This Is the First Weekend in America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons

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This Is the First Weekend in America With No Saturday Morning Cartoons


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. In the 1990s, the FCC began more strictly enforcing its rule requiring broadcast networks to provide a minimum of three hours of "educational" programming every week. Networks afraid of messing with their prime-time slots found it easiest to cram this required programming in the weekend morning slot. The actual educational content of this live-action programming is sometimes debatable, but it meets the letter of the law.

But more importantly, with hundreds of cable and satellite channels to choose from that don't have to abide the FCC's guidelines, whippersnappers kids these days can get their animation fix any day of the week. With the rise of cable and satellite, advertisers no longer had to cram all their kid-aimed commercials into the four-hour Saturday morning block. When the money left Saturday mornings, so did the cartoons.

Add in mobile streaming from Netflix, Hulu, and the like, and you'll realize that the spoiled brats we're raising today don't even need to dash to the TV in time to catch the opening credits. They can just watch whatever, whenever. Sheesh.

Still, there's something a little hollow about the notion that we woke up this morning to an America bereft of broadcast 'toons. I guess we all had to grow up sometime.

In memoriam...

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and the GOAT
 
I thought I'd be upset about this, but I truly don't care
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I barely watch TV as it is; and folks acting like there aren't cable networks that play cartoons 24/7.

It's not 1998 anymore man
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. If y'all wanna watch Animanics that bad, then download it
 
How could you forget Carmen Sandiego and darkwing duck and Bobby world
 
I just poured a little out for my childhood

favorite of all time was the Ghostbusters Christmas episode "past, present and future" where they do the Scrooge story
 
I thought I'd be upset about this, but I truly don't care :lol:


I barely watch TV as it is; and folks acting like there aren't cable networks that play cartoons 24/7.


It's not 1998 anymore man :lol: . If y'all wanna watch Animanics that bad, then download it

Who are you, the dream killer :lol: :lol:?
 
don't really affect me personally bc i barely have time to keep up w/ tv but its a shame my kids will never experience anything as dope as Kids WB or Fox Kids.

I used to love the marvel shows, the bruce timm DC shows and Power Rangers.​
 
Who are you, the dream killer
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****** acting like they all of a sudden realized that Doug is no longer on the air. The article itself states that most other networks stopped with the Saturday lineup 10 years ago
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. Or like children don't watch cartoons anymore. I have 3 brothers under 13, and two nieces under ten. Rest assured that kids still watch cartoons--just not the ones from 1995.
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Like bruh gone with that nostalgia mess.
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I mean these kids have nickelodeon and cartoonetwork so who cares honestly
 
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I remember waking up as a kid, sneaking into the family room, turning the tv on as low as I could so I could watch cartoons...then proceed to the kitchen and poor a big *** bowl of some sugarized cereal.

A shame my kids will wake up and probably try to steal my iPad to watch something.
 
Saturday mornings were a ritual for many of us. RIP FoxKids and KidsWB.
Bruh! Foxkids and KidsWB been dead since like 04!
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"The screens that children are watching animated tomfoolery on are smaller and more portable, what a shame. Children are consuming cartoons on tablets instead of televisions because televisions are dead technology. How horrid. I feel so sorry for this generation"
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Ya'll are the 2014 version of old folks from the 50s who wanted their kids listening to radio instead of watching TV
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Never had cable growing up sister day morning cartoons were appreciated.
Also after school when there were cartoons and then ended at 5pm every day :frown:
 
Sign of the times.

Basic television cartoons were clutch when a lil bruh such as myself didn't have cable in the household :lol:
 
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