Saturday-morning cartoon


A "Saturday-morning cartoon" is a colloquial term for the original animated television programming that was typically scheduled on Saturday mornings in the United States on the major television networks. The genre's popularity had a broad peak from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s; after that point it declined, in the face of changing cultural norms, increased competition from formats available at all times, and heavier regulations. In the last two decades of the genre's existence, Saturday-morning cartoons were primarily created and aired to meet educational television mandates, or E/I. Minor television networks, in addition to the non-commercial PBS in some markets, continue to air animated programming on Saturday 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 noon Eastern Time. 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 out of production. In some markets, some shows were pre-empted in favor of syndicated or other types of local programming. Saturday morning cartoons were largely discontinued in Canada by 2002. In the United States, The CW continued to air non-E/I cartoons as late as 2014; among the "Big Three" traditional major networks, the last non-E/I cartoon last aired in 2006. Cable television networks have since then revived the practice of debuting their most popular animated programming on Saturday mornings on a sporadic basis.

History

Early cartoons

Although the Saturday-morning timeslot had always featured a great deal of children's programming beginning in the early 1950s, the idea of commissioning new animated series for broadcast on Saturday mornings 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, DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, Total Television, Jay Ward Productions 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. While production times and costs were undeniably higher with animated programming, the cost of talent was far less and networks could rerun children's animated programming more frequently than most live-action series, negating the financial disadvantages. The experiment proved successful, and the time slot was filled with profitable programming.
Until the late 1960s, a number of Saturday-morning cartoons were reruns of animated series originally made for prime time during a brief flurry of such series a few years earlier. These included Hanna-Barbera's Top Cat, The Jetsons and Jonny Quest, Ross Bagdasarian, Sr.'s The Alvin Show, and Bob Clampett's Beany and Cecil.
Some Saturday morning programs consisted of telecasts of older cartoons originally made for movie theaters, such as the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons, the Tom and Jerry cartoons produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for that studio prior to establishing their own company; the Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle cartoons produced by Paul Terry's Terrytoons, and Walter Lantz's Woody Woodpecker cartoons. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was not uncommon to have animated shorts produced with both film and television in mind, so that by selling the shorts to theaters, the studios could afford a higher budget than would otherwise be available from television alone, which at the time was still a free medium for the end-user. Some of these legacy characters later appeared in "new" versions by other producers.
The remainder of the networks' Saturday-morning schedules were filled by reruns of black-and-white live-action series made in the 1950s, usually with a western background and occasional first-run live-action series such as The Magic Land of Allakazam, the later color episodes of Howdy Doody, The Shari Lewis Show, Shenanigans, and Watch Mr. Wizard.
Independent stations often did not show cartoons on Saturday mornings, instead running feature films, chapters of "cliffhanger" serial films, comedy short subjects originally made for movie theatres, older live-action syndicated series like The Adventures of Superman, The Cisco Kid, Ramar of the Jungle, The Abbott and Costello Show, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Hopalong Cassidy, Flash Gordon, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, and regional sports shows, often wrestling or bowling programs.

1960s–1980s

1960s

The mid-1960s brought a boom in superhero cartoon series, some adapted from comic books,, and others original. Also included were parodies of the superhero genre. Another development was the popular music-based cartoon, featuring both real-life groups as well as anonymous studio musicians. Live-action series continued to some extent with Sid and Marty Krofft's H.R. Pufnstuf and Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Hanna-Barbera's The Banana Splits, Stan Burns and Mike Marmer's Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp, ABC's Curiosity Shop, Don Kirshner's widely popular The Monkees, and the British-made slapstick comedy Here Come the Double Deckers.

1970s

With the 1970s came a wave of animated versions of popular live-action prime time series, mainly with the voices of the original casts, including The Brady Bunch, Star Trek, Emergency!, Gilligan's Island, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Mork & Mindy, The Partridge Family, and The Dukes of Hazzard. Less literally adapted was The Oddball Couple, which turned Neil Simon's mismatched roommates into a sloppy dog and a fastidious cat. Many of these animated spin-offs featured storylines and settings that would not be feasible in most live-action series. The ties between the animated spin-offs and their live-action origins varied widely, depending on how much input the original cast and crew were willing to contribute ; in retrospective, animated versions of TV series are generally not treated as canon.
Other adaptations of familiar characters and properties included Tarzan, Planet of the Apes, Lassie and Godzilla. At this same time, the great success of Scooby-Doo spawned numerous imitations, combining Archies-style teen characters and funny animals with light-weight mystery stories Comedian Bill Cosby successfully blended educational elements with both comedy and music in the popular, long-running Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids.
Filmation, primarily a cartoon producer, also turned out several live-action Saturday morning series in the 1970s, including Shazam! and Isis, Jason of Star Command, The Ghost Busters and Uncle Croc's Block.

1980s

A Hanna-Barbera adaptation of the Belgian comic strip The Smurfs became a huge success in the 1980s, bringing with it other series with fairytale-like settings Most of the genres made popular in previous generations continued to appear as well, with the exception of the musical band cartoons. CBS and the producing team of Lee Mendelson and Bill Melendez, acclaimed for their Emmy-winning prime time specials adapted from Charles M. Schulz's comic strip Peanuts, brought Schulz's characters to Saturday mornings in The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show; later in the 1980s, the successful Garfield comic strip and TV specials were adapted into the long-running Garfield and Friends, also on CBS.
Other adaptations of familiar characters and properties included The Lone Ranger, Star Wars and Zorro.
During the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, series featuring younger and junior versions of existing characters were introduced, such as Muppet Babies, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, and The Flintstone Kids.

Watchgroup backlash

Parents' lobby groups such as Action for Children's Television appeared in the late 1960s. They voiced concerns about the presentation of commercialism, violence, anti-social attitudes and stereotypes in Saturday morning cartoons. By the 1970s, these groups exercised enough influence that the television networks felt compelled to lay down more stringent content rules for the animation houses. By 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, 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 and/or live-action for enriching content. The Schoolhouse Rock! series on ABC became a television classic; ABC also had several other short-form animated featurettes, including Time for Timer and The Bod Squad, that had long runs. Just as notable were CBS's news segments for children, In the News and NBC's Ask NBC News and One to Grow On, which featured skits of everyday problems with advice from the stars of NBC primetime programs.

Decline

The decline of the timeslot somewhat began in the early 1990s for a variety of reasons, including:
The decline of Saturday morning cartoons coincided with a rise in adult-oriented animation and a wave of new, creator-driven animation studios, which experienced a revival in the 1990s as the Saturday morning cartoons were in decline, as did animated feature films. Fueled by the continued requirement for educational programming, networks continued to carry some cartoons well into the 2000s; by this point, these consisted either of re-purposed reruns from cable or outsourced blocks of cartoons imported from outside the United States. As the popularity of these blocks continued to decline and no hit shows emerged from them, by the early 2010s cartoons began an outright phaseout, with the major networks opting to fill their educational mandates by commissioning live-action, mostly documentary/human interest series that were far less labor-intensive and expensive to produce. Some of the space formerly filled by Saturday morning cartoons would be occupied by paid programming and expanded coverage of college football, both of which greatly expanded as the result of separate government rulings in 1984.

State of Saturday morning cartoons since the 1990s

A 1996 Federal Communications Commission mandate, issued in the wake of the Children's Television Act, requires that stations program a minimum of three hours of children's educational/informational programming per week.
To help their affiliates comply with the regulations, broadcast networks began to reorganize their efforts to adhere to the mandates, so their affiliates would not bear the burden of scheduling the shows themselves on their own time, thus eliminating the risk of having network product preempted by the mandates. This almost always meant that the educational programming was placed during the Saturday morning cartoon block.
NBC abandoned its original Saturday morning cartoon lineup in 1992, replacing it with a Saturday morning edition of Today and adding an all live-action teen-oriented block, TNBC, which featured Saved by the Bell, California Dreams and other teen sitcoms. Even though the educational content was minimal to non-existent, NBC labeled all the live-action shows with an E/I rating and provided the legal fiction of a blanket educational summary boilerplate provided to stations to place in their quarterly educational effort reports for the FCC. Cartoons returned to the network in the fall of 2002, after cable network Discovery Kids won the rights to the timeslot in an auction, beating out other children's television companies.
CBS followed NBC's lead in 1997 by producing CBS News Saturday Morning for 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 its animated series CBS Storybreak.
In the 1990s, Japanese television shows targeted towards children and teenagers were introduced to American television, including live-action tokusatsu superhero shows such as Power Rangers and VR Troopers, and anime shows such as Pokémon, Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, Digimon and Yu-Gi-Oh! This led to a transition in the Saturday morning slot from traditional American Saturday-morning cartoons towards Japanese anime, which have dominated the Saturday morning timeslot since the 1990s. Yu-Gi-Oh in particular was the most popular Saturday-morning cartoon during the 2000s.
In 2004, ABC was the last of the broadcast networks to add a Saturday morning edition of its morning news program in the first hour of its lineup, mainly due to internal affiliate criticism of the lack of network coverage for the February 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster which occurred on a Saturday morning, forcing them to take coverage from other video wire services. Prior to that, and particularly in the early 1990s, it was not uncommon for affiliates to preempt part or all of ABC's cartoon lineup with local programming.
Fox carried little or no E/I programming, leaving the responsibility of scheduling the E/I shows to the affiliates themselves. Following the closure of its 4Kids TV block in 2008, Fox would not carry any children's programming at all for five years until the launch of Xploration Station. The WB was far more accommodating; for several years, the network aired the history-themed Histeria! five days a week, leaving only a half-hour of E/I programs up to the local affiliates to program.
Several channels, while not offering original animated series, do air reruns of older Saturday morning cartoons. Boomerang, a spin-off channel of Cartoon Network, specialized primarily in reruns of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s. In the 2010s, the channel's focus shifted toward airing reruns of canceled animated series from the 1990s and 2000s, and as of 2014, all earlier cartoons are relegated to graveyard slots. Hub Network owned the broadcast rights to rerun several of Fox Kids' most popular programs ; the majority of that programming was dropped or relegated to early morning timeslots when Loesch left the network and the channel was relaunched as Discovery Family in 2014. A handful of digital subchannels also make use of Saturday morning cartoon reruns, including Luken Communications's PBJ and Ion Media Networks' Qubo.
In 2011, the major networks began to phase out weekend-morning educational programming aimed towards preteen audiences, in favor of live-action reality and docuseries outsourced to other producers. Litton Entertainment took over programming the Saturday morning children's blocks from ABC, CBS, The CW, and NBC in 2011, 2013, 2014, and 2016 respectively. These programs are ostensibly aimed at teenagers and families, and networks have legally declared these new programs to be oriented towards viewers between the ages of 13 and 16. This distinction is important from a legal basis, as it removes the requirement for the programs to comply with the advertising limits imposed by the Children's Television Act.

By network

ABC
By the mid-1990s, broadcast networks were now becoming units of larger entertainment companies. ABC was bought by The Walt Disney Company in 1996, which began airing all Disney-produced programming by 1997 and canceled programs produced by companies other than Disney and Science Court also ran until 2000. After being purchased by Disney, ABC's Saturday morning cartoons became part of a block called Disney's One Saturday Morning before switching to a block of live-action and animated programs under the banner ABC Kids in 2002. Many of the block's shows were produced by Disney and also aired on the Disney Channel and/or Toon Disney. At one point, ABC Kids had only two animated shows on its schedule, while the remainder of the lineup consisted of live-action entertainment shows. By late 2008, most shows that were part of the ABC Kids block were reruns of older episodes that originally aired a few years earlier; this remained the case for the next three years, with no episodes added into rotation.
The Disney Channel launched a Saturday morning block of its popular animated programming, initially named Toonin' Saturdays, in June 2011. On August 27, 2011, ABC ended the ABC Kids block. ABC was the first network to outsource its E/I liabilities and Saturday morning program block to Litton; Litton's ABC block is known as the Weekend Adventure.The Disney Channel quietly ended its Saturday morning cartoon block in 2014, then brought it back in 2017 as "Get Animated!"
CBS
In 1999, CBS was purchased by Viacom, bringing it under the same ownership as popular children's network Nickelodeon. CBS in turn ran programming from Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. from 2000 to 2006, nearly a year after Viacom split into two separate companies. The two parties ended the Nickelodeon/Nick Jr.-branded block, which was replaced by the DIC Entertainment and produced KOL Secret Slumber Party in September 2006. The block was rebranded as KEWLopolis, featuring an increased amount of animated series, in September 2007. On September 19, 2009, KEWLopolis was rebranded as Cookie Jar TV, with its target audience shifted toward preschoolers.
Cookie Jar TV ended its run on September 21, 2013, at which point Litton also took over programming CBS' E/I liabilities and Saturday morning programming. Litton's CBS block is known as the CBS Dream Team. This is the second time CBS has dropped animated children's programming from its lineup; the network had previously gone with an all-live-action programming lineup for the 1997-98 season when the E/I rules took effect, but reverted to animated programming the following season. The Dream Team block is also unusual among the other Litton blocks as it includes scripted programming.
Fox
From 1990 to 2002, Fox ran the Fox Kids block, which featured both animated and live-action series in the after school hours on weekday afternoons from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.. Among its notable series included animated series such as Taz-Mania, ', X-Men: The Animated Series, Eek! The Cat, Bobby's World, Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and Animaniacs, live action shows like Power Rangers, Goosebumps, and Big Bad Beetleborgs, and Japanese anime series such as Digimon and '. Fox sold its children's division as part of its 2001 sale of Fox Family Channel to The Walt Disney Company; the network then leased its remaining Saturday morning block to 4Kids Entertainment in 2002.
The 4Kids-produced block, which by that point had become 4Kids TV, ended its run on December 27, 2008, Fox opted to drop children's programming altogether rather than lease the block to another company, becoming the third broadcast network to completely abandon children's programming, and replaced 4Kids TV with a two-hour infomercial block called Weekend Marketplace; as with 4Kids TV and its predecessors, Fox has allowed several stations the option to decline to carry the block and lease it to another station in the market, especially those stations which had never carried Fox Kids following the affiliation changes resulting from Fox's 1994 affiliation agreement with New World Communications. Fox's owned-and-operated stations and affiliates instead hold the responsibility of carrying children's programming.
On September 13, 2014, Fox's owned-and-operated stations picked up a new block entitled Xploration Station from Steve Rotfeld Productions. The three-hour block features E/I programs focused on science and space.
The CW
Origins
Kids' WB debuted on The WB on September 9, 1995, as a block on weekday mornings, weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. During the run of the weekday morning blocks, the network aired the animated series Histeria! to meet E/I content quotas for the network's affiliates. The Kids' WB weekday morning block ended in 2001, while the weekday afternoon block was discontinued on December 30, 2005 with The WB retaining the two afternoon hours to run a lineup of off-network syndicated reruns.
The CW begins airing children's programming
Kids' WB, now reduced to just the Saturday morning block that was expanded to five hours from four with the removal of the weekday afternoon lineup, moved to The CW on September 23, 2006. The Kids' WB block ended its run on May 17, 2008, and was replaced on May 24, 2008 by the 4Kids Entertainment-produced The CW4Kids. The CW4Kids was renamed Toonzai on August 14, 2010, Toonzai was replaced by Vortexx, produced under a time lease agreement with Saban Brands on August 25, 2012.
Vortexx ended its run on September 27, 2014, at which point the CW turned over its E/I liability and Saturday morning programming to Litton as well. Litton's CW block is known as One Magnificent Morning and at five hours in length, it is two hours longer than the blocks that Litton programs for ABC and CBS.
NBC
NBC entered into a partnership with digital cable and satellite network Discovery Kids to provide original programming from the channel on NBC's Saturday morning lineup in 2002, Discovery Kids on NBC ran on the network from September 14, 2002 to September 2, 2006. NBC replaced that block with Qubo, a three-hour "edutainment" block that debuted on September 9, 2006, as part of a programming partnership between parent company NBCUniversal, Ion Media Networks, Scholastic Press, Nelvana and Classic Media, that resulted in the creation of a companion digital multicast network on Ion Television's stations; the Qubo blocks on NBC and Telemundo ended on June 30, 2012, leaving only the Ion block and standalone Qubo Channel.
On July 7, 2012, NBC launched a new Saturday morning block aimed at preschool-aged children, NBC Kids, under a time lease agreement with co-owned cable network Sprout. NBC Kids, which was the only and final Saturday morning programming block to air animated programming, ended its run on September 25, 2016.
On February 24, 2016, NBC announced a new E/I block produced by Litton Entertainment, The More You Know—a brand extension of NBC's public service announcement brand of the same name, and it launched on October 8, 2016, resulting in NBC removing all cartoons from its Saturday morning lineups for the first time since September 1992.
ThisTV
On November 1, 2008, ThisTV launched airing a daily children's program block called Cookie Jar Toons, which was programmed by Cookie Jar Group. The block featured mainly scripted animated and live action series; Cookie Jar-produced programs that did not count towards E/I quotas aired under the sub-block This is for Kids. Cookie Jar Toons/This is for Kids was discontinued on October 31, 2013, effectively removing Saturday children's programming from the network; after Tribune Broadcasting assumed part-ownership of ThisTV from Weigel Broadcasting the following day, Tribune replaced the block with a three-hour Sunday morning lineup of exclusively E/I-compliant programs from various syndication distributors.
On May 2, 2017, Sinclair Broadcasting Group announced that it would introduce a new children's programming block named KidsClick, which airs on mainly CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates, and nationally on This TV, beginning on July 1, 2017. The block was transferred from This TV to TBD nationally starting on July 1, 2018, ahead of the collapse of the attempted acquisition of Tribune Media by Sinclair Broadcast Group. At the time of its closure, it aired no E/I programming.
KidsClick aired for the last time on March 31, 2019, after being on the air for just 20 months.
DIC Kids Network/Cookie Jar Kids Network
In 2003, DIC Entertainment launched a syndicated children's programming block titled the DIC Kids Network, which aired select animated series from the DIC Entertainment catalog on Fox, UPN and The WB affiliated stations, alongside independent stations to allow these stations to meet required E/I programming quotas. The block was distributed by Tribune Entertainment and later by Ascent Media.
With the purchase of DIC Entertainment by Cookie Jar Entertainment in 2008, the block was later relaunched as the Cookie Jar Kids Network in 2009 and various additional programs from the Cookie Jar catalog were added to the lineup. The block ended on September 18, 2011.
PBS Kids
PBS has run daytime children's programming targeted at children between the ages of 4 and 12 since the network debuted on October 5, 1970. Its afternoon and Saturday morning children's programming was folded into a daily block called PTV. On September 6, 1999, the block was rebranded as PBS Kids and spun off into a 24-hour cable channel using the same name, which was turned into a joint venture with Comcast, HIT Entertainment, and Sesame Workshop in 2005, becoming PBS Kids Sprout. The PBS Kids cable channel was funded by DirecTV.
Then, PBS Kids was divided into two sub-blocks and they were: PBS Kids Go! and the PBS Kids Preschool Block. An additional three-hour weekend morning block for preschool-aged children that was produced in conjunction with the Canadian production company Nelvana called the PBS Kids Bookworm Bunch debuted on September 30, 2000 and lasted until 2004. PBS Kids Go! debuted in 2004 and ended in 2013. The network continues to offer Saturday morning programming as of 2015, though as with most PBS programming, local member stations retain the right to refuse it outright for other programming such as instructional/DIY/cooking programming, carrying it on Sundays instead, or placing it on a subchannel. Also, other PBS member stations maintain full-time or half-time subchannels with self-programmed and slotted PBS Kids content which may share channel space with other networks such as Create or a local state political proceedings coverage network.
Retro TV
's Saturday morning lineup consisted of classic cartoons from the 1960s through the 1990s, most of which were produced by Filmation licensed via DreamWorks Classics. Due to corporate consolidation which led to the DreamWorks library being owned by NBCUniversal in 2016, this lineup was eventually pulled for low-cost barter E/I content and other newer cartoons unable to find distribution otherwise. As of 2019, Retro carries The Houndcats and The Barkleys, two DePatie-Freleng Enterprises cartoons from the 1970s, on its Saturday morning lineup in addition to its E/I liabilities.
TeleXitos
TeleXitos airs both cartoons and 3-hour children's programming; however, only two non-E/I programming airs in the early morning and afternoon hours such as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and . Like Retro Television Network and MundoMax, it does not air commercials aimed at children. It is the only Spanish-language subchannel to air cartoons on Saturdays.