoast offerings. rather than breeding a more intelligent, more fit generation of americans, the program instead has been turning out americans more and more accepting of establishment, and less likely to change their habits to conform with a changing enviroment.
some have said that the program was subverted from within by a splinter group of the Young Republicans to just this end
meanwhile, the writers of decent cartoons have abandoned the youth market and instead targeted adults, to the benefit of the growing adult cartoon market, a short-lived market segment, not only because these are the last generation of adults who grew up with quality youth-oriented cartoons, but also because they still spend their leisure time on a couch watching TV instead of exercizing.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
...kids who ought to move with lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee.
What is so sad about this, is that children are being forced to make decisions more frequently and more often before they are ready. One side-effect of this is that the kids might start realizing the arbitrarity of the decisions and get burnt-out, depressed, or dug into a deep hole they can't get out. As an adult, I happily blow off the alternatives, but a kid just looks at the alternatives without fully understanding trade-offs and consequences and picks what they percieve as the best at that time. The culmination of all this is when kids go to colleges "of their choice" without knowing or caring how to pay for them. Ten years after college and still paying the minimum on their loans...maybe, then, they'll "get it". (and, no, this isn't the story of my life, just my observations)
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Just looking at the UK schedule for the up and comming Saturday morning (we have 5 main channels).
BBC1 9am - 12pm = Cartoons and Music
ITV3 9am - 12pm = Cartoons and Music
Ch5 8am - 1pm = Cartoons (mostly CGI)
Sky1 7am - 1pm = Cartoons + WWE
Thank Ghod Cartoon Network has figured out there is such a big audience for Cartoons among adults, although I wish they would put more effort into making cartoons like Rocko that have jokes that are clearly engineered to be equally funny to small children and adults, but for different reasons. I have infinite respect for scriptwriters and animators who can pull that off well.
Not likely as MTV/Viacom owns Nickelodeon and AOL Time Warner owns Cartoon Network.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
When WB decided to get into Laserdiscs, they published their archives.
Included on one was this Bugs Bunny episode where he infuriates an overly-stereotypical Japanese soldier.
After complaints from Japanese people everywhere, it was pulled from further releases.
Hurried though childhood? Throughout history kids starting working and helping out the family as soon as they were able.
Only recently has society retarded the mental growth of kids to keep them stuipd and dependant on their parents as long as possible.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Are you referring to the Old or New testaments? The Old Testament has a lot of historical info, and talks about a different system of faith (the law). Its a pretty scary thing. Some of it doesn't make sense without context, like Jericho for example.
When Jericho fell, (if I remember right) the Israelites were told to take nothing from the city, take no treasure and no slaves. Every man, woman, child, animal, and thing in the city was burned. Damn scary stuff. However, this was supposed to set and example for the Israelites, as other nations gained an easier lifestyle with the riches and slaves of the conquered, the Israelites gained only land to work, and some dead from the battle.
The message in the New Testament is pretty radically different (grace). There are some gender issues, but as far as I can tell, most of these come from the colorings of the apostles at the time, rather than the words of JC.
Now, if you're interpreting everything as literally as possible, then, yeah, it sounds pretty stupid. But then, I don't read it that way. Its not a science textbook, and its not a manual of things to do and things not to do.
I know, don't feed the troll...
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
Saturday morning flash cartoons and sunday morning webcomics. Or at least that's how it seems. Nobody has time to sit down and stare at a tv, putting up with all those stupid commercials when you can just access homestarrunner.com or whatever and get a pleasant short, minus the commercials (but plus the pop ups...)
I don't know how everybody can complain about the cartoons being any better when we were kids. Haven't you tuned in lately?
They are the SAME CARTOONS!!
- He Man
- GI Joe
- Transformers
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Care Bears
- Scooby Doo
- Voltron (aka Power Rangers)
Plus if you count Batman, Superman and The Justice League, they are all FAR better than the old Super Friends and the crappy live action Batman.
We are just going to have to keep importing our cartoons from Japan.
Kids a few years ago were all Pokemon freaks anyways, and now those kids have graduated to be Yu-Gi-Oh freaks.
Not to mention all of the Pokemon clones: Digimon, Food-o-mon??(That food wars one)
And if you want life lessons and good/evil shows, check out Ultimate Muscle.
As for me and my house, we watch Static Shock
I really believe that kids are missing out when it comes to current cartoons. The quality of cartoons has suffered in recent years. Everything is trying to be "one for all" type of entertainment. No show wants to leave any one group out, and I think this is where the quality suffers. Boys and girls are different - and they are entertained by different things. Too many cartoons try to bridge the gap and fail miserably. Hopefully all the "good" cartoons come out on DVD so my kids don't have to miss out on what I got to enjoy.
Just download them using BitTorrent.
The Chuck Jones toons. which included my introductions to classical music; Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig in "Ride of the Valkyries" and Donald Duck in "Swan Lake".
The original Pink Panther SILENT cartoon, which never needed no stinking dialogue!
The badly animated but nicely written Filmation cartoons which included a superior version of Star Trek.
And while not toons, these were part of my weekend staple.
The weekly Abbott and Costello movies on WPIX New York and the Toho Japanese monster flicks with Chiller Theater at night.
Working on the family farm had purpose. Rushing to soccer/ballet has no purpose. There *is* a difference. (Spoken as someone who spent a little time on a farm, and had LOTS of friends who spent lots of time on a farm.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Personally, I put some of the blame on over-commercialization. The goal isn't to create a compelling cartoon, its to create a marketing opportunity. Any more, a cartoon isn't a sucess unless it comes bundled with everything from action figures to its own cereal.
Nobody's mentioned Spongebob, the best new cartoon to come along in a long time. It's great!
No, not for your comment, insightful though it may be. But for your sig. You don't know how many damn people I fight (best friend and Super Genius (and he is one wily fellow, let me tell you!) included) all the damn time! I've never seen a sig I agreed more wholeheartedly with or that even inspired me into action. Congratulations!
Ah Animaniacs...the closest we've been to the classics for quite some time. I originally though Tiny toons was better, but Animaniacs is the best since the original Warner Bros. stuff.
Recipe for classic cartoons...
1. Slapstick comedy...for the kids
2. double entendre...for the adults
Animaniacs had an abundance of both. From the Jerry Lewis references, Mime bashing, wheel if morality, The GoodFeathers...I can go on and on.
They are just great entertainment.
We need more of that.
Sean D.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (or something like that...I'm certain about the "Captain Power" part). Backstory involved machines taking over the world. I'm blanking on all of the details, though.
Alan Zabaro
They weren't on Saturday morning when I was a kid, but I was a fan of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Dudley Dooright, and Underdog.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
That Chiller Theater hand / clamation and music *freaked* me out.
...
am Googling for it now
thanks for the reminder.
S
My kids love Saturday morning on Cartoon Network! At 9 a.m., they stop showing the new crap (they hate this stuff too) and show two hours of classic Looney Tunes and an ahour of classic Tom and Jerry.
With the exception of Pokemon (which is really irritating to me), there are few modern cartoons that my kids will watch, even they recognize the classics as such.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Check out jaywalking yada daba doo.
Start the corporate brainwashing early I guess.
Saturday morning or otherwise...
Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner show (or hour?)
FAT FRIGGIN' ALBERT
Let's not forget the Sid and Marty Croft "LSD" 'toons:
Land of the Lost: How could this one NOT have been created without some form of substance usage?
ELECTRA WOMAN AND DYNA GIRL (My mother could never figure out why I wanted to sit inside at 11 AM and watch them...could it be because Judy Strangis was such a little hottie?!)
Sigmund and the Seamonsters
Far Out Space Nuts
Lidsville
THE BUGALOOS
Hanna Barbera 'toons:
The adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Banana Splits (was this show run on saturday mornings?)
Banana Splits "special" shows:
Gulliver's Travels
Danger Island
Three Musketeers
It's a damn shame that most of this stuff will never be released on DVD or something else...add other shows to this list if you can think of any.
I wouldn't whiz on you if you were on fire.
Chalupa
Flexibility: Today's kids are too busy to sit around for a specific timeslot, but with VHS and DVD, they can watch shows whenever they have a moment. They can even stop partway and resume later. Video games and the internet are also this flexible, and both are currently popular.
Kids want to do grownup stuff. R-rated movies are often designed to appeal to kids, as is parental-advisory music and M-rated video games. Think of The Matrix, Eminem and Grand Theft Auto. If cartoons used to be written for adults, then kids would watch them for that reason. But if cartoons are written for kids, kids will ignore them because they'll feel talked-down to. Anime made for teens or adults has the problem that it's too offensive for a Saturday morning timeslot, but it's not popular enough for an evening timeslot because most American adults assume that all cartoons are childish. So animators have to inform Americans that cool, mature cartoons exist.
...speak for yourselves. I'm watching *Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends* on ABC (ick) Family Channel every Saturday morning, just like I did when I was 7... 'cept its not on NBC and they aren't showing it along with the animated *Incredible Hulk*. Sure, its terrible, but it brings back memories. It was definitely inferior to the solo Spider-Man cartoon from the late 70s, which I found better than the 90s cartoon (boring!)... I hope MTV's upcoming version is better...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Captin Caveman :)
Hong Kong Fooey (sp?)
Instead of getting up early Saturday, we just stay up later on Sunday to watch the Simpsons.
I can remember almost looking forward to going back to school because the networks would have special preview shows where they would announce their summer lineup.
It's just like the prize in the bottom of the cereal box. Seemed better we used to have to walk in the snow both ways to get it.
There's something very wrong with full-grown men who watch childrens' cartoons.
So, if you watch cartoons, are people going to think you're immature, or are they going to question your masculinity? Interesting that you're narrowing it down to one gender here.
I'm 34. I occasionally watch the old Warner Bros cartoons; I love Futurama and seasons 1 through 9 of the Simpsons. My DVD shelf has a whole bunch of computer-animated stuff, including Veggie Tales (despite the fact that I'm basically an atheist, I just can't resist a series that's part Muppets, part Python, and computer-animated, with really funny and catchy music). My boyfriend lumps all these things into the category of "cartoon" and disdains them because cartoons are for kids. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on the couch laughing my head off. As far as I'm concerned, he's missing out on a lot of fun just because he has this preconceived notion that adults aren't supposed to watch anything silly.
i thought this line from the article was a giveaway that it was written by a woman - not a dig in any way, just something to note:
Lizzie McGuire is a live-action Ally McBeal for kids on The Disney Channel and it's a huge hit with girls, and boys oddly enough.
however, it was written by someone named Gerard, which, traditionally, is a male name.
so i have to ask, Gerard, do you remember being a pre-teen/young teenager? we're talking about a show in which the title character, and presumably most of the other main characters, are (A) female, and (B) probably fairly attractive if they're on a TV show, and, if given A and B, probably dressed like little pre-teen whores.
sorry, not whores... too harsh. tramps maybe. sluts. women of negotiable affection.
you know what i mean - all the fashionable girls, and thus their little sisters who don't know any better, are wearing midriff shirts that show their stomachs, lowrider pants that show their asses, and not a lot else. and lots of makeup.
is it any wonder little boys, who very quickly go straight from "girls? yuck!" to "girls? damn!" are tuning in?
offtopic? yes... but one must understand one's target audience...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
You must mean "Jabberjaw" (the shark) and my all-time favorite, "Laff-a-lympics"... Grape Ape, Speed Buggy, Jabberjaw and all those Hanna-Barbera guys were on Laff-a-lympics...
The system has failed you, don't fail yourself. --Billy Bragg
Are you referring to film versions of these or the original writing? I ask because I'd be interested to learn if there was a film of A Wrinkle in Time and if it were any good.
However, if you're referring to the books, AFAIK, Watership Down was not written for children. Weighing in at nearly 1000 pages (paperback), and having some, what is the ephemism? oh, "explicit" violence (the account of the Sandleford Warren is pretty damn gruesome), it was always intended for adult readers. That is not to say it is inappropriate for children. Those children who are up to reading 1000 page allegorical novels about political systems, who don't still get nightmares, are in for a real treat. I read it at the age of about 13, and thought it the single most thrilling thing I'd ever read; I still think it's one of the most thrilling things I've ever read. I strongly recommend this book to GT kids; if you can make it through the first 60 pages, the book will sweep you up and carry you the rest of the way.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I'm an amendment to be, yes an amendment to be...
What they didn't tell you was that happy innocent looking amendment was the DMCA.
SCO to Hell
yeah, nothing is as good as those old cartoon, you know the ones in the 70s.
Then I read that they mean the 80s as old.
that means I'm middle aged.
crap.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
(sound of vomitting, goes on for 5 minutes) ...thanks, I feel a lot better now.
They don't? I thought their purpose was
I'm completely willing to believe I'm badly out of the loop, but aren't those things kids do because they enjoy them? I kept as heavy a performing arts schedule as I could manage, when I was a kid (the limiting factor was my mother's willingness/ability to schlep me around to places.)
Guess what? Until very recently, I kept as heavy a performing arts schedule as I could manage, as an adult. I enjoyed it.
I find all this handwringing about kids' heavy activity levels to be somewhat boggling. As much as I did, it still felt to me like I was kept in a state of enforced boredom; I enjoyed what activities I did get to do mightily, but until HS, they never felt like close to enough.
I grasp that too much of a good thing is not a good thing. But it seems that it's adults who are wailing and gnashing their teeth over kids schedules, not the kids. Or at least, far less frequently the kids. Maybe I'm way off base, but I can't help wondering if it's just that there's a lot of adults who are jealous of what kids get to do, and have a bad case of Sour Grapes.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I think Dick Dastardly and Muttley were on their own eponymous show, and Wacky Races, and Stop the Pidgeon. You can get all that stuff on VHS - just look in the Hanna Barbera section.
Agreed. I don't see what this has to do with my statement though.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I think the critical difference here is that it was YOUR choice to take all that on, NOT your parents decision that you need to do these things.
The same thing applies now. Saturday is my day to sleep in, but often I don't. That's fine as long as it's my choice when I get up and not my wife's or daughter's.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I took your original statement to mean that you were in favor of 'rushing kids through childhood' through soccer, ballet, etc. YOu seemeed to imply (or I misread) that this was an okay substitute and a modern equivalent to working on the farm or the family shop. I was saying that there is a big difference between the two. The traditional work had value, whereas the soccer is 'make work'.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
1. Inculcation of desirable physical traits like strength, coordination and grace
Perhaps. But given the amateurish level of coaching and training, wouldn't these best be served by tossing a ball in the backyard with dad, or playing pickup games?
2. Honing of talent, and intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic self-improvement
Unfortunately, no. Well, not necessarily. First is the problem with amateuristic training. Second is the idea that 'everyone is a winner'. If everyone wins, there's no competition. There's nothing to strive for.
3. Entertainment
That doesn't place it at or above TV or a billion other things. Also, my child's entertainment doesn't really matter to me in the grand scheme of things.
I'm completely willing to believe I'm badly out of the loop, but aren't those things kids do because they enjoy them?
Your willingness to admit you may not know puts you ahead of many parents (likely myself included:) The kids may start in activities through some desire, but not always. And continuing is often upon orders by the parent. There's something to be said for teaching kids to follow through, but there's also serious danger of burnout for these kids. I've seen lots of peers who got burnt out and just couldn't perform in college and RL. My wife was a teacher, and kids who didn't get a break just looked/seemed miserable when the parents weren't around.
Kids need some down time. Look at the week for a school age kid. 30 hours of school per week. Ten hours of homework (and from what I hear, that's incredibly generous. Many places give much more homework.) 5-10 hours of after school activities or daycare, which often features structured activities. Throw in some games and/or recitals on the weekend, and you're getting close to a 60 hour week. That's strenuous on adults. How does that affect an eight year old?
I'm also not sure that all of these activities are any less detrimental to the imagination of young children than television. With so much time spent focused, where is the time to day dream?
But it seems that it's adults who are wailing and gnashing their teeth over kids schedules, not the kids. Or at least, far less frequently the kids. Maybe I'm way off base, but I can't help wondering if it's just that there's a lot of adults who are jealous of what kids get to do, and have a bad case of Sour Grapes.
It's interesting. IMO, the people who are running themselves ragged to have their kids do piano, soccer, ballet, etc, etc, etc. are the ones with sour grapes. They view their own childhoods as 'wasted', and vow not to let their children waste time. The question is, was their childhood 'wasted' because of lack of activities, or something else? I would argue the something else.
In a perfect world, I can see where some of the activities parents force (often, see above;) can result in positive results. In practice, I'm not sure it works that way.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
True story:
Back in the mid to late 70's Dick Van Dyke did a public service announcement that ran during Saturday morning cartoons advising kids "if you ever catch on fire, remember to stop, drop, and roll!". Sure, it's a pretty bizzare topic for a PSA, but as a 7 year-old child I didn't give it a second thought. I also didn't realize that, like the "2 all-beef patty..." ingredients of the Big Mac, this esoteric little bit of information was etched into the hidden recesses of my brain. I never gave it a thought.
Fast forward to Christmas of `98 (IIRC). My wife and I were at a party with a bunch of friends. It was a renaissance-themed party, so we were all dressed in ren faire garb, there was period music and food, the house was lit with candles, etc.
My wife has beautiful hair, and it's very long. No, really. When it's down it's a few inches below her knees. It's simply amazing.
At one point we decided that a group photo was in order. My wife doesn't enjoy having her photo taken, so she volunteered to snap the picture. The rest of us piled onto or around the sofa and she stepped back to take the picture. Unable to get us all into the frame, she leaned back over a low table that was right behind her... and over a candle that was on the table.
From our perspective in front of her the only thing that looked odd was that little bits of light seemed to be appearing behind her, almost like an aura. She took the photo and felt something strange behind her. She turned around to see what was behind her and a collective gasp filled the room as the rest of us saw the surface of her hair on fire!
Time stopped. I have never in my life been more terrified than I was at the sight of the person dearest to me in the world- on fire. Everyone was frozen with panic, and I was incapable of conscious thought- except for that one little thought in the back of my brain.
"STOP DROP AND ROLL!!!" The words came out of my mouth before I realized that I was saying them. Thank God, this was the one (and thus far only) time she did what I said, immediately and without question.
Ladies and gentlemen, "stop drop and roll" works. Aside from her hair she was completely unharmed, and because she reacted so quickly only the surface of her hair was burned (hard to describe). We brushed it out, put a bottle of leave-in conditioner in, shared a good cry, and continued with the evening. The stench of burnt hair lasted for days, but after it was washed and combed the damage was hardly noticeable (except to her, of course). Now, years later, the damage has completely grown out.
I tried to find Mr. Van Dyke's e-mail address so I could send him a personal thank-you for saving her hair, and possibly her life, but never did locate one. I was never a big fan of his movies or TV shows, but I do feel indebted to him.
Oh, the picture came out terribly.
-Cybrex
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Invader Zim hits a few nerves, with broken-glass coated bandsaws.
A couple of others got the "spirit", too.
It's mostly a question of whom the networks let air.
I still don't understand why all those undiscovered talents don't flood the internet with good, different, interesting cartoons.
With a cheap pc + videocam and free software, one or two guys, today, can do what it took a whole studio to do, in the past century.
Most of the interesting stuff I've seen is quite "artsy", and done in Flash.
"Fast foot"? I can't drive 55???
Oh, the link is about the EEEEEVILS of fast food. "Never mind"
Yow! I'm supposed to have a plan?
With the crap cartoons they play on saturday mornings now how can they expect to keep that tradition? If they were still playing the cartoons they had when I was a kid (Tailspin, Tiny Toons, Ducktails, Chip and Dale Adventures) I would *still* be glued to the tv on saturday mornings.
Oh hell no. I'm not in favor of rushing kids though childhood. But you should be a young adult by the time you're 16 (And treated like one).
And my statement was more of a rant agaist people trying to keep kids from growing up.
And I hated after school sports. Small school, I was on a team for every season.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
*Makes an expression*
By 9 year old programmers I'm not refering to kids today making dialog boxes but kids cerca 1972-1983 who wrote whole games on the Commodore 64.
But I can see some of the old "Kids can't code" bies lives today...
Only now you'll accept a 9 year old can actually compile code.
About child artists...
Same is true... if a 9 year old draws well others will clame he didn't draw it at all.
I don't actually exist.
Andy's Gang and Kulka, Fran and Ollie ruled! Winky Dink and writing on the tv with crayons, Rootie Kazootie, et al.
"Plunk you magic planger Froggy! Hiya kids, hiya, hiya!"
I am on the older side of gen X and am wondering why no one reminisces for Superfriends or Laffalympics. I cannot be older than the majority of slashdotters (not that anything is believable here, but still strangely interesting).
.sig .sig Sputnik
It would be a better world if my son could see the Halls of Justice on Sat morning.
My question is: Did anyone besides me get up at like 6:00 AM on Saturday morning to watch the Star Trek animated series back in the '70's? I was such a frickin' nerd I also bought the paperback books that were adapted from the the animated series when I could read them......
/* It's amazing the damage someone with a stunted sense of humor and mod points can do to your karma. */
Lisa: It's one of those campy 70's throwbacks that appeal to Generation X'ers.
Bart: We need another Vietnam to thin out thier ranks a little.
You miss my point. Nobody disagrees with that. We all agree here on what is good vs. bad. The thing I'm wondering is: Which is happening? Is it the parents who are making those decisions? I'm cynical enough to wonder if it might not, instead, be the case that the kids take it on happily themselves, and the people going on about how awful it is for parents to make kids take all that stuff on are... other parents.
After all, it's a common sport for parents who don't support their kids to sneer at parents who do as "pushy". It's not to say there aren't pushy parents, just that there's a hell of a lot of insecure parents who are happy to slander another parent just to make themselves feel better about what they are or aren't providing to their own kids. "Isn't it terrible what Mrs. Jones is doing to little Janey making her take all those ballet classes and chess lessons. What a wonderful parent I am for sparing my child those opportun^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpressures"
When I hear someone say "Oh! Oh! Think of the children!" my cynicism gets turned up to 11.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
Irrelevant, actually. I listed those three items as purposes, not outcomes. As to whether those purposes are attained is obviously contingent upon many things. Furthermore, they are the purposes as to why someone would choose them for themselves, not why a parent would choose them for their child.
Yes, being impelled to continue is bad.I don't know if you're implying here that a parent ordering their child to continue doing something teaches that child to follow through. I have not found that to be true. Quite the opposite. I find it quite shocking how many gifted young people I know who are convinced that "If I weren't made to do it, I wouldn't be able to stick it out" about anything that has to do with self-improvement. Particularly distressing was the seminar at MIT in which I heard a bunch of undergrads express that opinion of themselves.
Surely teaching a child how to persevere is a vital part of their upbringing. I am quite sure I don't know how to do it. But I am also quite sure that forcing a child teaches the child to rely on being forced. It makes children lazy!
At any rate, yes, burn out is a big problem, especially among those whose experience of an activity -- any activity -- is as of a forced march!
Agreed. Of course, I don't consider the problem to be the enrichment activities such as may be lumped under "after school activities"; I consider the problem to be the loads of busywork homework they load kids down with.
Agreed. The other problem I would have were I a child now, with much of the way children's lives are organized today, is that children are required to spend all their time in herds. I am an introverted person, and need quiet solitude to think, compose, write, reflect, etc. I do better learning one-on-one or in small groups. So many enrichment activities -- and all classroom time -- happen in big groups. I studied music one-on-one with a private instructor; I studied art the same way.
No, not in my experience. Those parents I know who seem to always be running around to their kids' activities don't have that attitude at all. They seem to be trying to keep up with the kids -- who seem quite able to say "I don't want to be in that activity".
Of course, one of the issues here is that complaining about the detrimental effects of too many activities gives parents who don't want to support their kids a handy out. They can claim, to themselves if no one else, that they're doing their kids a favor by insisting on the kid not doing activities.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
There's a section headed "The Fiscal Future of Saturday Morning Cartoons", but it doesn't mention Keynes or taxation or anything like that. Perhaps the author thinks fiscal is a clever synonym for financial. It isn't, but what can you expect from someone named after a cucumber salad.
Last post mofos
AJ is so awesome
Maus is hot
Ktrain and gorge ar cool
Linux dave and the pirate owne
Gabe buys mtn dew
In soviet russia...
My TI-99/4A.. I loved that thing... I had to program my own games on it as a kid, cause when my parents bought the thing, they went outta business.... So the only games games I owned was Moon Mine, Parsec, and Defender....
;) , but I quickly grew sick of the other two games, so had to occupy myself with making my own games :) It helped to have an older brother, so we often tried to outdo each other....
Defender never got old
I remember Captain Kool and the Kongs, Sigmund the Sea monster, Liddsville, Thunderbirds, Wacky Racers, H. R. Puffinstuff, etc. All those Sid and Marty Kroft Productions with Witchypoo and Charles Nelson Riley were not really cartoons but they were wrappers around the cartoons. Yogi's Ark, Birdman, Superfriends, spiderfriends, Space Ghost (before the talk show) Banana Splits, Jabberjaw (blatant Scooby Doo rip off), Atom Ant, and lots more.
I have always been happy with my bowl of Cheerios and my saturday morning cartoons. Now 30 years later I am happy to spend the morning with my 2 sons and Kids WB, Jackie Chan, YuGiOh, Pokemon, Batman, Batman Beyond, Superman, Justice League, Static Shock, The Zeta Project, and the upcomming Teen Titans cartoon look interesting, the Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain are quite enjoyable. Over on ABC One Saturday Morning kind of fizzled out, but Recess and Doug were funny enough. On Fox the X-Men: Evolution and another dose of Pokemon make a nice balance.
I hate Transformers Armada although my kids like it and have almost all the toys, I much prefered the CGI Beast Wars and Beast machines incarnations of Transformers.
A few years ago ReBoot was an excellent series on ABC and I expect the occasional movie spinnoff on Cartoon Network.
Courage the Cowardly Dog and Catdog is more fodder my kids like and I don't. I draw the line at any series with 2 animals, 2 stupid Dogs, 2 angry beavers, Ren and Stimpy, Grim and Evil are banned. Samuri Jack, Dexters labratory, and the Powderpuff Girls I find stimulating enough to allow. I actually watch Futurama and Inuyasha and will let them when they are teenagers. I tell them when something is a blatant pitch for merchandizing and I think they are starting to get it. Luckily there are enough creative people out there to counteract the people just trying to push merchandise.
Be selective, vote with your dollar and your remote control.
If you know a Neilson family, watch tv with them and be very critical of their choices.
Hopefully TiVo, ReplayTv, and cable companies are mining the data they collect about what actually gets watched and selling that information, it has to be more accurate than the tiny number of Neilson households.
I'm bummed no one mentioned Freakazoid or Earthworm Jim
Well I've wrestled with reality for thirty five years doctor, and I'm happy to say I finally won out over it.
Yes, I agree that Saturday morning television was a huge part of my childhood, but if kids are watching less TV, is that really all that bad???