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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....