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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.
Yeah, same here. FoxBox and WB Kids for me. Call me childish if you want, but enjoying cartoons will keep a part of me forever young. Too many people try to grow up too fast these days, throwing away their childhood in exchange of a stressed adulthood...sad isnt it?
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?
I'm currently in the habbit of downloading politically incorrect cartoons off of Gnutella...
Most WWII ones have politically incorrect Japanese or German characters. In other words, they are damn funny, and P2P is really the only way to get them these days.
Unfortunately, it seems that banned-cartoon afficionados never heard of MPEG4, so most are 100+MB MPEG1/2 files and on slow hosts. The quality often leaves something to be desired.
Anyhow, classic cartoons are still aired on Cartoon Network... Not as much as I think they should be, but if you've got a Tivo, you could accumulate quite a few just setting it to record the Chuck Jones/Tex Avery 30min shows. Rip 'em to Divx and pass 'em around on CD and the Internet for the less fortunate.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.
I think you nailed it dead on. The demise of cartoons was when they started writing 'em not for adults, but rather for what they THINK appeals to kids. (Funny how this was concurrent with the big slide in the educational system, and the advent of toys that do the playing FOR the child, but that's another rant.)
This switch forgets that kids live in a world filled with adults, and tho they may not get all the complex jokes, they do recognise when they're being talked down to. And making cartoons "kid-level" takes away the kid's incentive to pay attention so he gets all the nuances. IOW, they become uninteresting, so the kid loses interest. Once that happens, you never get the kid back.
Kids aren't near as stupid as some adults think. Write a good clean cartoon with complex humour that an adult can appreciate, and it'll keep the kids' interest better too.
Survey question: What was your fave cartoon as a kid? and as an adult?
A: Bullwinkle, and A: Bullwinkle. Why? See above.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Not a bad racket if you can pull it off... at least its legal."
Not very ethical however. Its a shame that these people represent believers in Jesus to so many people.
They are like the crackers of hackers. Crackers give hackers a bad name but they are a very small percentage of hackers. Same with greedy televangelists. They give Christianity a bad name, but are a very small percentage of Christians.
Jesus knocked over the tables of the "money changers" in the Temple. He definately does not approve of fraudulent televangelism.
You're forgetting something important. A show that "keeps the kids' interest better" will be cancelled, unless it's also driving toy sales. Obviously, "keeping the kids' interest" is not the primary goal of the people who produce cartoons. Cartoons nowadays are basically just infomercials.