JCC End of an Era: Traditional Saturday Morning Cartoons will end this fall

Haven't watched saturday morning cartoons since Fox ended 2002-3-ish I think.

 

You know what we need to do to celebrate the last?

Have a cartoons party on a saturday morning. It will start at 6 or 7 and end at 1. You can put together a list of the cartoons for a particular day in the 80s and a few extras, maybe some old cartoons as well and then have a party with some friends and or kids who don't know what the magic is like. Of course no coffee but cereal for all.

Make it a sleepover Friday night.

 

That's a fantastic idea, Beezal, I'm sure everyone will be onboard. Now back to the think tank with you, we wouldn't want to waste any of these brilliant ideas.

 

I can only imagine what it would be like to try to entice your own kids to actually do this. The parents or the adults would be on board quick. It would be probably be difficult to get any kids to do this.

KID Can't we just watch the cartoons anytime, we have them on DVD and Nextflix?
Parents, Its not the same. You don't understand. This was before the internet and all your gadgets. This is how we spent our Saturday mornings and it was fun. You get to experience what life was like for us when we were your age.

 

You ain't right, boy.

 

Never was, but that doesn't change who I am. Sometimes my ideas work and sometimes they don't.

 

Which ideas worked?

 

No more derailing the thread about myself. Needless to say it will be an end of an era. No more sugary filled saturday mornings spent in front of the TV. It is really scary to think that our toys that we grew up with on saturday morning have been replaced by the ipad. That is so wrong. Kids need real toys that they can collect and leave all over the house for parents to step on in the morning barefoot.

 

You're right. Kids no longer watch TV or own toys. You're a sharp one.

 

Thanks for proving my point: Beast Wars is late 90s and Prime was this decade. Exactly like I said about cartoons becoming better recently. I was talking about the originals when I said they were actually awful.

And this news, that the CW is going to stop airing cartoons, predates those networks by 30 years? wtf are you talking about? My point is that kids having been watching non-major network(lol the networks still think they matter) produced cartoons for about 30 years.

 

Actually the non major networks produced cartoons for roughly a very short time. Even Disney put all of their programming on prime time. Cartoon Network only started doing it around mid 90s. And no one did more then maybe an hour or two at most. You could say the last 20 years was dedicated to the independants. The majors discontinued with major teen stuff at the same time. CW technically isn't a major network. Just an offshoot that you don't need cable for. Like Fox was back in early 80s. Very little original programming but lots of reruns. In fact Fox ran the odd ball teen cartoons that the majors wouldn't touch anymore in the afternoon or morning. Remember when you could watch cartoons till 9 or 10 and then watch again at 2. That died by the early 2000. Now the programming is gone cause no one cares to invest the money. We are like a civilization that has died out.

 

Do it like how I did: Have them wake up at 5 or 6 AM, to be greeted with this on the television:



and then watch cartoons like Tennessee Tuxedo and Rocky and Bullwinkle, the farm report, and the Bozo show before the regular cartoons came on.

I'll admit, I was a weird child.

 

Hey, hard core Saturday morning cartoon watchers reveled in that. That way they had time to get the cereal and not lose any time watching tv.

 

And you're a weird adult.

 

A little bit of this, but mostly because the FCC created the Education/Information (E/I) rule, which states that broadcast networks have to air a minimum of 3 hours of educational and informative programming for children . After that, they were like, "Why bother?", and pretty much gave up on children's programming, and left if to the cable networks.

I also read an article online that pretty much said that children's programming area at the networks wasn't a prestigious job, and they often felt like they aired it because they had to, not because they wanted to. It kind makes sense in context, because I remember reading a kids' magazine in the late '80s that said NBC wished to reduce or cut out their Saturday morning cartoon block in favor of airing a Saturday version of the Today Show, and when they started pretty much doing that in the early '90s, I thought back on that article and thought, "And so it begins....".

 

Even this was better done in the UK, Murikans. We had

 

Fox in the early eighties? It started in 1985. Once again, your ramblings are divorced from reality.

 

Yes it is. So, can you blame us British for being ********s? I'd suggest not.

 

If anyone grew up in Chicago (and even if you didn't it's still interesting stuff) then here's a great website which has archived samples and snippets from various times in local television history:

http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/]FUZZY[/url] MEMORIES

There are clips of when Marty Robinson used to announce Doctor Who late Sunday nights on WTTW, but there are also some cartoons, Bozo show snippets, and some Star Wars commercials. And for fans of Mad Men, there are old commercials for the former Burger Chef, which played such a role in the last couple of episodes. All sorts of choices under the category search.

 

Being the 90's child that I am, there were (obviously) many different times to which I could watch & enjoy cartoons during my pre-puberty (which occurred some time in '98) childhood (and beyond that of course), specifically because of the proliferation of cable television. Thus, I've never had an exclusive connection to Saturday mornings in regards to cartoons... for me, Saturdays meant Monster Wars (show about monster trucks- this was a very huge thing for me growing up), WWF programming, baseball (shocking!), and I Love Lucy episodes. I played my fair share of Little League baseball too, so many weekends were spent outdoors in that regard.

 

Oh, I definitely remember those. One year (I think it was when they were previewing the first time "Super Friends" was on), I was watching one when our color TV up and died on us. This was back when color sets were very big and very expensive. We couldn't afford a new one or to fix the busted one, so, for years afterwards, our dead color set served as a stand for a much cheaper B&W one, with rabbit ears.

Oh, on a side note, I may have learned more about basic math, grammar and the Constitution from "Schoolhouse Rock" on Saturday mornings than I did in school.

 

I'd watch until the shows were over. Which was by eleven and everyone was up then. I either played in my room or went outdoors. As I grew older, I'd wait until later to either go to my friend's house or they'd come to mine. That's if we didn't go to town to go shopping.

Kids still watch them on Saturday mornings. The ones that are on that they like. But DVD and Netflix have played a part in the decline on the networks.

Well, I already watch stuff on DVD on Saturday mornings, on the weekends that I don't have anything important to do at that time of the day. Hence I watch stuff like this...

The 80's era cartoons did have a mix of good ("The Transformers") and bad ("He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe"). But back then, the focus was more on action and less on complex storytelling. But a lot of those cartoons were designed to sell toys. Even BW and "Prime".

You were only asserting that cable channels is the only thing kids watch. But those three channels only came about in the 80's and 90's. This is about the tradition going back to the late 50's and becoming hugely popular during the 70's and 80's.

Correct. Shows like "Bill Nye: The Science Guy" began filling that niche in the 90's and by 2000, well, we know what happened then. Now all three networks air local news and the national morning shows, before showing educational stuff and infomercials. FOX, WB and the cable shows could get away with more without having to rely on educational segments and even censorship.

 

By the mid to late 80s, they really sucked, anyway. Mighty Orbots was the last great reason to get up on Saturday morning.

The 70's were the Renaissance. The Herculoids and Space Ghost were my required viewing. And whatever Joe and William were recycling that season.