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

A little late

[houstonbofh]

After 2 days of discussion I am kinda done with this topic. So much for leading the pack.

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...

What killed it?

[kuzb]

Simple. They made shit and kids didn't want to watch it. They butchered shows so badly and made so many rules that it was impossible to make anything other than shit.

Speaking for myself

[fyngyrz]

I don't think the Internet killed Saturday morning cartoons. I think corporate-inspired churn in pursuit of ever more income pushed out some very lovely and entertaining cartoons in favor of what was, quite frankly, awful junk. Poorly drawn, badly scored, badly scripted, and almost uniformly missing the hilarious innuendo and subtleties that were present in your typical 'toon from the nineteen-fifites and -sixties.

I would *still* be willing to sit down for a morning of road runner, bugs bunny and crew, daffy duck, foghorn leghorn, jetsons, flintstones, pepe le pew, and so on. I would have encouraged my kids to watch. But it all went away, I "encouraged" my kids to ignore the television entirely (with a lock and key), and that's part of the story of how broadcast television completely lost one family. Toons were definitely part of the problem. Between that, and the evolution of news from at least somewhat "this is what's happening" to almost entirely "this is what you should think", broadcast television became exceedingly unwelcome in my home. Cable went soon after.

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:Speaking for myself

[Pseudonym]

I say this as an Australian: All the good cartoons these days seem to be Canadian. Check out Total Drama, Almost Naked Animals, and Kid vs Kat for a few good examples.

Looney Tunes

[p51d007]

Looney Tunes, Bugs, Elmer Road Runner etc...THOSE were cartoons. What happened is the political correctness destroyed them. Speedy Gonzales, nope, making fun of Mexicans, Sylvester, Elmer, nope, makes fun of someone with a speech problem. Then you run into the whole "too violent" problem. Daffy walks into a shotgun blast from Elmer, the Coyote falls off a cliff, hits the ground and an Acme safe falls on him, too violent. Even the reruns the cartoon network use to show have been butchered. They show the coyote at the edge of a cliff, then on the ground a few seconds later. Oh yeah and the video games, crap on tv isn't violent? Political correctness destroyed the Saturday morning cartoon along with instant access streaming, and political correctness is destroying America and the rest of western civilization along with multiculturalism.

Re:Looney Tunes

[mlts]

There is also the fact that cartoons were not obviously just advertisements for products. Yes, there was merchandising... but a Bugs Bunny cartoon stood alone... it wasn't something made to sell a Bugs doll or an Elmer-Fudd styled blunderbuss.

There is also the quality difference. The 1950s backdrops that were painted by hand versus crap where the characters barely move when dialog happens. It is nice to see a mouth move, not a square or triangle flash when a character makes dialog. Mainstream animation is junk for the most part.

The sad thing, there are still quality artists out there. You just don't see their animation work on TV because their work isn't selling something or is part of a merchandising campaign to get kids whining to their parents for yet another made-in-China toy that ends up tossed in the trash in less than a few months.

Re:Looney Tunes

[C0R1D4N]

First off, Speedy Gonzalez is LOVED in Mexico, he's a cultural icon there, not a stereotype (his slower cousin maybe not as well received). Also there was a recent show that featured all the characters and definitely as enjoyable or more enjoyable for adults.

Re:Looney Tunes

[vux984]

Looney Tunes, Bugs, Elmer Road Runner etc...THOSE were cartoons.

And flinstones and jetsons... but while the looney toons violence is timeless... the flintstones humor hasn't aged well.

And Rocket Robin Hood and Hercules were from the same era and were shit.

Point is not everything pre-1970 was good, even if it was the golden age.

But yeah, the 70s and 80s had some hits ... smurfs, transformers, tom and jerry etc... but sure the end of the 80s was pretty bad... Smoggies remains fixed in my mind as the pinnacle of PC schlock.

But it rebounded, those died off, as even kids wouldn't watch them. And lots of 90s cartoons are solid ... from Tiny Toons and Animaniacs to Talespin, Darkwing Duck, The Tick, Dexters Lab....

And there's lots of good shows on today. Gravity Falls, Adventure Time, Phineas and Ferb to name a few...

Political correctness destroyed the Saturday morning cartoon

In a word no. What destroyed the "Saturday Morning Cartoon" is quite simply that the majority of people who want to watch cartoons have cable or satellite with 24 hour cartoon networks. It wasn't the internet or political correctness or streaming.

When I was a kid, saturday morning was about the only block of cartoons I could watch we lived around them in a sense. My kids? Have cartoon network, and ytv... they aren't going to even think to switch it to NBC or something for a 4 hour block once a week...

The internet and streaming, sure just more nails in the coffin, but it was already dead.

And Political correctness? Sure it set cartoons back in the late 80s, but its been 20 years since; and there are cartoons out now that are better than ever.

Re:Looney Tunes

[Anonymous Coward]

There is also the quality difference. The 1950s backdrops that were painted by hand versus crap where the characters barely move when dialog happens.

Do you know what killed the quality animation?

Saturday morning cartoons.

The early cartoons were shown in movies. When they switched to TV, they needed so much more new cartoons that it just wasn't possible to have any quality in the animation anymore.

When you think of 1960s and 1970s Saturday morning cartoons, don't think about the Looney Tunes that were made in the 1940s for movies. Think about Top Cat, Snagglepuss, Lippy the Lion & Hardy Har Har, Magilla Gorilla, Atom Ant, and all the other mass-produced drock from Hanna-Barbera.

Re:Looney Tunes

[CrimsonAvenger]

Which has little to do with the Political Correctness Police in the USA.

If the PC crowd decided that Speedy ought to be offensive to Mexicans, then it WAS offensive to Mexicans (by definition, even if Mexicans enjoyed it thoroughly).....

Re:not quite

[jaymz666]

Except for Game of Throne, and The Walking Dead, and True Blood, and The Good Wife, and Big Bang Theory and a whole host of other shows that somehow still get made and watched.

Re:Well....

[JustOK]

Scrappy Doo had a paw in the downfall too.

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).

Re:Rose Glasses

[mrbester]

So it was fine for you to watch and enjoy them as a child but not for a child today because you subscribe to the ridiculous "imitation" dogma? Are you a violent racist wife-beating asshole or just an asshole?

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.