The Era of Saturday Morning Cartoons Is Dead

An anonymous reader writes Gizmodo published an article on Saturday pointing out that, with The CW having aired its last episodes of Vortexx cartoons last weekend, this is the first weekend in the United States with no Saturday morning cartoons playing on national broadcast stations. NBC stopped airing Saturday morning cartoons in 1992, CBS stopped shortly after, and ABC followed suit in 2004. Gizmodo failed to take into account the Public Broadcast Station (PBS), but during an age of instant online media access...and cable...the oversight is understandable because everyone has already moved on. TV is dead. Long live the Internet.

Comments

An end of an era...

[SternisheFan]

I was born in '59, basically raised on TV. In fact I was my family's walking TV Guide. Cartoons then were mostly the repeats of what were shown in theaters. Heckle & Jeckle cartoons were strange, Bugs Bunny 'toons were un-uncensored, and U.S. militarily bent. Tom & Jerry's violence would never be shown today, too much violence in them. A lot of the gags when those cartoons were made then tried to entertain the kids and the adults, with double entendres that would never be allowed to be shown to today's kids. Somehow, we survived.

I can remember turning on the TV early Sunday morning, before anyone else in the house was awake, and after the early morning test pattern went by, Davey & Goliath would fill my mind with 'magical images' of a wondrous, magical, moral world. It was a very nice time to grow up in, at least until the grownups woke up, but I digress.

R.I.P., Saturday morning cartoons. I guess it's all real news for the kids of today...

Re:Speaking for myself

[witherstaff]

I've been happy with Phineas and Ferb. Sure it's Disney, still it's just oddball enough to make it worth watching. The main characters are engineers finally something neater than Handy Smurf or the doozers.

Re:Speaking for myself

[Dahamma]

Why does everyone keep using the Flintstones as an example of (good or bad) Saturday morning cartoons!?

Flintstones was a prime time ABC show in the early 1960's. If you think of it in *that* context is was a trend-setting and brilliant forerunner to the current (and mostly over the hill) prime time family-unit cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy...

Re:not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. As someone with 12 years in the industry (why I am posting anonymously) it isn't that people aren't watching TV. People watch loads of TV, and if you want to watch cartoons on saturday morning you can. You can watch one type on Nick, another type on Disney, another type on Cartoon Network and... the issue is that the households with kids who decide not to get cable aren't large enough now to justify the expense vs profit.

There are two things going on here:

1. Profit-seeking.
This is cost/revenue stuff. If you can get $5 million for 10 million viewers with production costs of $4 million, you've just made $1 million. If you can get the same viewership while spending $1.5 million on cheaper programming, you've just made $3.5 million. And remember, these types of numbers aren't just about total viewers, you get much better ad prices for different demographics... an example might be The Office, which never had spectacular ratings yet the ratings it did have skewed towards affluent and younger. They could license cartoons instead of paying to have them made, but have decided they make more running other stuff.

2. Market fragmentation.

There will never be another Cheers, where 50-75% of the country watched the finale, or where everyone at work the next day had watched last night. They still watch boatloads of TV, they simply have 180+ channels to do it on hence why niche (and yes, cheaper) programming is a valid way to focus *unless* you are a network. Everyone wants as many viewers as possible, in the most desired-demos possible... but due to fragmentation, you can still win the night by targeting a specific niche, whether ethnicity or class or gender (gender, being 50/50, is often the better bet).

Iron Curtain

[SharpFang]

If you think the cartoons from 70s were crap, that means the Iron Curtain worked well, "protecting" the west from any positive imagery from the Eastern Bloc.

You should really watch some toons made in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union. Dozens of excellent, funny, well-animated toons that were friendly, didn't promote violence, and were fun to watch even for adults. Reksio, Wolf and Hare (Nu pogodi!), Krteek, and lots of other titles that would leave Hana Barbera in the dust and could easily compete with Disney's shorts - if only given a chance.

Re:Rose Glasses

[TuringTest]

While I enjoyed those older cartoons as a child, now, as an adult I can totally see why they are no longer screening. They were rife with racism, violence, sexism and other crap that I wouldn't wan pumped directly into my child's brain.

On the other hand, you watched them and grew to know it as crap. Your children, not being exposed, will not learn to recognize it, and as adults they may be more likely to fall prey to it.

There's something to be said about playing with risky or shameful behaviors in safe environments - it's the natural way for learning to face the darkest aspects of life.