Saturday-morning cartoon

"Saturday-morning cartoon" is a colloquial term for original animated series and live-action programming typically scheduled on Saturday and Sunday mornings in the United States on the "Big Three" television networks. The genre was a tradition broadly ranging from the mid-1960s to mid-2010s, In the last years of the genre's existence, Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were primarily created and aired on major networks to meet "educational and informational" (E/I) requirements. Minor television networks, in addition to the non-commercial PBS in some markets, continued to air animated programming on Saturday and Sunday while partially meeting those mandates.

In the United States, the generally accepted times for these and other children's programs to air on Saturday mornings were from 8:00 a.m. to approximately 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time Zone. Until the late 1970s, American networks also had a schedule of children's programming on Sunday mornings, though most programs at this time were rebroadcasts of Saturday-morning shows that were already out of production. In some markets, some shows were pre-empted in favour of syndicated or other types of local programming.

History

1950s–60s: Early years

After the Paramount Decree broke up block booking practices, in the 1950s, animation production began shifting from theatrical shorts to television animation. Jason Mittel argues that by the end of the 1960s, this shift to television also unintentionally shifted popular understandings of animation. With the rise of the Saturday morning cartoon block, Mittel observes that animation transformed from "a mass-market genre with so-called 'kidult' appeal and became marginalized into the kid-only Saturday morning periphery." Until 1963, the Saturday morning programming block across all three major networks consisted primarily of telecasts of older cartoons made for movie theaters, reruns of animated series originally broadcast in prime time or reruns of younger skewing live-action television series such as My Friend Flicka or Sky King.

1960s: Rise of original programming

Beginning with the 1963–64 television season, CBS took the first steps in setting up Saturday morning programming block made up of two hours of back-to-back animated series. The block consisted of acquired programs Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales and The Quick Draw McGraw Show after the two had been seen in first-run syndication and pairing them with returning series The Alvin Show and Mighty Mouse Playhouse. CBS and ABC would typically order an average of 16 episodes to run six times over the course of two years, while NBC's orders were characterized by 13 episode batches to run 4 times over the year in order to cover the 52 week television schedule. These groups voiced concerns about the presentation of commercialism, violence, anti-social attitudes and stereotypes in Saturday-morning cartoons. Fred Silverman, who at the time was head of CBS' daytime programming and brought about many of these action-oriented cartoons with his "superhero morning" initiative, refuted the claims that ACT and parental concerns were the deciding factor in the decline of these shows and instead said that ratings for superhero cartoons in general had begun to slip by the end of the 1960s and that declining ratings were a greater deciding factor than parental advocacy groups for causing these series to be phased out. In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission was openly considering a ban on all advertising during television programming targeting preschoolers, and severe restrictions on other children's program advertising, both of which would have effectively killed off the format; the commission ultimately dropped the proposal.

The networks were encouraged to create educational spots that endeavored to use animation or live-action for enriching content, including the Schoolhouse Rock!, Time for Timer and The Bod Squad series on ABC which became fondly-remembered television classics, while CBS had the Bicentennial Minutes and their long-running children's oriented news series, In the News. In Canada concurrently, the National Film Board of Canada produced a roughly equivalent domestic series called Canada Vignettes and their successors the Heritage Minutes, although they were intended to be aired throughout the usual broadcast day. With the 1970s came a wave of animated versions of popular live-action prime time series as well, mainly with the voices of the original casts, such as Star Trek: The Animated Series, as well as imitations of the highly successful Scooby-Doo combining teen characters and talking animals with supernatural mystery stories.

1980s: Deregulation and toyetic programs

By 1982, under President Ronald Reagan, the FCC had loosened programming and advertising regulations. One of the earliest first cartoons to take advantage of this deregulation push was Hanna-Barbera's Pac-Man which was the first cartoon to be based on a video game and its success leading to the era of "half-hour toy commercials", starting with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and continuing with such series as The Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These were heavily criticized by ACT, but were nevertheless successful. As well, several more lighthearted series appeared, popularized by Hanna-Barbera's The Smurfs and Jim Henson's Muppet Babies. These included series based on popular video games, such as Saturday Supercade.

Beginning in the late 1980s, networks commissioned new series based on legacy properties that would appeal to nostalgia and to a whole family audience, including ABC's reviving the Scooby-Doo franchise with A Pup Named Scooby-Doo and commissioning The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from The Walt Disney Company, both series being major successes. The move was largely driven by the adoption of the people meter, which ABC believed that younger children could not operate and which ABC blamed for the network's poor viewership with its younger-skewing lineup featuring the likes of The Little Clowns of Happytown. CBS likewise focused its content on established properties, bringing the comic strip Garfield (which had produced a number of successful specials already) to Saturday morning with what would become the long-running Garfield and Friends and pairing the show with live-action children's series hosted by fictional characters originally created for adult audiences, Pee-wee Herman (Pee-Wee's Playhouse) and Ernest P. Worrell (Hey Vern, It's Ernest!). (later ABC Kids), UPN's UPN Kids (later Disney's One Too), CBS's CBS Saturday, The WB's Kids' WB, and Amazin' Adventures (later Bohbot Kids Network) in syndication.

From 1992 however, the "Big Three" traditional major networks and their affiliates began replacing their Saturday-morning animated programming with weekend editions of their morning news programs, and live-action teen-oriented series. Multiple factors contributed to the change, among them an increasingly competitive market fueled by the multi-channel transition, a boom in first-run syndicated content and the introduction of home video and video games; increasing restrictions on advertising, educational content mandates and a boom in fully-animated educational content on public television such as The Magic School Bus and Arthur; and broader cultural changes stemming from an increase in no-fault divorces and the end of the post-World War II baby boom. Attempting to pair the newscasts with the remaining cartoons was largely unsuccessful because the two program formats drew widely different audiences that did not lend themselves to leading in and out of each other, leading to viewership oddities (such as NBC's children's block having an average viewership age of over 40 years old).

In North America, the debuting Pokémon franchise quickly rose to success. By December 1998, the Pokémon anime had become the highest-rated syndicated children's show during the weekdays. This attracted the attention of two media companies: Warner Bros., co-owner of The WB channel; and Saban Entertainment/Fox Family Worldwide, owners of the Fox Kids channel. A bidding war ensued between the parties, which was won by Warner Bros. On 13 February 1999, Pokémon launched on the Kids' WB national television block. The debut episode became the most watched premiere in Kids' WB's history. The success of Pokemon and the wider phenomenon of “Pokemania” in general led other children's blocks adopting similar series to ride the coattails such as Digimon on Fox Kids or Monster Rancher on the Bohbot Kids Network. The success of these acquired anime series was such that they were favored over legacy series such The Avengers: United They Stand which despite possessing the Marvel Comics branding was delayed in release so Digimon could be given a spot on the Saturday morning schedule.

2010s: Last years and discontinuation

By the mid-2010s, all of the major American networks had shifted to live-action documentary programs. These were ostensibly targeted at teenagers to meet the educational mandates but less likely to cause a clash with the newscasts, as the programming was genericized as much as possible to resemble reality television programming for general audiences found on most cable networks (or in the case of Dr. Chris: Pet Vet, general reality programming from overseas re-edited to comply with American mandates). This documentary programming also benefited from having less restrictive rules for advertising compared to programming targeted to children. In the United States, The CW continued to air non-E/I cartoons until September 27, 2014, with the closure of the Vortexx block. In the 1990s, many Generation Xers were nostalgic for the Saturday-morning cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s. One such example was the tribute album Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits (1995), where Saturday-morning cartoon themes such as Scooby-Doo and Fat Albert were covered by alternative rock artists. The Netflix animated series Saturday Morning All Star Hits! parodies the mid-1980s to early 1990s era of Saturday-morning animation, such as Thundercats, Care Bears, ProStars, and Denver, the Last Dinosaur. The science fiction animated series Futurama also spoofed 1970s and 1980s Saturday-morning cartoons in the episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit".

References

External links

Saturday-morning grid of 1967, year of debut of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man
TV Party 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