The Disappearance of Saturday Morning

Ant writes "Saturday morning no longer means kids in front of TV sets across the country, glued to the latest in hip cartoons. Why? Gerard Raiti investigates the death of an era." As a former Saturday morning TV addict, this doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

Re:What about classic cartoons?

[graveyhead]

These cartoons were written for adult audiences. The early Tom & Jerry cartoons were the same way. In fact, they used to air these during USO shows for army troops abroad. That's why they are still funny, even when you watch them again as an adult. There are puns all kinds of other humor in there that I'm sure kids miss (I did).

Anyways it seems to me like sometime in the early seventies, they started making them more kid-oriented (hence Scoobie-Doo, Flinstones, Jetsons, et.al.) and therefore not as all around entertaining.

Anime, as you suggest, is the only thing that comes close because it doesn't pretend to be a product for kids.

Re:What about classic cartoons?

[ChrisTower]

Anime, as you suggest, is the only thing that comes close because it doesn't pretend to be a product for kids.

That's a very common misconception. While the audience might be a bit older here in the states, most of the anime we get is targeted at middle school students in japan.

Re:The end of an era

[Belgand]

Cheap?!? The PS2 costs about the same as a SNES did and while the economic climate of where you lived will impact this almost everyone I knew had a NES and later a SNES. As a college student right now I don't have a spare $150-200 to blow on a console system, but I sure as hell still have my SNES.

I totally fail to buy the argument that videogames or anything else (quality time?!? WTF?) is taking kids away from cartoons. The problem is that they just don't exist. I recall the last time I woke up before noon on a Saturday and there wasn't anything on other than MST3k. The last time I recall an actual Saturday morning cartoon (as I still feel it was a genre and seperated itself in many ways from afternoon cartoons and such) was about 3 years ago or so when Fox was re-running the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.

The execs seem out of touch. The claim that noone under 25 has an emotional attachment? I'm 22 and almost everyone I know has an emotional attachment to it as do many younger friends. This in the same paragraph stating that kids went from Power Rangers looking for something else. Power Rangers was after most Saturdays were already cartoon-free. Hell, Nickelodeon was going strong in the 80s and Power Rangers didn't come in until the mid-90s. It all seems like an excuse to avoid spending money on something that didn't bring in gobs of money despite massive popularity (I recall in the late 80s or so how NBC ran cross-promotion with Toys 'R Us for the new season of cartoons). Cable networks are a quick dumping ground for why kids don't watch anymore while ignoring that the only content there is just crappy Disney shite.

I think the best way to revive things is to bring back the better cartoons that used to run. Cartoon Network could stand to clean up with it, especially if they start the aring slightly later in the morning to appeal to twenty-somethings as well. A block of Transformers, GI Joe, Voltron, X-Men (not the shitty new one, the good early nineties one that was relatively faithful and well-written), TMNT... even toss in some new stuff like the excellent Batman or JLA perhaps or the good nineties Spider-man. A block like this would appeal to both children who never grew up with it as well as adults who did and want to see it again. I've often thought that a late-night Friday or Saturday block of classic Saturday morning cartoons would do well on Cartoon Network as a sort of outgrowth of Adult Swim (not adult-oriented, but adult appeal). The costs would be low and using proven products with a strong existing fanbase could be a huge hit.

Re:Saturday Morning

[Guppy06]

"Cartoons are too PC these days."

Try to catch an episode of The Fairly Oddparents on Nickelodeon when you can. Grown men talking about how much they like wearing a dress, internet stalkers... and that's just from the episode where I got my sig.

Well, crud! This is not my day for HTML...

[geekwench]

Here are the links that I tried to post above.

Merrie Melodies:
http://www.toonzone.net/early-years/
http://www.bcdb.com/pages/Warner_Bros_/Merrie_Melo dies/

The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartons at amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0816 038325/103-1349286-7639828?vi=glance

Fleischer Studios and Max Fleischer biographical information:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/archive/innova tors/fleischer.html
http://www.toonopedia.com/fleischr.htm
http://www.bcdb.com/pages/Paramount/Fleischer_Stud ios/

Re:Remember nothing

[Kirsha]

There is also a "wide, yawning gulf between a father who takes an interest in his child's life in order to be a part of it" and one who wouldnt be caught dead having anythign to do with it and considering it something meaningless, stupid or pathetic. You sound to me like the later.

Re:The classics

[binarytoaster]

Scryed. Mahou ni Taisetsu na Koto. Ai Yori Aoshi. Chobits.
These are some of the recent anime I've watched that fall into "Above-Average" category. Below are the two that I think fall into "Oh My God" category. ;)

His and Her Circumstances. Also known as Kare Kano, this is the Gainax take on romance. What comes out is a totally hilarious and yet serious anime. Very well done, especially since Right Stuf did the dub VERY VERY well. You can't even tell the difference in inflection between the Japanese and English voices.

Hikaru no Go. Only in anime could one write an entire series about a traditional board game and make it incredibly suspenseful. Every damn episode has ended on a note that made me really, really want to stay up another half hour and watch the next one.

Sure, you have to watch the subtitled versions of a lot of anime to get anything good out of it. But anime has definitely not "jumped the shark" yet, any more than live-action movies have.

Anyway, I wanted to see something truly intelligent, animation wouldn't be the first place I looked...

And we have a winner for the "Standard American Opinion of Animation" award. :)

Re:I used to love Saturday morning cartoons...

[Orne]

This is the song from the Simpsons, 3F16 - 17th March 1996 [tarnish.net], from the episode The Day the Violence Died [snpp.com], when Crusty the clown was forced to remove the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon from his show. The "kid" voice was done by the same lady who does the voice as Millhouse.

Re:I remember saturday mornings

[catscan2000]

According to a Sociology class i had in college several years ago, the professor debunked the 50% divorce rate statistic because it only measures the number of divorces divided by the number of marriages in a single year. If you measure what percentage of marriages end in divorce over a long time span, that 50% rate dwindles substantially to something like 10% or less, if I remember correctly (it's been a while). The 50% rate is not a very good measurement and many cofactors exist to inflate it, though I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head.

Saturday cartoons saved my wife from disfigurement

[Cybrex]

True story:

Back in the mid to late 70's Dick Van Dyke did a public service announcement that ran during Saturday morning cartoons advising kids "if you ever catch on fire, remember to stop, drop, and roll!". Sure, it's a pretty bizzare topic for a PSA, but as a 7 year-old child I didn't give it a second thought. I also didn't realize that, like the "2 all-beef patty..." ingredients of the Big Mac, this esoteric little bit of information was etched into the hidden recesses of my brain. I never gave it a thought.

Fast forward to Christmas of `98 (IIRC). My wife and I were at a party with a bunch of friends. It was a renaissance-themed party, so we were all dressed in ren faire garb, there was period music and food, the house was lit with candles, etc.

My wife has beautiful hair, and it's very long. No, really. When it's down it's a few inches below her knees. It's simply amazing.

At one point we decided that a group photo was in order. My wife doesn't enjoy having her photo taken, so she volunteered to snap the picture. The rest of us piled onto or around the sofa and she stepped back to take the picture. Unable to get us all into the frame, she leaned back over a low table that was right behind her... and over a candle that was on the table.

From our perspective in front of her the only thing that looked odd was that little bits of light seemed to be appearing behind her, almost like an aura. She took the photo and felt something strange behind her. She turned around to see what was behind her and a collective gasp filled the room as the rest of us saw the surface of her hair on fire!

Time stopped. I have never in my life been more terrified than I was at the sight of the person dearest to me in the world- on fire. Everyone was frozen with panic, and I was incapable of conscious thought- except for that one little thought in the back of my brain.

"STOP DROP AND ROLL!!!" The words came out of my mouth before I realized that I was saying them. Thank God, this was the one (and thus far only) time she did what I said, immediately and without question.

Ladies and gentlemen, "stop drop and roll" works. Aside from her hair she was completely unharmed, and because she reacted so quickly only the surface of her hair was burned (hard to describe). We brushed it out, put a bottle of leave-in conditioner in, shared a good cry, and continued with the evening. The stench of burnt hair lasted for days, but after it was washed and combed the damage was hardly noticeable (except to her, of course). Now, years later, the damage has completely grown out.

I tried to find Mr. Van Dyke's e-mail address so I could send him a personal thank-you for saving her hair, and possibly her life, but never did locate one. I was never a big fan of his movies or TV shows, but I do feel indebted to him.

Oh, the picture came out terribly.

-Cybrex