THE DEATH OF SATURDAY
MORNING CARTOONS
If you grew up in North America in the past few decades, then you probably spent your Saturday mornings watching cartoons on TV. Today’s kids don’t get to engage in that ritual…and here’s why.
HEY, KIDS!
For decades, Saturday mornings were a time-honored tradition for millions of children. They’d rise at 7:00 a.m. or so, pour themselves a big bowl of sugar-coated cereal, and plop down in front of the TV for several hours to watch nonstop cartoons on the three (and later, four) broadcast television channels. Why Saturday morning? Well, they were cartoons, and kids have always loved cartoons, but that was the only time the networks put aside just for that age group—showcasing hours of programs like The Smurfs, The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show, Scooby-Doo, Roger Ramjet, Muppet Babies, What’s New, Mr. Magoo?, The Care Bears, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Atom Ant, Heathcliff and Dingbat, King Leonardo and his Short Subjects, Laff-A-Lympics, Super Friends, Dungeons and Dragons, and whatever else was on.
Viewership for Saturday morning cartoons peaked in the 1970s and ’80s, and then started to dwindle…until the programming block disappeared from all the big networks entirely in the 2010s. What caused the demise of Saturday morning cartoons?
WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
Almost since the widespread adoption of television in the 1950s, parents and educators worried about the effect that watching television (and absorbing ads) was having on children. Peggy Charren formed a watchdog group in 1968 called Action for Children’s Television, which pressured the industry to provide educational TV for children. The group gained national prominence in the 1980s, when kid-targeted programming consisted primarily of shows like G.I. Joe, Transformers, and My Little Pony—cartoons produced to sell toy lines, with ad space sold to toy makers, fast-food restaurants, and cereal manufacturers.
There were educational programs on the air, but both ACT and FCC chairman Mark Fowler noticed that the TV networks were trying to bury them. In 1981, for example, ABC canceled its long-running weekend series Animals, Animals, Animals, and CBS shortened Captain Kangaroo from an hour daily broadcast to a half-hour, and then moved it to Saturday. Wholesome content for children was being replaced by the superficial, commercial-driven programming the networks put up on Saturday mornings.
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It became such a part of the public conversation—and with ACT’s heavy lobbying of lawmakers—that in 1990 Congress passed the Children’s Television Act. Going into effect on October 1, 1991, it mandated that ad time during children’s programming be limited to five minutes per half hour, and it banned ads for tie-in products on related shows. In other words, networks couldn’t advertise He-Man toys during airings of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. So not only were there three fewer minutes of advertising every half-hour (which translates to millions in lost revenue), ad time couldn’t be used to advertise the products that companies most wanted to advertise to their captive audience of children.
Further changes to the law in 1995 required TV stations to broadcast three hours of child-oriented “educational/informational” programming per week. Because Saturday morning was becoming a little less lucrative (and that was where the kid stuff was already located), the networks used that slot for their government-ordered “E/I” shows. That alone cut out three potential cartoon hours for each TV channel, replacing them with shows like Jack Hanna’s Animal Adventures.
PRETTY SMURFING EXPENSIVE
However, by the time the networks started abiding by the law and airing fewer cartoons, the writing was on the wall. As early as 1988, NBC was looking into eliminating Saturday morning cartoons. Its biggest hit at the time was The Smurfs. Although it looks cheap and choppy by today’s animation standards, one episode of the adventures of the little blue creatures cost $300,000 to produce. NBC entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff wondered if that was still worth it, since ratings for the network’s entire Saturday morning lineup were slipping. Some internal network research showed that it would be much cheaper for the network to air three hours of a newsmagazine, such as a Saturday extension of The Today Show.
So, in 1992, that’s what NBC did. The cartoons from 7:00 to 10:00 a.m. were gone, replaced by Today. From 10:00 to noon they aired barely educational, teen-oriented shows like Saved by the Bell.
PLAY BALL
NBC also figured that fans of sports, which had long dominated TV on weekend afternoons, would watch their teams play, even if games aired on Saturday morning. (Before that, college football games traditionally started after noon, but they’d preempted TV cartoons on the West Coast for years, which is three hours behind the East Coast.)
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So, in 1991, NBC made a plan that would signal the final death blow to its kid-friendly lineup: It signed a long-term deal to air Notre Dame football games on Saturdays. The Peacock network paid a whopping $1 million per game…which was still cheaper than producing six hours of cartoons. Besides, NBC could charge more for advertising during higher-rated football games than lower-rated cartoons, and without the advertising time and content restrictions placed on cartoons.
CHANGING CHANNELS
Other networks continued to air cartoons, making them with their own in-house production facilities or contracting the rights for producing individual shows to independent TV producers. In the early 2000s, ABC and CBS realized that they could still air cartoons but do it for a lot cheaper by airing kids’ programming from their corporate siblings. ABC was owned by Disney, so its Saturday morning lineup was bussed over from the Disney Channel. CBS gave its Saturday mornings over to programming it leased from Nickelodeon, which, at the time, was owned by Viacom, just like CBS. That agreement ran out in 2006.
Fox held out until 2008 when it got rid of its Fox Kids lineup in favor of Weekend Marketplace, which is a fancy title for a block of infomercials. By that time there was a fifth (if smaller) broadcast network—the CW—and by 2014 it was the only remaining network with its own Saturday morning cartoons, a block of programs called Vortex. That year, though, it ended, and was replaced with easier-to-run educational / informational content: animal shows and travelogues called One Magnificent Morning.
CARTOONS EVERYWHERE
Not one of the TV networks would have killed off Saturday morning cartoons if Saturday morning cartoons had continued to pull in tens of millions of young viewers every week. They would have just dealt with the government restrictions and kept at it. But they didn’t. Ratings had started slipping way back in the late 1980s, thanks to two major developments in the TV landscape: syndicated children’s programming and cable.
What became of those thinly veiled (and very effective) toy ads, such as Transformers and Thundercats? They were sold to local stations for use in after-school time slots. Disney was particularly successful with a two-hour block called The Disney Afternoon, which ran on independent TV stations in the late afternoon from 1990 to 1999 and featured hits like DuckTales, Darkwing Duck, and Goof Troop. But more than just a couple of hours a day came from niche-based cable TV stations. Suddenly, instead of having to wait until Saturday, kids had all-day channels like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network to provide nearly endless streams of cartoons. And a few years after that, they got YouTube, then Netflix, then Hulu…
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