This Is The First Weekend In America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons
Janet Denzel
"Saturday-morning cartoon" is a colloquial term for the original animated series and live-action programming that was typically scheduled on Saturday and Sunday mornings in the United States on the "Big Three" television networks. The genre's popularity had a broad peak from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s; over time it declined, in the face of changing cultural norms, increased competition from formats available at all times, and heavier media regulations.[1][2][3] In the final two decades of the genre's existence, Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were primarily created and aired to meet regulations on children's television programming in the United States, or E/I. Minor television networks, in addition to the non-commercial PBS in some markets, continue to air animated programming on Saturday and Sunday while partially meeting those mandates.[4][5]
In the United States, the generally accepted times for these and other children's programs to air on Saturday mornings were from 8:00 a.m. to approximately 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time Zone. Until the late 1970s, American networks also had a schedule of children's programming on Sunday mornings, though most programs at this time were repeats of Saturday-morning shows that were already out of production.[6][7] In some markets, some shows were pre-empted in favor of syndicated or other types of local programming.[8] Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were largely discontinued in Canada by 2002. In the United States, The CW continued to air non-E/I cartoons as late as 2014; among the "Big Three" traditional major networks, the final non-E/I cartoon to date (Kim Possible) was last aired in 2006. Cable television networks have since then revived the practice of debuting their most popular animated programming on Saturday and Sunday mornings on a sporadic basis.
This Is the First Weekend in America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons
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Some Saturday-morning programs consisted of telecasts of older cartoons made for movie theaters, such as the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, the Tom and Jerry cartoons produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for that studio prior to establishing their own company; the Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle cartoons produced by Paul Terry's Terrytoons, and Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker cartoons (supplied by Universal Pictures). During the 1960s and 1970s, it was not uncommon to have animated shorts produced with both film and television in mind (DePatie-Freleng, established by two former WB employees, was particularly associated with this business model), so that by selling the shorts to theaters, the studios could afford a higher budget than would otherwise be available from television alone, which at the time was still a free medium for the end-user, except for a minority of households that had cable television, then strictly a medium for delivering signals from distant TV stations.[9] Some of these legacy characters later appeared in "new" versions by other producers (Tom and Jerry by Hanna and Barbera for their own company, and later by Filmation; Mighty Mouse by Filmation and later by Ralph Bakshi; Pink Panther and Sons by Hanna-Barbera with Friz Freleng as a consultant).
Cartoons based on advertising material were restricted by the Federal Trade Commission by the late 1960s. A notable example is Linus the Lionhearted, which ran from 1964 to 1969. The characters in the series were lifted from Post cereals and the commercials for each of the cereals utilized an art style identical to the program, which would have made it more difficult for children to distinguish the commercials from the program.
The success of Star Wars toys convinced manufacturers of the enormous profit potential in developing their own intellectual properties to base toys on. Along with the FCC's looser interpretation of programming regulations under President Ronald Reagan, this led to the era of "half-hour toy commercials" that became almost synonymous with 1980s cartoons. The first were Masters of the Universe and G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero in 1983, followed by The Transformers, M.A.S.K., Jem and the Holograms, Thundercats, Silverhawks, Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light, My Little Pony, and others. Defining cartoons of the 1980s that had associated toy lines, but which were not created specifically for the purpose of selling toys, included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which began as an independent comic book series, and The Real Ghostbusters, based on the live-action movie from 1984; both continued to be produced into the 1990s, and in fact, Ninja Turtles lasted so long that most of its episodes were produced and aired in the 1990s, though it is still associated more in the public mind with the 1980s due to major changes in format and tone toward the end of the series run.
The networks were encouraged to create educational spots that endeavored to use animation and/or live-action for enriching content, probably as a compromise between the advocacy groups on the one hand and the networks and producers on the other. The Schoolhouse Rock! series on ABC became a fondly-remembered television classic; ABC also had several other short-form animated featurettes, including Time for Timer and The Bod Squad, that had long runs. Just as notable were CBS's news segments for children, In the News, and NBC's Ask NBC News and One to Grow On, which featured skits of everyday problems with advice from the stars of NBC prime time programs.
The decline of the timeslot somewhat began in the early 1990s for a variety of reasons, most of which were tied to the broader multi-channel transition that affected numerous television genera. Among the direct and indirect factors in the decline of the Saturday morning cartoons:
The decline of Saturday-morning cartoons coincided with a rise in adult animation and a wave of new, creator-driven animation studios, which experienced a revival (much of it on prime time television) in the 1990s, as did animated feature films (see, for example, the Disney Renaissance), as the Saturday-morning cartoons fell out of favor.[23] Fueled by the continued requirement for educational programming, networks continued to carry some cartoons well into the 2000s; by this point, these consisted either of re-purposed reruns from cable or outsourced blocks of cartoons imported from outside the U.S. As the popularity of these blocks continued to decline and no hit shows emerged from them, by the early 2010s networks began an outright phaseout of cartoons, with the major networks opting to fill their educational mandates by commissioning live-action, mostly documentary/human interest series that were relatively less labor-intensive and expensive to produce (and, more importantly for the networks, less restrictive in regard to commercials).[26] Some of the space formerly filled by Saturday-morning cartoons would be occupied by infomercials (on local stations)[27] and expanded coverage of college football on television,[citation needed] both of which greatly expanded as the result of separate government rulings in 1984.
A 1996 Federal Communications Commission mandate, issued in the wake of the Children's Television Act of 1990, requires that stations program a minimum of three hours of "educational and informational" ("E/I") programming per week.
To help their affiliates comply with the regulations, broadcast networks began to reorganize their own efforts to adhere to the mandates, so their affiliates would not bear the burden of scheduling the shows themselves on their own time, thus eliminating the risk of having network product preempted by station efforts to follow the mandates. This almost always meant that the educational programming was placed during the Saturday-morning cartoon block.
NBC abandoned its original Saturday-morning cartoon lineup in 1992, replacing it with a Saturday-morning edition of Today and adding an all live-action teen-oriented block, TNBC, which featured Saved by the Bell, California Dreams and other teen sitcoms. Even though the educational content was minimal to non-existent, NBC labeled all the live-action shows with an E/I rating and provided the legal fiction of a blanket educational summary boilerplate text provided to stations to place in their quarterly educational effort reports to the FCC. Cartoons returned to the network in the fall of 2002, after cable network Discovery Kids (now Discovery Family) won the rights to the block in an auction, beating out other children's television companies (notably Nickelodeon, which recently programmed CBS's Saturday-morning block under the name Nickelodeon on CBS).
CBS followed NBC's lead in 1997 by producing CBS News Saturday Morning for the first two hours of its lineup and an all-live-action block of children's programming. The experiment lasted only a few months, and CBS brought back its animated series CBS Storybreak.
In 2004, ABC was the last of the broadcast networks to add a Saturday-morning edition of its morning news program (in its case, Good Morning America Weekend) in the first hour of its lineup, mainly due to internal affiliate criticism of the lack of network coverage of the February 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, which occurred on a Saturday morning, forcing them to take coverage from other video news agencies (the networks were also feeling pressure from competition with cable news outlets that ran a "24/7" cycle). Prior to that, and particularly in the early 1990s, it was not uncommon for affiliates to preempt part or all of ABC's cartoon lineup with local programming.
Fox carried little or no E/I programming, leaving the responsibility of scheduling the E/I shows to the affiliates themselves (although the network did eventually add daily reruns of The Magic School Bus to meet the E/I mandates from 1998 to 2001). Following the closure of its 4Kids TV block in 2008, Fox would not carry any children's programming at all for five years until the launch of Xploration Station. The WB was far more accommodating to its stations; for several years, the network aired the history-themed Histeria! five days a week, leaving only a half-hour of E/I programs up to the local affiliates to program.
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