This is the first Saturday morning with no Saturday morning cartoons on broadcast cartoons. Generations of kids will now grow up not knowing the pleasures of waking up at 6AM loading down with sugar and learning how plucky teenagers with anthropomorphic animals can solve mysteries and play in bands. Thanks to Dave 2000 for posting this sad news in Facebook. http://gizmodo.com/this-is-the-firs...source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow 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. What was your favorite Saturday morning cartoon? Tell us in the comments below. [Reddit; Slashfilm via Engadget]
In the early 80's Saturday morning cartoons were good until I discovered channel 20 had westerns on all morning and basically all day. Smurfs had nothing on Paladin or Josh Randall.
*sigh *The good old days. Yugioh bro? We talking duck tales and street sharks and all kinds of shredded badasses.
It's cool to think of nostalgically. I tell my son about it. But nowadays he just turns on the DVR and there are 200 episodes from 10 different cartoons, ready to play at his whim. That's not even including Netflix and Amazon video that we have. But I'll still have my memories of waking up at 7am to watch cartoons while eating cereal. And then it rolling into WWF. And then into Kung Fu Theather at noon on Fox 26. All the while watching classic Houston commercials like Thunderbolt Transmissions and Mr Norman (Llama Mr. Norman!).
80s Saturday morning cartoon rules!!! <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BKcYGOIJhqo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/glZFi5Rj23c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/bPiZptATdGc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/XZJfknWVIgY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ZaV0Q9Nlb0M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/tClTFRqtcKA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
When you woke up, and a second later realized no school. God that was a good feeling. Cartoons in the morning, finishing up with X-Men. Then I would go out and do something, another thing kids these days don't do.
Yep I remember Kung Fu theater. A typical Saturday morning for me when I was 9 was get loaded up on sugar watching cartoons from 7 to 11 and then watch Kung Fu theater and spend the afternoon trying to recreate the moves from Kung Fu theater in the back yard.
I watched '36th Chamber of Shaolin' and '5 Deadly Venoms' with my 11-year old son just a few weeks ago. For movies made in the 70s, they really hold up very well. We both enjoyed it very much.
Also, parents could drop your ass off at the library and if you had a long enough attention span to just read for eight hours no one would bother or probably even worry about you.
I bet kids go out often more than we think, physical energy doesn't just dissipate and somebody's paying for all these all star elite little league and swim teams.
Yup. Hasn't been a thing for quite a while. First of all: cartoons are on every day now, not just Saturday. There are multiple cable networks that play nothing but cartoons 24-7. Add in the streaming factor and VOD services, and there's no reason for Saturday morning cartoons any more. Let's face it: if people were watching, the networks would keep 'em on the air.
