Saturday morning cartoon
Saturday morning cartoon is the colloquial term for the animated television programming which was typically scheduled on Saturday mornings on the major American television networks from the 1960s to the 1990s. This genre is often referred to by its critics as "illustrated radio" (a term coined by Chuck Jones), because of its focus on voice performances, music, and sound effects over animation and visual quality.
In the United States, the generally accepted times considered to be Saturday mornings are 8am-12pm Eastern. Most of the stations in Pacific Time generally follow the Central time schedule, which is one hour earlier than Eastern. In addition, 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 cancelled and/or out of production.
Technique
An animated feature film may use 24 different drawings per second of finished film, sometimes even more, if several characters are on the screen simultaneously. Due to lower budgets, Saturday morning cartoons are often produced with a minimum amount of animation drawings, sometimes no more than 3 or 4 per second. In addition, the movements of the characters are often repeated, very limited, or even confined to mouths and eyes only.
Early Saturday morning cartoons
Although the Saturday morning timeslot had always featured a great deal of children's fare before, the idea of commissioning new animated series for broadcast on Saturday mornings really caught on in the mid-1960s, when the networks realized that they could concentrate kids' viewing on that one morning to appeal to advertisers. Furthermore, limited animation, such as that produced by such studios as Filmation Associates and Hanna-Barbera Productions, was economical enough to produce in sufficient quantity to fill the four hour time slot, as compared to live-action programming. The experiment proved successful, and the time slot was filled with profitable programming.
Watchgroup backlash
Parents' lobby groups like Action for Children's Television appeared in the late 1960s. They voiced concerns about the presentation of violence, anti-social attitudes and stereotypes in Saturday morning cartoons. By the 1970s, these groups exercised enough influence that the TV networks felt compelled to lay down more stringent content rules for the animation houses.
Critics have complained that this proceeded to the point where the very depiction of conflict and jeopardy and the basic elements of drama and suspense were severely restricted, and the artists were left with few avenues of expression. The prohibition against the depiction of anti-social elements often prompted conformist stories, such as in the Smurfs series, where almost any individual initiative often resulted in trouble for the group and therefore had to be avoided.
Saturday morning animation programming restricted itself to certain clearly-defined types of shows:
- non-violent superheroes (Super Friends, Spider-Man)
- touring musical groups (Josie and the Pussycats, The Jackson 5ive, Alvin and the Chipmunks; Hammerman, New Kids on the Block)
- secret fantasy folk (Smurfs, The Snorks, Gummi Bears)
- teen life (Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids);
- teen detective shows with funny sidekicks (Scooby-Doo, Jabberjaw, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels)
- animated children's versions of prime time shows ([[Emergency +4]], Punky Brewster, ALF, Star Trek)
- cartoons based on movies (The Real Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Teen Wolf, The Karate Kid, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures, Star Wars: Droids, Star Wars: Ewoks, Return to the Planet of the Apes, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Fantastic Voyage, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beetlejuice, Lilo & Stitch, "Timon and Pumbaa", "MTV's Spider-Man", and "Buzz Lightyear of Star Command")
- animated adaptations of comics and video games (Batman: The Animated Series, The Archie Show, Pac-Man, Saturday Supercade, Captain N: The Game Master, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Swamp Thing, Garfield and Friends, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?)
- animated adaptations of actor in their childhood (Little Rosey); or actors given top billing in the show's title or starring in the top role (Wish Kid, Camp Candy, Mr. T)
- reruns (or sometimes, newly produced episodes) of older prime-time animated shows (The Jetsons, The Flintstones)
- classic theatrical animated shorts, for many years shown complete, but more recently censored for political correctness, and for content deemed inappropriate for young children. (Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry)
In a more constructive direction, the networks were encouraged to create educational spots that endeavoured to use animation for enriching content. Far and away the most successful effort was the Schoolhouse Rock series on ABC, which became a television classic.
Decline
The decline[1] of the timeslot began in the mid 1980s for a variety of reasons, including:
- the rise of first run syndication animated programs, which usually had a greater artistic freedom, and looser standards (not mandated by a network) such as G.I. Joe, Transformers, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. The increasing popularity of imported Japanese animation such as Robotech also contributed to this.
- increasing popularity of home video; this made quality animated productions (like the Walt Disney Company's classic animated features) easily accessible, which encouraged unfavourable comparisons with typical television animation.
- the rise of cable[2] TV channels like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network which provided appealing children's entertainment throughout the week, making Saturday morning timeslots far less important to viewers and advertisers.
Current state of Saturday morning cartoons
While animated production is still present on most broadcast networks on Saturday mornings, it has been noticeably reduced. Because of FCC-mandated regulations that began in the mid-1990s, broadcast stations were forced to program a minimum of three hours of children's educational/informational ("E/I") programming.
To help their affiliates comply with the regulations, broadcast networks began to reorganize their efforts to adhere to the mandates, so its affiliates wouldn't bear the burden of scheduling the shows themselves on their own time. NBC abandoned its Saturday morning cartoon lineup in 1992, replacing it with a Saturday morning edition of The Today Show and added an all live-action teen-oriented block, TNBC, which featured Saved By The Bell, California Dreams, and other teen comedies. Even though the educational content was minimal to nonexistent, NBC labelled all the live-action shows with an E/I rating.
CBS followed NBC's example by producing a Saturday edition of The Early Show in the first two hours of its lineup and an all live-action block of children's programming. The experiment lasted a few months, and CBS brought back their animated CBS Storybreak series.
In 2004, ABC was the last of the broadcast networks to add a Saturday morning edition of their morning news program, Good Morning America in the first hour of its lineup. Prior to that, especially through the 1990s, it was not uncommon for ABC affiliates to preempt part or all of ABC's cartoon lineup with local news programming.
"Netlets" like Fox and The WB carried little or no E/I programming, leaving the responsibility of scheduling the E/I shows to the affiliates themselves.
Units of larger entertainment companies
ABC
By the mid-1990s, broadcast networks were now becoming units of larger entertainment companies. ABC was bought by The Walt Disney Company, who began airing all Disney-made programming by 2001 and cancelled non-Disney made productions, most notably The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. After being purchased by Disney in 1996, ABC began airing their Saturday morning cartoons in a programming block titled Disney's One Saturday Morning before switching to a block of live-action and animated programs titled ABC Kids. Many of the block's shows are produced by Disney and also air on The Disney Channel or Toon Disney.
CBS
CBS was purchased by Viacom in 1999 and began airing Nickelodeon-made programming from 1999 until 2006, a year after Viacom was split in two with Nickelodeon going to Viacom and CBS becoming a part of CBS Corporation. The two parties ended the Nick Jr.-branded block, which was be replaced by the DIC Entertainment-produced KOL's Saturday Morning Secret Slumber Party on CBS in fall 2006. A reimagining of the block, "KEWLopolis", with a greater amount of animation, premiered in fall 2007.
FOX and the WB
From 1990 until 2006, smaller networks like FOX[3] and The WB aired child-friendly programming, both animated and live-action, on weekday afternoons in the hours after most American children were let out of school (outcompeting the syndicated afternoon children's programming on the remaining unaffiliated channels in the process). Several animated series of note, such as Batman: The Animated Series, Eek! The Cat, Bobby's World, and Animaniacs, came out of these afternoon programming blocks, and some later appeared on their networks' Saturday morning programming blocks.
By the 2000s, both FOX and Kids' WB! concentrated their broadcast lineups solely on Saturday mornings. FOX, which ended their weekday block in 2002, airs 4Kids TV (formerly Fox Box, which was previously Fox Kids), a programming block owned and operated by 4Kids Entertainment on Saturday mornings. Kids' WB!, which ended their weekday programming lineups in January 2006, was absorbed into The CW's lineup, but retained the Kids' WB! name with mostly Warner Bros-produced series such as Tom and Jerry Tales, Legion of Super Heroes, The Batman, and a new, stylistically-different Scooby-Doo series, Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue!.
NBC
NBC, which had a partnership with the Discovery Kids network to broadcast the channel's original programming, reentered the Saturday morning arena with new, original programming in September 2006 as part of the qubo "edutainment" partnership, which involves numerous parties, including parent company NBC Universal, Ion Media Networks, Scholastic Press, Nelvana, and Classic Media, all of whom providing the programs for the Saturday morning block.
See also
References
- ^ Six key factors have led to children watching less Saturday morning cartoons: more recreational sports, the introduction of cable and satellite TV, the Internet and video games, a poorer quality of animation, and a greater emphasis on family time. These factors are rather self-explanatory with the exception of the latter: the divorce rate of Americans now stands at 49 percent, and time on the weekends has become more precious for children as many commute between parents' houses. For parents who only have limited access to their children due to either divorce or career advancement, plopping them down in front of the television for five hours on a Saturday morning is no longer a viable option. Among most parents, divorced or not, there is a new emphasis on "quality" time. Consequently, taking one's children to the theater, mall, museum, event, zoo or beach on the weekend is deemed more appropriate to being a "good" parent, than letting kids sit and watch cartoons. To this effect, American society has changed substantially enough over the last two decades to the point where Saturday morning cartoons are less important to our culture.
- ^ Cable and satellite TV have replaced these dated network juggernauts as the home of cartoons. The Disney Channel, Viacom-owned Nickelodeon, and Turner-owned, now AOL Time Warner's Cartoon Network form the new triumvirate of cartoon supremacy. Oddly enough though, the ratings for these three cable channels hardly exceed one million viewers per station on Saturday mornings -- a far cry from the zenith of Saturday morning ratings in the '80s. Why are these channels less successful than their network counterparts were years ago since cable TV is now in the majority of American households? The success of Nickelodeon and the other cablers during the week has led to their own shortcomings on Saturday mornings. That is to say, Nickelodeon and the others are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; there is no draw card for children to watch at any specific time or on any specific day. It is always there! A child who never knew the phenomenon of Saturday morning cartoons sees no reason to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings rather than on Wednesday nights or Sunday afternoons. Nevertheless, according to some studies, when a child sees the color orange, the first word the child associates with that color is "Nickelodeon." Today's children are being raised as brand loyal to Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network's signature checkerboard. These brand loyalties form as early as two years of age.i Needless to say, this brand loyalty demonstrates that despite Nickelodeon's not earning comparable ratings to broadcast networks in the '80s on Saturday mornings, Nickelodeon and the others are doing something right.
- ^ FOX Kids Paved the Road for Nickelodeon's Success According to Lee Gaither, vice president of Saturday morning programs at NBC, "If you go back and look at the growth of Nickelodeon, it owes much to FOX. Most FOX affiliates did not have local news, so FOX Kids was able to go to a six-day-a-week schedule. For the first time, you had a set of kids who had Saturday morning fare six days a week. FOX started to feed an appetite...but it was only two hours a day." Before the FOX Kids weekday lineup in 1991, weekday cartoons existed in the realm of syndication. The difficulty with syndicating any show is that local affiliates determine a show's timeslot. There is no continuity across the country and no way to promote the proceeding show. "FOX Kids' weekday lineup created a single promotional machine," adds Gaither. "FOX Kids came on at the same time across the country and promoted to the next day [and Saturday." Problems for cartoons on broadcast networks stemmed from what began as "promoting to the next show" on FOX. Promoting to the next show transformed into a churning desire in children to see more programming. As Gaither explains, "Kids would watch Power Rangers , then they would flip all over the dial trying to find more content just for them. Nickelodeon benefited because they had Double Dare and other live-action shows. They had a branding voice: 'This is yours. It doesn't belong to your parents.' Consequently, kids found cable in a huge, huge way. Today, 'Saturday morning cartoons' is a phrase that emotionally means nothing to anyone under the age of twenty-five." Brian O'Neal, former manager and vice president of children's programming at CBS, concurs with NBC's Gaither: "The competition from Cartoon Network and Nick changed the programming paradigm for the broadcast networks. It eroded our audience base. Kids discovered that they did not have to settle for programming one day a week. There were shows for them seven days a week." O'Neal also elaborated how even the most successful children's programming could never compete with programming for adults: " Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , at the height of its success, was never even comparable to the average primetime show. One hour of primetime generated the same profit as the entire Saturday morning lineup. As a network, where are you going to put more of your resources to drive your ratings? You're not even going to allocate children's programming in your budget." Since cable TV can program to specific verticals every hour every day, there is no longer any financial reason to keep cartoons and children's programming on broadcast networks.]
| Cartoons on Television |
|---|
| Weekday cartoon | Saturday morning cartoon | Sunday morning cartoon | Prime time cartoon |
| United States Network Television Schedule (Saturday morning) |
| 1960-61 • 1961-62 • 1962-63 • 1963-64 • 1964-65 • 1965-66 • 1966-67 • 1967-68 • 1968-69 • 1969-70 1970-71 • 1971-72 • 1972-73 • 1973-74 • 1974-75 • 1975-76 • 1976-77 • 1977-78 • 1978-79 • 1979-80 1980-81 • 1981-82 • 1982-83 • 1983-84 • 1984-85 • 1985-86 • 1986-87 • 1987-88 • 1988-89 • 1989-90 1990-91 • 1991-92 • 1992-93 • 1993-94 • 1994-95 • 1995-96 • 1996-97 • 1997-98 • 1998-99 • 1999-00 |
External links
- The Disappearance of Saturday Morning
- Saturday morning grid of 1967, year of debut of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man
- TVparty presents the schedules and program profiles for every series the networks broadcast on Saturday Mornings from the mid-Sixties all through the Seventies.
- St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture: Saturday Morning Cartoons
- The Death of Saturday Morning
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