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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.
When I was a kid, I thought the cartoons were hilarious and the Christian Evangelists were boring.
Now I think I that the cartoons are boring and the Christian Evangelists are hilarious.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
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?
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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?
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.
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.
Then the university programs would come on for one or two half-hour shows. There'd be lectures on dinosaurs, chemistry, ancient art, archeology, religion, Egyptian architectures, etc...
Then, if I remember correctly, Scooby-Doo would start off the morning line up (the real Scooby-Doo, not that new-age Scrappy crap, and DON'T get me started on Gadzookie...).
Superfriends, Laugh Olympics, and of course the classic Schoolhouse Rock fill-ins...conjunction junction, what's your function?
I never really liked the Smurfs; guess I was starting to outgrow cartoons then. But I never missed an episode of Dungeons and Dragons. Always wanted that bow...
Back then, shows were real. Now we've got Artifical T.V. ... my wife says that Jenna won.
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.
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
I hate Grammar Nazi's
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.
(singing)
I'm an amendment to be, yes an amendment to be, and I'm hopin' that they'll ratify me. There's a lot of flag burners who have got too much freedom. I wanna make it legal for policemen to beat 'em, cause there's limits to our liberties. 'Least I hope and pray that there are, 'cause those liberal freaks go too far.
kid: Well why can't we just make a law against flag burning?
Amendment: Because that law would be unconstitutional.
But if we changed the Constitution...
kid: Then we could make all sorts of crazy laws!
Amendment: Now you're catching on!
Kid: What if people say you're not good enough to be in the Constitution?
Amendment (singing): Then I'll crush all opposition to me, and I'll make Ted Kennedy pay. If he fights back, I'll say that he's gay.
Congressman: Good news, Amendment! They ratified ya! You're in the U.S. Constitution.
Amendment: Oh yeah! Door's open, boys.
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"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.
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.