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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 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.
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 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.
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.
My little brother loves Sat. mornings he always wakes up at some un-godly hour (7:00am!?!) to watch Kids WB and FOX - Yu-Gi-Oh, Jackie Chan, Pokemon...
From Article:
My parents are divorced and my brother still loves to watch TV from 7:00 to Noon. I think the "death" of Sat. Morning Cartoons is due to the 24 hour cartoon stations, not divorce and TiVo. As I was growing up I did not have Cartoon Network, Disney and Nickelodeon. The programming for kids was only on Saturday Mornings and for 1-2 hours after I got home from school. So if I wanted to see the only kids shows I would have to have watched on Sat Morning.
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!
> I fought with my sister over whether to watch Garfield and Friends or Teenage Mutant
> Ninja Turtles.
The Saturday-morning cartoons I most easily remember from when I was a kid are *The Smurfs* and those public service type edu-toons the stations were required to run, like the *Schoolhouse Rock* cartoons, as well as the musical advertisements from cheese manufacturers' or beef industry associations...
I also recall that my favorite Saturday-morning show wasn't a cartoon, but rather some show in which a bearded guy would tell stories to a room full of kids. Just like story time in elementary school, only on TV. He'd tell some really gruesome kids' stories though, like the one in which a man fights with some sort of man-beast and cuts a chunk out of its flesh during the fight, and takes it home and cooks it up to serve for his family...
A few years later the arrival of *Saved By the Bell* started to change the landscape of Saturday-morning kids' TV, turning it into a time for kids' versions of sitcoms and other live-character shows instead of so many cartoons. Mmmmm, the crush I had on those *Saved By the Bell* gals when I was a kid...
BTW, for anyone who doesn't know, the classic *Schoolhouse Rock* series is available on a special-edition DVD these days. Great nostalgia.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This may be unrelated, but I just wanna comment that while kids are learning games (and gaining that instinctive reflex action to press the controller buttons), they're not learning something else. 2 hours a day of gaming means 2 hours taken away from something else (maybe like interacting with people).
It may not be obvious now, but after a few years of "2 hours a day" gaming (on a young child's mind!), the kids today may grow up to be totally different adults than we are (I mean as in "viewing the world" differently).
No Saturday morning cartoons (and crappy cartoons all over)... Well, kids have to find entertainment somewhere, and it sure isn't school they're looking into.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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.
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?
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?
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
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'm surprised this thread is not modded higher - until very recently, I got up ay 7 am (or before!) on Saturdays to whatch cartoons with my kid, who is now 7. I know a hell of a lot of people don't dig it, for the both oft-maligned and praised factor in this thread - toy tie-ins - but we watched the freaking hell out of the first three seasons of Digimon. Totally kickass. Then you had in the last couple years these crazy cartoons like Fighting Foodons - not only was that hella f***ed up but also pretty damn funny.
Now, Digimon got re-angled at a younger audience, but the risky cartoons (not risqué, risky - too weird to get popular) have all been cancelled and there's just nothing there. Makes me really sad - I LOVE saturday morning for cartoons, just any cartoons. Spoon up some sugar bombs with the kid before mom wakes up - hell, maybe even wake and bake before I wake the boy up - and watch the hell out of four hours of cartoons.
Also, I agree with other posters that toy tie-ins are totally important! Yes, it's a scam to take your money as a parent, but it rocks to connect with both the cartoon and the kids by having the digivices, the action figures, etc. - it gives you a whole mythology to explore early creativity, etc. I guess in the new family-values world that mythology is provided by religion, but not in my house, bub.
F*** sunday and church, my son and I want cartoons back on track.
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.
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.
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!
I am 36, which means I remember Cartoons starting when I was 5 in 1971, up to when I left home at 19 and no longer had younger brothers and sisters watching them.
No one hear has mentioned Boomerang, the Cartoon Network spin-off which showcases Hanna-Barbara cartoons from 1958 to 1985.
Yes, now seen as an adult, some of the shows I thought were cool, are, well, junk. However, some things still hold up well. Like Johnny Quest
Also no one has mentioned such Jay Ward classics as Rocky and Bullwinkle. A show written for kids, with dialog for the adults and humor that cut to the heart of the cold war.
I remember back in the 70's when the networks would have a Friday night where they would show off their new Saturday morning linuep. One of the things we would look forward to after school started up again in September is seeing what new cartoons would be on.
Inspector Gadget and Robotech were worth watching. At 18, I grew tired of the He-Man,GI Joe tie-ins. They had enough bullets flying around to call it world war 3, but no one ever dies, They can't die, K-Mart had 100 units of each figure on the shelf, killing of the character would have been bad business.
Yes, the quality of the animation is terrible now days. There are a few modern gems. I find Ren and Stimpy funny and pretty incorrect.
I would have to agree that most cartoons are not very good, because they are not witty and there is no adult humor in them, or that they are so PC. Let's dialog about our feelings. The Simpsons has not been on so long because they dialog about their feelings, it's because they take no prisoners.
It's pretty sad realy, even back in the 70's most of the great cartoons had been made in the 60's.
vi +
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
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
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
You never talked to anyone about playing games? You never went over to a friend's house to play something cool that they owned and you didn't? No time spent trading tricks, tips, codes, etc. ?
Like many forms of entertainment there is a cultural basis established with it and people will interact due to that shared culture. Look at the internet, people run websits about games, get involved in communities over them, play games with other people, form clans, and even lasting friendships. I know at least one person longer than any human I am currently in contact with outside of my family due to a website we worked on... the internet keeps friendships going during the transience of the late teens and twenties.
Maybe I should trash on vapid, time-wasting hobbies like fishing, reading, cycling, or sports. I mean, hell... what good are sports? All you do is gain skill at moving a silly ball around an artificial enviroment and perhaps some physical benefits. It's a shame that all they're learning about is the sport they engage in and precious little else.
My apologies, but really. When you look at it almost any hobby is insular to a point and tends to teach little else but the hobby itself and perhaps a few things related to it. I also find it odd when people mention reading as being significantly better than television or video games or such. Yes, reading is a valuable skill (I read voraciously now and always have and tend to notice the effect it's had on my vocabulary as well as reading level and other such skills) but a child (or adult for that matter) can read total crap and gain very little just as they can play shitty games or watch terrible television programs and get the same value out of it.
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.
There's an excellent Onion article that I feel addresses this point rather well: "Stoner Uncle All The Kids' Favorite". If you cut it down to the essential element children enjoy people who aren't uptight and can still bother to enjoy themselves. If you were used to the idea of your parents enjoying the same things you did then it might not seem so odd. I recall in particular a friend's father who played Nintendo with him as well and wishing that my father was that cool. My mother having been admonished after staying up all night one time (shortly after getting it and never again) playing her way through Gyromite probably didn't help though.
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.
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).
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've always wondered how the "divorce rate" is measured. It always seems strangely high to me because it just doesn't add up anecdotally.
Is it simply a count of divorces per marriages in a particular year? If so, doesn't that discount marriages that last for a long time?
JoAnn
Yeah, same here. FoxBox and WB Kids for me.
Yu-Gi-Ohhhhhh!!!!!
Too many people try to grow up too fast these days, throwing away their childhood in exchange of a stressed adulthood.
Here's something someone e-mailed to me a little over 3 years ago. It fits here. (I didn't write it, and neither did the person who sent it to me. I don't know who the author is and don't feel like google'ing to find out.)
My Adulthood Resignation:
I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult.
I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of a 6 year-old
again.
I want to go to McDonald's and think that it's a four-star restaurant.
I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make a sidewalk with
rocks.
I want to think M&M's are better than money because you can eat them.
I want to lie under a big oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends
on a hot summer day.
I want to return to a time when life was simple. When all you knew were
colors, multiplication tables and nursery rhymes, but that didn't bother you,
because you didn't know what you didn't know and you didn't care.
All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of all the
things that should make you worried or upset.
I want to think the world is fair. That everyone is honest and good.
I want to believe that anything is possible. I want to be oblivious to the
complexities of life and be overly excited by the little things again.
I want to live simple again. I don't want my day to consist of computer
crashes, mountains of paperwork, depressing news, how to survive more days in
the month than there is money in the bank, doctor bills, gossip, illness, and
loss of loved ones.
I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice,
peace, dreams, the imagination, mankind, and making angels in the snow.
So . . . here's my checkbook, my car-keys, and my credit card bills!
I am officially resigning from adulthood. And if you want to discuss this
further, you'll have to catch me first, 'cause
"TAG! You're it." !!!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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
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.
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
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