Posted on 10/04/2014 10:01:13 AM PDT by lowbridge
Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation's home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid's weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find any animation on broadcast this morning. It's the end of an era.
Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week,where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you'll instead find "One Magnificent Morning," a block of live-action educational programming.
It's the end of an era, but it's been a long time coming: NBC ditched Saturday morning cartoons in 1992, CBS followed suit not long after, and ABC lost its animated weekend mornings in 2004. The CW, a lower-tier broadcast network, was the last holdout in a game that the Big 3 left long ago.
What killed Saturday morning cartoons? Cable, streaming, and the FCC.
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
“. . . this is it, we’ll hit the heights . . .”
But what percentage of America is dependent solely on over the air broadcasts? This means far less now than it would have several decades ago.
“On with the show, this is it!”
Good ol’ non PC Loony Toons. I was at the age when they were phasing in all the PC captain planet crap and didn’t much care for it. I wanted to see how Bugs outwitted Sam and how many times Wylie Coyote blew himself up. Now I imagine no kids wanted to sit around and be lectured how they are destroying the planet. Besides. The computer games are way more cool than some boring cartoon.
Oh Mighty Isis
Even when I was a little kid I thought the story line and dialog and animation and sound effects in most cartoons were infantile.
The only cartoons I recall enjoying were “Jonny Quest,” which had lifelike animation and interesting plots, and Mr. Peabody and Sherman and the WABAC Machine, because the idea of a time machine and re-visiting historical events in person seemed incredibly exciting to me.
I used to spend my Saturday mornings begging my brothers and my couch potato friends to go out and play baseball or football.
A rainy Saturday was a death sentence of total boredom for me until various sports events came on in the afternoon.
The Left took over cartoons and began trying to brainwash children with globalist warming and homos, etc. Parents just turn it off. Like everything else the Left touches - it dies.
Good one.
Even as a kid, I found plenty of B.S. in Captain Planet, if you’re talking about the 1990s, then that’s te time I enjoyed for the sake of Pinky and the Brain. Even as an adult, I watch it to laugh at all the ingenious political satire about the incompetence of politicians, or about therapy with Jimmy Carter, or about then president Billy Jeff Clinton being clueless about how to handle things going wrong in the universe of Pinky and the Brain. That and at least as a kid, and a preteen the 1990s Batman an Superman cartoons rocked.
Even as a kid, I used to find a lot of the Saturday morning fare pretty cheesey, and always wondered why the cartoons weren’t as good as the daily rerun offerings of old Looney Tunes, Heckle and Jekyll, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, and such, which always seemed more lively, more vibrant.
In a similar vein, I also was more apt (when possible) to drop the Saturday cartoon fare in favor of old Tarzan or Jungle Jim movies. Or Abbott and Costello or the Bowery Boys. Or reruns of Lone Ranger, Sergeant Preston, Roy Rogers, or Fury. I found that kind of stuff a bit more to my tastes.
But there was nonetheless something relaxing and pleasant about the whole kid-centric Saturday morning tv world. I remember a lot of goofy nonsense. Like some show about a dog on the lam, a la “The Fugitive,” called “Run, Joe, Run.” Or, what was that thing with Jim Nabors and Ruth Buzzi... “The Lost Saucer?” Plus strange cartoon variations like having “The Partridge Family” in space like the Jetsons. Weird, wacky stuff.
Liberalism.
PC attacked "violence" in Tom & Jerry and Bugs & Daffy cartoons starting in the 1960s. By the 1970s ACT (Action for Children's Television) had worked over the story development sessions. The woman behind it was forced to watch the pablum and said that it may be boring but at least it wasn't offensive.
SeeBS tried doing "news breaks" (IN THE NEWS) in the 1970s to propagandize to the growing chil'run.
By the 1980s, toy companies created programming up around their wares (rather than the other way around).
Then NBC started to make s(h)itcoms aimed at teens and pre-teens since there were better rerun syndication opportunities for live-action programming than animated shows.
Eventually Today added Saturday to their lineup (because kids SO much want to watch grownup shows and grownups SO much want to wake up at 7am on Saturdays to watch the lib-news infotainment they see all week long).
It's been winnowing down for awhile.
And the war on sugar cereals may have been the death blow.
This is not the country I grew up in.
I think some variation of Scooby Doo was on every season since it debuted in the late 1960s.
I loved it. Bullwinkle, Looney Tunes, but most of all Johnny Quest.
The Flintsones were great too, but they were an evening family series. Like the Simpsons were much later. When Wilma was ‘expecting’ it made the cover of TV Guide.
My parents discouraged me from sitting too close to the tv. "It's bad for your eyes".
Growing up they encouraged me to get a job working with computers. I spent 8 hours a day a couple feet away from a personal "set" on my desk and I HAD to look at it to do my job.
The two cartoons you cite were night time programs until they went into rerun.
Good riddance.
They were produced on a theatrical budget.
Hanna-Barbera and Paul Terry produced low-cost animation for television in the 1960s. Jay Ward joined in. Even the Warner Brothers cartoon footage (mostly to host the segments) was done on a shoestring budget in the 1960s.
The culture isn't so happy to see kids these days. Pushes them to grow up too soon and then stay in a latent adolescent stage (a monied consumer) for a couple decades.
Disney has a kids channel. So does Viacom. They are not pro-family corporations.
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