ch890909With the cancellation of CW’s Vortexx cartoon block, broadcast television has ceased showing cartoons on Saturday Morning.

With it, a cherished memory and ritual vanishes, as technology, economics, and regulations force changes to a way of life.

The decline of Saturday Morning television began in 1992, when NBC began airing a Saturday edition of Today, followed by live action shows aimed at teens.

At the head of the tombstone...In 1990, after years of politicking by Action for Children’s Television, Congress passed the Children’s Television Act of 1990, requiring television stations to broadcast three hours of “educational and informational” children’s programming per week.  (Here’s a listing of what is replacing Vortexx this Fall.)

With that requirement, and the rise of niche cable channels which are exempt from the E/I bug, Saturday Morning programming slowly withered over the next two decades.

Wikipedia lists several causes:

  • The rise of first-run syndicated animated programs…
  • Increasing regulation of children’s programming content … [see above]
  • Station owners that owned a large number of network affiliates…
  • The over reliance on common tropes and clichés.  [TV Tropes has the lowdown.]
  • The rise of cable television networks like Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network …
  • The entrance of more adult-oriented cartoons into the mainstream…
  • Concurrent with their film successes, Walt Disney Television Animation and Warner Bros. Animation also began producing content for television in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Both companies invested far more money into their productions than Saturday morning cartoons had done up until that point, raising the standards much higher than most television animation companies were able to reach.
  • Increased awareness of childhood obesity and lethargy; advocates often targeted Saturday morning cartoons as the culprit.
  • The proliferation of commercial toyline-oriented animated programs in the 1980s also led to advocacy group backlash and a decline in such programming…
  • The increased availability of VHS tapes and later DVDs, Blu-rays, iTunes and videos on the World Wide Web, which, like cable, allowed children to watch their favorite cartoons at any given time.
  • The development and rapid improvement in quality of video games…
  • An increase in children’s participation in Saturday activities outside the home.
  • A 1984 decision legalizing infomercials on American television; profits from Saturday morning infomercials were potentially much more than those from children’s programming. …
  • The 1984 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Oklahoma, which greatly expanded opportunities for college football on television. …
  • Television networks becoming part of larger corporations. These networks included ABC (purchased by the The Walt Disney Company in 1996), CBS (purchased by Viacom in 1999, before splitting in 2005) and The WB (created by Time Warner in 1995, before merging with UPN in 2006 to create The CW). Since the parent companies already owned television animation studios, the networks preferred to air shows from these companies with programming blocks such as “Disney’s One Saturday Morning”, “Nick on CBS” and “Kids’ WB” rather than contracting out independent television animation companies.
  • Many of the same networks that often showed Saturday morning cartoons began airing similar programs on weekday afternoons…
  • The success of live action teen sitcoms, starting with NBC’s Saved by the Bell, which led to the rapid development of more live-action teen programming, with networks slowly squeezing out the cartoons.
  • The gradual loss of most of the American companies which were, at one point, iconic and prolific producers of animated children’s shows. …
  • The 2005 to 2009 decisions by breakfast cereal companies and fast food restaurants to reduce their advertising towards children. …

——————-

Some links from across the web:

Mark Evanier recollects his experience as both a viewer and employee of Saturday Morning cartoons, explaining the lucrative economics of early series, how toy companies

That was often cost-effective and deficit-financing became even more the norm for syndicated shows. Toy companies found it paid off to underwrite the cost of a series that promoted their products. A Mattel or Hasbro could easily sink a few million up front into a show about characters they were marketing to make those characters more famous. Not every time but often enough, having the show out there, five days a week in syndication, would boost toy sales enough to make that a good investment.

With such shows siphoning viewers away from networks, the networks did the logical thing: They stopped paying high license fees for Saturday morning programming. Thereafter, if you wanted to get your production on in one of those time slots on a broadcast network, you had to give it to them for a very low price and make up the rest of your costs elsewhere. Selling it cheap usually meant doing it cheap and there was a change in priorities.

No longer was it all about doing a show that would be a hit on Saturday morning because that alone was no longer enough to make a profit. It was just a way to pay part of the cost of production. You had to have your eye on foreign sales and merchandising. I wasn’t approached a lot to work on such shows because, well, I wasn’t the cheapest talent available. But the times I was asked, the producers made it clear they didn’t care that much if show drew an audience on Saturday morning. That was no longer where the game was.

And of course, since airing cartoons on Saturday mornings became a lot less lucrative, one by one the networks stopped doing it. Which got us to where they are today: They don’t do it at all anymore.

TV Party has a great rundown of the many seasons of Saturday Morning cartoons!

NPR offers an elegy.

Some memories, slightly sugar-coated…

  • In The News, quick two-minute news bites on CBS.

  • School House Rock (My Hero Zero)

  • Levi’s Jeans and Chords

  • Electra Woman and Dyna Girl (and the rest of the Kroft Super Show!)

  • Pee Wee’s Playhouse

  • Thundarr the Barbarian (Gerber, Kirby, Toth, Pasko!)

  • Space Ghost

  • Land of the Lost (A perpetual schedule filler, usually in the summer, along with Super Friends.)

  • Galaxy High (Aimee Brightower, *SIGH*)

  • Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (afterwards, I’d hike two miles, uphill, both ways, sometimes in the snow, to buy comics).

  • Too young to remember the Banana Splits, but wondering who they were as I saw vague images here and there, like a light-switch cover in the late 70s at Montgomery Wards. Which…I can’t find on Google.

  • Also, one-season wonders, which only exist now in Gold Key comics, or the rare lunch box. Like this…
  • Shazam! (I owned a pair of socks when I was six…) (…and the cartoon was pretty good, too!)

  • …and a decade later:

  • Those crazy TV specials shown Friday night, right before the new season.
      • Avery Schreiber and Jack Burns meet Superman and Bugs Bunny in the flesh! 1973

      • Boss Hogg tries to swindle Charles In Charge, 1982

      • ALF Loves A Mystery! 1987

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7P6Fk5PdzI

  • Bronze Age comicbook collectors will remember the two-page advertising spreads featured in superhero comics.  Retrojunk offers a selection found in comics and TV Guide.

wpid-Uncanny_X-Men__37_-_Page_18.jpg

  • Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures; Don’t Touch That Dial (A great satire of American and Japanese animation!)

So, cartoons on television continue, mostly on Cartoon Network and Disney XD. There’s YouTube and Warner Archives, and streaming and downloads. Gone is the joy of uncertain discovery, and unspoilt wonder. But it does make it easier to share!

Part of me wonders if kids will find other distractions, like shown in the satirical and prophetic “Itchy & Scratchy & Marge” from 1990?

And part of me knows that kids will seek out the stuff that’s cool and fun and bad in large quantities, like pre-sweetened breakfast cereal. They’ll laugh uncontrollably, and some of them… well, they’ll make their own cartoons!

For those who want one last sample of just how special Saturdays were when I was younger and life was unscheduled…

We’ll be right back after these messages…

16 COMMENTS

  1. Yeah, today’s kids don’t comprehend the concept of *scheduled* programming in a world of Netflix, Hulu, Apple, Amazon, and a wealth of on-demand content…. all in the palm of their hand.

    It is an era that I fondly remember, but then again… that’s because I’m an old fart at this point. Hahaha!

  2. I saw this reported at another site. Apparently the news broke in May. I wonder why it is only now making the rounds online.

  3. NBC, at the very least, shows a mix of cartoon and puppet-based shows on Saturday mornings http://www.nbc.com/nbc-kids

    Different shows than the ones I watched, of course, but it seems like the same experience. Seems like people are reporting on nothing

  4. @srfan
    CW ended their SM programming last weekend.
    The actual event was what triggered the reporting, not the anticipation way back last Spring.
    @Luigi Hann
    Like the CW, NBC is using another provider to supply the E/I content.
    It’s adults running the show… It’s sandlot baseball vs. Little League. “Some cereal…s’posed to be good for you…”
    Or, for a better analogy, it’s like watching PBS on Saturday Morning. Lilias, Yoga and You…

  5. Vortex was essentially a syndicated block of cartoons anyway. It showed nothing but reruns of things like Spider Man, Dragon Ball and Yu Gi Oh. Local network affiliates still do show cartoons on Saturday mornings. My local NBC station runs Qubo channel cartoons after the Saturday Today show. The other networks show the live action newsy shows.

  6. It is sort of amazing how many people jumped on this story. NBC showed two hours of cartoon yesterday, including a series premiere.

    It can be argued that “traditional” Saturday morning cartoons are gone, but that’s been true for years. Even Vortexx was a block of programming that the CW farmed out to outside programmers.

    The “first Saturday in over fifty years without cartoons” line that a lot of folks have recycled on the internet this weekend isn’t exactly true either. On September 6, 1997, all three broadcast networks pre-empted their Saturday morning line ups to cover the funeral of Princess Diana.

  7. I’m looking at:
    http://www.tvguide.com/Listings/
    for next Saturday, and aside from the E/I programming on CW and NBC, there isn’t any other kids programming. (Well, there are a few cartoon shows on PBS…)

    But gone are the days of networks showing four-five hours of fun, entertaining programming for kids on Saturday Morning.

    Here’s the current schedule:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%9315_United_States_network_television_schedule_(Saturday_morning)

  8. I keep seeing this talked about but looking at TVGuide.com for next Saturday I see on NBC:
    Astroblast
    The Chica Show
    Tree Fu Tom
    LazyTown
    Poppy Cat
    Noodle and Doodle

    Sure it’s not as fun as the Superfriends, Thundarr the Barbarian, Mr. T or the Smurfs, but there is one hold out.

  9. I love yugioh and it’s not on any other channels!!!!! I just want vortexx on every Saturday and not only in the summer

  10. hi im 25 years old and i will tell you all i think its sad that with all the networks we have today that none of them will sign the rights of some of the old cartoons they all bought 20 or 30 years ago so that another public broadcasting channel can keep them a live and let are kids of today see what made us laugh in the mornings and made us happy..and cartoons today are just coughe outs of are cartoons..here are a list of are cartoons..street sharks, extreme dinosaur’s, earthworm jim, tiny toon adventures, animaniacs, x-men animated series, Gargoyles, the new Ghostbusters, The tick, The Hulk, Spiderman, Iron Man, what the hell happened to them all?????

  11. My kids were just commenting/ questioning whythey no longer have their Saturday morning cartoons. I wasn’t aware that the feds, knowing what is best for us all, had a hand in the demise of Saturday morning cartoons. We live out in the sticks and our family has to survive with over the air broadcast progamming. Even if I was willing to pay the high satellite tv rates, I would,no doubt, find the kids glued to YTV or some other like channel 24-7. At least when Satuday morning cartoons ended, we then did our chores and went out to play. As i read the reasons for the demise of the Saturday morning cartoon ritual to them they were devestated. Hey, our and previous generations turned out to be productive members of society, so, why not provide our kids with the same opportunity?
    Hopefully in time, more sober heads will pervail and a long standing Saturday morning ritual will be revived.
    RIP Bugs and friends.

  12. It’s a shame that Sat. Morning Cartoons are thing of the past. I remember being so excited when I woke up on Sat. Morning to go and watch cartoons. Then again when I was a child that was pretty much the only chance you got to watch cartoons. There was no Cartoon Ch. Or Disney type channels. Then again kids may not be missing out. The cartoons they show now days suck compared to what was on in 80’s & early 90’s. I loved Tom & Jerry He-Man G.I. JOE & my all time favorite and I still watch if I catch it on SCOOBY-DOO! I loved that cartoon and always wanted a dog just like Scooby.

  13. I want Saturday morning cartoons on local networks back! It just beats all I’ve ever seen. There is nothing but pure crap on every channel. Why are we forced to pay for cable, Netflix or any of the other pay t v just to see cartoons? Who do I talk to to change this??

  14. That half-remembered tv shoe may have been an episode of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie- see number 6 on Wikipedia

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