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 ...
i never knew Fat Albert was shown live....
In the 1970s I grew up watching H-B cartoons. They were indeed all over the place. And I loved them. Oh, I did watch others like some of the ones you listed. But I guess being just a little child, the weak animation of H-B didnt matter to me at the time.
My Saturday morning TV menu in the early 60’s:
Popeye, Mighty Mouse, Heckle & Jeckle, Sky King, My Friend Flicka, Fury.
And yet the Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons that would’ve influenced his formative mind remained on tv.
Here’s another reason for the murder of cartoons as children’s programming, the government:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E/I
E/I, which stands for “educational and informational” (or “educational and informative”), refers to a type of children’s television programming shown in the United States. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires that every full-service broadcast television station in the U.S. air at minimum at least three hours of these television programs every week to retain their station license. The E/I program requirements were enacted as part of the Children’s Television Act of 1990.
All children’s television programming is subject to limits on the amount of advertising. Stations can air no more than 12 minutes of advertisements each hour on weekdays and 10½ minutes an hour on weekends.
In addition, the FCC also has a very strict policy that an advertisement for a product tie-in for the program being aired is not allowed in any form, or else the entire program will be classified automatically as a violating half-hour program length commercial according to the FCC’s definition, even if one second of a show’s character or reference is seen in an advertisement. The individual station has the responsibility to comply with the standards and regulations, and report instances of it happening within their quarterly children’s programming report, even if the programming is transmitted by a television network.
This has been demonstrated through several incidents where episodes of Pokémon airing on the former Kids’ WB block (which originated on The WB, before moving to The CW) featured references to products such as Eggo waffles, Fruit by the Foot, and the Nintendo Game Boy Nintendo e-Reader accessory mentioning their products having a tie-in to the Pokémon franchise on-air. The FCC has fined individual affiliates of The WB for the violation of the guidelines and upheld the fines on appeal, even though it was the television network which transmitted the content.[5][6]
Meanwhile, promotion for related websites are allowed only under certain circumstances and must specify that the linked site is meant as an advertisement, and must be in compliance with the COPPA Act regarding personal information acquisition for advertisers online for children under thirteen years of age.
...When the FCC announced the new requirements, local stations tried to repackage existing children’s shows as educational and informational, such as Hearst Television distributing Cappelli & Company, a children’s program from its Pittsburgh station WTAE-TV across that station group, while Sinclair Broadcast Group aired (Girl) Scouting Today from WPGH-TV (also based in Pittsburgh) on many of the chain’s stations across the country to meet E/I requirements. The FCC turned down many of the requests. On the other hand, producers of true educational shows suddenly found a new market for their products, and reruns of shows like New Zoo Revue and Big Blue Marble suddenly became available on small-scale independent stations, which normally air religious shows, infomercials and home shopping programs. However, enforcement remains somewhat capricious: KDOC-TV, an independent station in Irvine, California and Fox affiliate WLUK-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin have both been allowed to count reruns of the 1970s television series Little House on the Prairie as an E/I show, due to its historical depiction of frontier life in the 19th century and its connection to the popular elementary-school book series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, though the show was not originally intended for that purpose (WLUK discontinued Little House in September 2013 due to shifts in its weekday schedule). Pax TV’s talent showcases (America’s Most Talented Kids) and animal rescue documentaries (Miracle Pets) were also counted toward the “E/I” requirement, with Pax giving them an unofficial and not binding “rating” of “TV E/I”.[citation needed] More recently, in the late 2000s, the teen-oriented Canadian drama series Degrassi: The Next Generation and Edgemont were sold into U.S. syndication (with stations often omitting certain episodes) to be used to count towards E/I quotas, because of their depiction of teen social issues such as bullying and sexual identity.
Likewise, PBS’s PBS Kids block, Ion Television’s qubo (both the standalone digital multicast channel and program block), and the Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Smile of a Child digital subchannel network feature educational programming throughout their schedules, and those the latter two networks as well as the PBS children’s block display their E/I bugs across most programming, including program promotions and pledge appeals. Because of the large amount of E/I programming seen on PBS stations, which is well over the guidelines in most cases, public television subchannel networks such as Create and World do not carry their own blocks of E/I programming within their main network feeds (this is a similar case with qubo and parent network Ion Television’s other subchannel services, Ion Life and Ion Shop, as well as QVC and the Home Shopping Network, which both lease subchannel space on Ion’s stations).
Many of the Discovery Kids network’s programs also included an E/I bug, and likewise its successor Hub Network uses E/I bugs and program guide metadata, even though the channel is available strictly on cable and satellite, possibly to have the programs stand out in the children’s sections of electronic program guide listings search applications as having E/I content; however some programs, such as My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Littlest Pet Shop and Pound Puppies, have dropped the E/I mark in subsequent seasons to accommodate references and plots which appeal both to children and My Little Pony’s unusually sizeable adult audience. Cable networks are exempt from federal regulations regarding E/I programming, and mainly their contributions which meet E/I have been limited in recent years to the decline of the Cable in the Classroom initiative or selling archive programming through online educational portals.
In the case of the Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) and their affiliates, they eventually replaced their traditional Saturday morning cartoon lineup with E/I-compliant programming, usually by forming a partnership with another company. For example, Discovery Kids originally presented a Saturday morning, E/I-friendly block on NBC from 2002 to 2006. In 2006, parent company NBC Universal along with Ion Television and others formed the multi-platform Qubo to air children’s programs on NBC, Telemundo, and a separate digital subchannel network usually found on the second digital channel of most Ion stations; Qubo was replaced by a time-leased block provided by PBS Kids Sprout called NBC Kids (along with an accompanying Spanish language block on Telemundo called MiTelemundo) in July 2011. In September 2011, ABC replaced its ABC Kids lineup (which by then only featured a limited pool of older episodes of Disney Channel Original Series which had remained unupdated for years) with Litton Entertainment’s Weekend Adventure, which is under a unique syndication agreement with ABC. CBS replaced its block in 2006 with one from DiC Entertainment, which in subsequent years has become a part of Cookie Jar Group, and is later became known as Cookie Jar TV; this block was replaced by another block produced by Litton Entertainment called the CBS Dream Team in September 2013....
I doubt it, many broadcast independents air informercials these days even during daylight hours.
A sad day in America
I guarantee Cartoon Network, Disney, and Disney XD all had cartoons on this morning. And probably quite a few other channels.
None of them are broadcast channels, none of them listen to the FCC.
Cartoon Network programs for dope smoking burnout hipsters, not children.
Will! Mah!
Jane, stop this crazy thing!
Rooby Rooby Roo!
I said they were on in other place. The formerly big 3 (aka the broadcast networks)don’t matter anymore. They can never show another cartoon again and there will be plenty of Saturday morning cartoons, they could go dark tomorrow and there would be plenty of Saturday morning cartoons.
Let’s look at the CN Saturday morning schedule:
http://www.locatetv.com/listings/cartoon-network#11-Oct-2014
Pokemon, Clarence, Amazing World of Gumball, Teen Titans, Scooby Do. Perfectly valid kids stuff. You really need to get over your hipster obsession, every time you mention them in a post, you say something dumb, and factually challenged.
The nannystate has been pushing for the death of children’s cartoons since the 1960s. They are still pushing today.
Just as they are pushing to get sugar out of kids food, get meat out of kids food, get dairy out of kids food.
It’s like the whimpy “smart” cars. Death by a thousand cuts. First get you used to the idea of only using a small car to make little journeys, not travel about independently across the country. Then eventually you decide you don’t need a car after all (at least to own).
The kids don’t like the kale lunches either but they don’t get a say in the matter, their non-parental adult figures do.
Putting it on cable doesn’t change their battle, it just is another sign of victory in their culture war.
Dumbest header ever.
.
As late as the mid-1970s, when during summers I’d visit my grandparents who lived not too far from Houston, there was an independent station that ran a triple-feature of b-westerns every Saturday morning. This included some of the early-to-mid-1930s westerns of Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, Rex Bell, Jack Hoxie, Tim McCoy and such, along with some more typical Roy Rogers fare. I found such items vastly more interesting than the networks’ Saturday morning schedule.
Buck Jones films somehow eluded me in those earlier years. I never saw one of his movies until attending a screening of “Silver Spurs” (1936) at a convention in downtown Hollywood, in which the leading lady co-star of that film (Muriel Evans) attended as a guest. Saw a few more Jones films, and he quickly became my favorite.
If the nanny state has been trying to kill kids cartoons they have failed more miserably at that than anything else. Saturday morning cartoons HAVE NOT DIED. The simply moved to other places. There’s more hours of cartoons on Saturday morning now than in the 60s, because there’s more networks to show them. The reason they’re not on the broadcast networks is because the broadcast networks LOST the competition to CN, Dis, DXD, Discovery Kids, etc etc etc.
Sorry but you’re just plain off in silly paranoid fantasy land. There’s plenty of sugar, meat and dairy in kids diets. Plenty of non-smart cars on the road. And more cartoons on Saturday morning than EVER BEFORE. If you think these things are important REJOICE, you’re winning.
CBS cartoons sucked.
Cartoons have been castrated since the 1970s. By the 2000s they were largely off of NBC altogether.
Same with “afterschool” programming. Apparently salacious talk shows and court programs are edumacational for chil’run.
Whatever. You think this is the SAME America you grew up in? It certainly isn't the one that was envied by other nations.
But who cares if they’re off NBC. It doesn’t matter. There’s tons of kids cartoons on other networks. Love those classic favorite? Great go to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. My favorite after school program was Barney Miller reruns. At least until Nickelodeon showed up with Danger Mouse and Mr Wizard. I’m sure there’s plenty of after school on the cable networks that aim at kids. Once again you’re fretting over a war you’re actually winning, you’re just looking in the wrong place. The broadcast networks don’t matter, they’re dead channels walking. What’s on them does not matter. Heck with the current generation of kids even the cable networks are in trouble, they live life on the stream.
...and oh what heights we’ll hit...
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