The Disappearance of Saturday Morning 838
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.
I used to love Saturday morning cartoons... (Score:5, Interesting)
What about classic cartoons? (Score:5, Interesting)
When was the last entertaining Bugs Bunny cartoon made? Around 1960 or so?
I can't help but wonder what happened. Sure, anime is good and all, but not as a replacement for classic cartoons. Why did it die out? They were infinitely more entertaining than anything recent. Did some Texans raise a stink about Yosemitie Sam, and PETA about talking animals being shot at all the time?
Come on... What happened?
A bad thing? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mean to come across as a self-righteous curmudgeon, but has watching less TV ever done anything but good for a child?
The alternatives, as I see it, are reading books, using computers, or interacting with other humans. Which one of those activities would you judge to be inferior to staring at the tube? The problem with TV is that it's not interactive; it doesn't require the "user" to think (or even react), but merely to passively stare at it.
Crap Today (Score:2, Interesting)
Now they are crap.
Gummi Bears. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Garfield. Pee Wee's Playhouse. Fraggle Rock....etc
Have you checked what's on TV on Saturday mornings now? - All I usually see are some Anime-esque shows, maybe a cartoon here or there, but nothing like the way it was back in the 80s and early 90s.
Anybody remember those computer-animated shows that were way ahead of their time? Must have taken months to render.
I have been scouring Kazaa, DC, etc for cartoons and shows, just so I have a record of them. They were so cool!
And yes, I am guilty of sitting down every now and then and watching some Fraggle Rock. Gotta love those Doozers - they are my favorite engineers.
The real reason (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I remember saturday mornings (Score:5, Interesting)
My little brother loves Sat. mornings he always wakes up at some un-godly hour (7:00am!?!) to watch Kids WB and FOX - Yu-Gi-Oh, Jackie Chan, Pokemon...
From Article:
My parents are divorced and my brother still loves to watch TV from 7:00 to Noon. I think the "death" of Sat. Morning Cartoons is due to the 24 hour cartoon stations, not divorce and TiVo. As I was growing up I did not have Cartoon Network, Disney and Nickelodeon. The programming for kids was only on Saturday Mornings and for 1-2 hours after I got home from school. So if I wanted to see the only kids shows I would have to have watched on Sat Morning.
Re:What about classic cartoons? (Score:5, Interesting)
Looney Toons and Calvin and Hobbes seem to span the full range of humor. There were simple gags and punch-lines to appeal to children while having hidden adult themes and social commentary subtlely burried to appeal to adults.
"Actually it's a buck-and-a-quarter quarter staff, but I'm not telling him that."
Well... (Score:2, Interesting)
Myself, I like watching YTV [ytv.com] on saturday mornings (it's a Canadian kids channel, for those who didn't know). The line up includes Transformers Armada, Transformers Beast Machines, He-man, Justice League, Jackie Chan Adventures and X-Men: Evolution. (a few others that I don't tend to watch much as well).
It's probably the most time I spend in front of a TV all week that little block.
But why would most kids want to spend saturday mornings watching cartoons? When I was younger, cartoons only happened in the early mornings, before school (forbidden to watch them by my parents at that time, or I'd miss the bus), a couple shows after school (normally the disney ones of the year) and saturday mornings.
Now, with 24/7 cartoon (or others with kid focused programming) networks, they can get their fix anytime, and plenty of households have multiple TV's, so parents and kids can each watch what they want. So there's nothing really special about saturday morning cartoons, at least to the average kid who watches cartoons (unless they realise that Saturday is when the new episodes come out... but there's always reruns, and multiple airings..)
Re:What about classic cartoons? (Score:3, Interesting)
What happened? They stopped making money.
The death of the entertaining animated short happened when the practice of running animated shorts before movies died out. Way back when, the shorts had to appeal to everyone, because everyone was going to the movies. Today, adults don't watch most animated TV shows (those specifically targeted to younger-than-boomer adults being the exception), so there is no reason to make them appeal to anyone but the pre-pubescent.
Not surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
1.) Bad cartoons. I loved Bugs Bunny, but I couldn't stand most of the new crap that the networks kept throwing at me. With the exception of Captain Planet. :oD
2.) Short runs. Those new cartoons usually had runs of one season or less (Remember 'Hypernauts'? Didn't think so). Not much room to get into it, and took no time for it to fade away. Its pretty hard to get interested in anything that way.
3.) The computer, the internet. Completely took over my mornings and days. I replaced one addiction with two more...and now I spend my Saturday mornings compiling custom kernels.
Whups, maybe I've said too much!
Re:I remember saturday mornings (Score:5, Interesting)
> Ninja Turtles.
The Saturday-morning cartoons I most easily remember from when I was a kid are *The Smurfs* and those public service type edu-toons the stations were required to run, like the *Schoolhouse Rock* cartoons, as well as the musical advertisements from cheese manufacturers' or beef industry associations...
I also recall that my favorite Saturday-morning show wasn't a cartoon, but rather some show in which a bearded guy would tell stories to a room full of kids. Just like story time in elementary school, only on TV. He'd tell some really gruesome kids' stories though, like the one in which a man fights with some sort of man-beast and cuts a chunk out of its flesh during the fight, and takes it home and cooks it up to serve for his family...
A few years later the arrival of *Saved By the Bell* started to change the landscape of Saturday-morning kids' TV, turning it into a time for kids' versions of sitcoms and other live-character shows instead of so many cartoons. Mmmmm, the crush I had on those *Saved By the Bell* gals when I was a kid...
BTW, for anyone who doesn't know, the classic *Schoolhouse Rock* series is available on a special-edition DVD these days. Great nostalgia.
Re:A bad thing? (Score:4, Interesting)
RTFA. You'll see he points out that the availability of cable TV means that kids can watch kid-oriented TV any time of the week, not just on Saturday morning. Though he doesn't mention it, the increased percentage of families with 2 or more TVs probably doesn't hurt either (as Mum and Dad go off to watch "The West Wing" while the kids watch "Nick at Night").
The availability of TV shows for kids probably means that kids watch more TV than before, not less. They just don't do it on Saturday morning.
(The demise of the cartoon, at any time, though, has different factors, also covered in the article)
Changes.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The second thing I feel leads to their demise is just the lineup. When I was a kid the Sat. Morning Cartoons had a basic layout, the lame cartoons early, the "hip" cartoons, or whatever cartoons fit the trend, and finally you could round out the morning with the timeless cartoons such as Bugs Bunny. In my eyes, things got bad when some jack ass executive decided that they needed to take the classics and change them into kid versions of themselves, such as the Tom and Jerry Kids (although I will excuse Tiny Toons, but thats my opinion). These crappy cartoons just took up air time.... then the Power Rangers came out and to me, thats when I feel Sat. Morning lost its apeal.
Looking around my neighborhood and at my friends and their children, Id have to agree with the divorce notion on the demise of these cartoons. Most people I know who get the kids for the weekend make plans with their children, like going to the zoo or the pool, or camping. Its sad, I remember waking up in my PJs to watch cartoons, and those will always be some of my fonder memories.
children of the late 70's and early 80's remember: (Score:2, Interesting)
Kids' shows featured casts of kids doing silly things. Nobody remembers what, but we all remember enjoying it just the same. Nobody ever figured out how to talk like the kids on Zoom did. We remember the other more useful things instead... Box 350, Boston Mass, oh-two-one-three-four.
Why can't my self-addressed, stamped envelope get me that fan stuff back the next day? ACME always gets the Coyote's packages delivered in seconds. Anyone that says today's television is more violent than it used to be has never seen what happens to the Coyote several times in any five minute stretch. I bet he's got a lot of 'frequent flier' miles built up, mostly vertical, down to be specific.
Popeye was cool, but never did persuade me to try spinish. Mickey Mouse and crew were probably the ideal cartoon, leaving out the violence and still keeping us smiling. Donald Duck had all sorts of issues. Taz wasn't cool yet.
We remember all those silly repititious cartoons that we never got tired of watching. Scooby Do, Space Ghost, Super Friends. I was always in awe at how the Mystery Machine crew spotted minor details I missed, detailed later in the show in a flashback... only later with repeats did I notice that they cheated us by not actually showing the minor detail in the earlier part of the show.
While I certainly don't blame any psychotic behavior on Road Runner, I would pose a few questions about how cartoons may have affected us. How many kids tried dog biscuits after watching Shaggy on Scooby Do? How many kids expected more of the Post Office after watching Wiley Coyote? How many of us thought you couldn't fall unless you made the mistake of looking down?
It's a shame these are very rare to see now on Saturday morning. Closest thing I've seen recently would be Animaniacs - characters being silly for sillyness' sake. Isn't that what being a kid is all about?
Cartoons were readily available during the 80s too (Score:5, Interesting)
We had Nickelodeon, we had Nintendo almost everything that exists now existed back then. The only real difference is the complete lack of cartoons (and the lack of major action figure lines as well... do kids not play with them anymore? What's the deal?!?). I think it's the networks trying to save money by not putting into shows that they state don't make a great deal of money. They ignored the cartoon departments and now they've just more of less given up on it and blamed cable as the reason.
I think a fair comparison would be a local theater. They got rid of student and military discounts a few years back in a small town (Manhattan, KS) that exists mainly due to Kansas State and nearby Ft. Riley. They jacked up adult prices at the same time. The cited reason for the lack of discounts was that dollar theaters covered this market. Ignoring that the same company then bought and quickly closed the only dollar theater in town they cite something vaguely related that doesn't compare (I want to see a first-run film, not something that I didn't want to see or already saw four months ago) as an excuse to make more money.
What ever happend to kids sitting around radios? (Score:5, Interesting)
The idea of BBSes and online shopping was such an amazing thing people couldn't believe it.
When Byte ran an artical about how computers would replace TVs eventually people were sceptical. The pet rock of the 80s or so they belived.
For kids today computers have already replaced TV. They probably don't even know what radio is. Music comes from MP3s and CD players. Books are PDF files.
Bugs Bunny has nothing on Neopets.com
Yugi and Pokemon... and while the cartoons exist as 30 min daily ads for the card games it seams more and more kids only watch them becouse of the card games.
Now a days the Yugi and Pokemon video games are ads for the TV shows and card games.
Willy Wonka candys advertises by having a website filled with games and runs ads on Neopets.com.
It's not just the kids. Thow they lead the way.
CNN Headline News already knows the future. CNN.com. FoxNews has it's website. and when NBC looks for a partnership it looks to Microsoft.
People complain less about the crap on TV... Not becouse there is less crap. All the good shows are going away or going to hell leaving nothing but crap. But it's the crap that people who won't go online like.
It's the digital age. I just gave a 7 year old a Knoppix CD and then the topic of upgrading ram came up... (The Bosses son.. His computer need more memory)
The next generation understands Rinkworks Computer Stupidities [rinkworks.com].
For them Google is the place to look up information not the public libary.
The idea of sitting around watching TV for 30 minuts seams.. alien.
My boss dosen't worry about her kids watching to much TV. She worrys about them playing to many video games.
Too many PC issues. (Score:5, Interesting)
To give you an idea to my age, I remember when the original Scoobie do wasn't a re-run, and didn't have that little croch sniffer Scrappie.
Blame it on video games. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then along came the NES, which truly revolutionized the home gaming phenomenon and became as commonplace as toasters in many households. Kids started spending more and more time with their came consoles and less with their toys, and this phenomenon continues to the present day, when video games continue to take up a larger and larger portion of floor space at toy stores every year.
It's especially pronounced in Japan, where, through the 60s, 70s and 80s there were jillions of live action and cartoon shows produced to serve as vehicles for promoting superhero, monster, and robot toys. Nowadays, there are only a few core brands left that have any kind of sustainability, with very few newcomers to the fold. Some companies like Takara have tried crossover products like Web Diver Gradion [google.com], but they haven't caught on as much as they'd like. Kids there are just having more fun with their Playstations and Game Boys.
Of course, there is the occasional Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh that achieve breakthrough success, but one could argue that these are pretty heavily game-based properties as opposed to toy-based.
Simple; they suck (Score:5, Interesting)
Cartoons were clearly tied to gender. There were boy cartoons (GI Joe, Transformers, Voltron, M.A.S.K., that one with the light gun plane where you shot at the screen, and so forth), and girl cartoons (Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, etc.). These were genuine, good quality shows that were obvious toy tie-ins, but kids loved them. See, toys provide something tangible, and the easiest way to generate toys is to not have character development. If I want to add a character to Spongebob, I have to have a meaningful purpose for that character, because said cartoon is primarily narrative and dialogue-driven. Transformers is also arguably narrative-driven, although the narrative consists primarily of Autobots vs. decepticons, so adding a flying plane or a dinosaur is trivial.
It seems a bit rambling, but I'm bringing it together here. I can remember watching kids play Power Rangers at the park. Power Rangers is easy to play. You choose your ranger, you go off and battle "evil". How the hell do a bunch of kids play Spongebob? What, you pretend to be some crab and exchange half-wit banter while simultaneously apppealing to an older demographic?
Basically, it's a lack of conflict. Every solid cartoon show revolved around the simplest of ideas, good vs. evil. It might've been that the evil was Decepticons, or the wicked Voltron queen, or Cobra, or that Rainbrow Brite villain who was only drawn in shades of gray. A dialogue-driven children's show is going to have to be pretty damned well-written to appeal to kids, and hiring good writers costs good money. Cartoons exist primarily because they're cheap to produce, so any gain from choosing the medium is eliminated when you have to gety talented writers on board. Maybe it's a reflection of our values as a society (or more particularyl, young parents' values) , or maybe it's Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, as other posts have mentioned, but something's just missing there.
Alternately, it could simply be that the plethora of cable networks broadcasting cartoons has taken the profitability away from the format.
Re:The end of an era (Score:3, Interesting)
This may be unrelated, but I just wanna comment that while kids are learning games (and gaining that instinctive reflex action to press the controller buttons), they're not learning something else. 2 hours a day of gaming means 2 hours taken away from something else (maybe like interacting with people).
It may not be obvious now, but after a few years of "2 hours a day" gaming (on a young child's mind!), the kids today may grow up to be totally different adults than we are (I mean as in "viewing the world" differently).
No Saturday morning cartoons (and crappy cartoons all over)... Well, kids have to find entertainment somewhere, and it sure isn't school they're looking into.
Ahh memories... (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps I watched a little too much TV as a kid. Like Pavlov's dog, I flip the TV off every time I see "Meet The Press" cause that means the cartoons are over.
The Conservation of Crappiness (Score:3, Interesting)
I was a TV kid; a real obsessive little dweeb. I watched far, far too much kiddie crap, and for too long. (Think Milhous van Houton.) But I was also an observant, skeptical, and curious little dweeb. (Good training for my career in QA!) I recognized before most kids the difference between first run and syndicated shows, film and video tape, and the value of different time slots.
Well, my point: There is a conservation of crappiness in Saturday Morning TV. Most of it has always been awful. Much of what we liked as kids was awful. It wouldn't hold up if you saw it now. At least, if you've grown up even a little.
The bright lights, then as now, were few, and usually died quickly. (There was a whole slew of live-action poetry-and-storytelling shows in the early 70s; well-meaning post-hippie artiness like "Animals, Animals, Animals." Anyone remember an early-90s FOX show called "Nightmare Ned?" Or the artsy, weird, "ZaZu U?")
If Saturday Morning dies, I can't feel too sad. Give the kids books, or video tapes, or shove them outside so they can build up their immune systems by rolling in the dirt.
Stefan
After Reading this is no surprise. (Score:2, Interesting)
I do remember however getting up really early and watching the end of the color bars and then drudging through the national anthem to watch wonder dog at 5:30 because that was the only time it was on.
However I don't buy the quality time crap though, Kids probably don't watch too much TV because they are busy at the mall doing nothing, adn trying to be more adultish or something. Which is why I think kids now a days are trying to be adults faster or something because kids mimic that of adult ones, like the lizzie mcguire that was mentioned.
Finnally a slight OT rant about the advertising portion of the article.
<rant> However when it comes to advertising and targeted marketing, it still sucks even today. For example how on earth do you get pixie pocket or other strange girl toy commericals during DBZ ? (* Not that I watch DBZ :-) *)
</rant>
last but not least if i ever ever get an anime channel, adult swim probably won't be a thing on my TODO list either.
Ah, good ol' cartoons (Score:3, Interesting)
Saturday mornings are crap nowadays. It used to be watch ABC's friday night lineup (family matters, step by step, some other crap and perfect strangers), go to bed, wake up, watch saturday morning cartoons, then sit around and play nintendo all day. Watch SNICK at night and then sunday was here. Ah the good ol' days.. now papers for school and this internet thing suck up all my time.
It's Not All Gone (Score:2, Interesting)
hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly. (Score:1, Interesting)
All it it took was one giant hamster rampaging through the city and a scene of a city being destroyed and Nick cancels it due to "9/11" sensitivities. Assholes. It could have been the best show on TV.
What happened? De-regulation happened. Duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
What was the mystery again?
Beginning of end of larger era (Score:5, Interesting)
There is one thing that the article is not completely clear on, and that is whether or not there is a definite drop in the number of children watching cartoons at all. In other words, is it just that they can now watch cartoons anytime they want, or are they also watching less?
From other trends I have seen, it could very well be that the current generation of children are too busy doing other things to look at TV (something that the article does mention), at least not as extensively as the generation before them. But if this is true, think of this: Today's cartoon-watchers are tomorrow's primetime TV watchers. If they're not watching TV much now, will they suddenly turn around and start watching it when they get older? I think not.
So we could be seeing the beginning of the end of the era of television itself. It will be a very slow death, but it may come nevertheless. Even now primetime TV is starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel for fresh ideas. I doubt the next generation of potential TV watchers will be satisfied with this.
This makes me think of a throwaway line of dialogue from an episode of the original Star Trek. I forget the name of the episode (it was the one where they get zapped back in time to 20th century Earth and accidentally beam the Air Force pilot on board). At one point Spock said something like (paraphrased) "Television died out as an entertainment medium sometime in the 21st century."
Life imitating art, perhaps?
Re:What about classic cartoons? (Score:2, Interesting)
Eventually some marketing genius thought it might be better to advertise for other movies, rather than provide a little extra entertainment. The advertisers paid a lot more than the cartoon people, who paid next to nothing (or nothing) to get cartoons on the screen. With the multi million dollars budgets for movies, it's chump change to have the editor cut you a preview for a movie. In fact, it should cost next to nothing or be included in the contract anyway. But animation costs money too, and they don't get that money back so unless ticket holders took on that cost, there would be no way to keep them around. Unfortunately, the economic situation of that time period did not allow for these costs to be successfully passed on.
Tthe real reason they are dead is because we won't pay (extra) to see them. If they spent the million or two dollars to make one now, would we pay the extra $1 to see the movie?
I also believe part of the reason they are dead is vanity. Disney abhorred the thought of anyone else's cartoons coming before one of his features. That led to series of shorts that he made to fill in the time before a feature and edge out the competition. For every cartoon someone else put out, Disney had to one up it to keep them off his movie screens. Because there were many studios, this led to a frenzy of cartoon making. (Goofy and baseball anyone?) But the truth is, Disney thought of himself and his studio as more than just "cartoonists" and thought that he was more than just basic laughs and sought to recreat characters with realism. He reasoned that that was the true destiny of animation and is what separated the "upper class" animators from the rest.
He took this matter very seriously so when the competition stopped making shorts due to advertising taking over, Disney was more than relieved as he could kill the shorts and focus and what he thought was the more money making and artistic of the two art forms. This would lead to the end of the WB/Fleischer/Disney/etc. cartoons before a show.
They were recycled into what we knew as the Saturday shorts, but newer cutting edge characters such as, Transformers, GI Joe, TMNT, My Little Pony, Strawberry Shortcake, etc. which feature more realistic violence and more modern characters phased them out. Then the newer shows were phased out by whatever is on the screen anymore on Saturday morning, I stopped watching.
If you want to know more about the history of animation, these books are quite useful:
Of Mice and Magic, Leonard Maltin
Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, Jeo Adamsson (might be out of print)
Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, Giannalberto Bendazzi
Sorry, too lazy to look them up on Amazon, I have an animation due this week. :P
Re:Remember nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm surprised this thread is not modded higher - until very recently, I got up ay 7 am (or before!) on Saturdays to whatch cartoons with my kid, who is now 7. I know a hell of a lot of people don't dig it, for the both oft-maligned and praised factor in this thread - toy tie-ins - but we watched the freaking hell out of the first three seasons of Digimon. Totally kickass. Then you had in the last couple years these crazy cartoons like Fighting Foodons - not only was that hella f***ed up but also pretty damn funny.
Now, Digimon got re-angled at a younger audience, but the risky cartoons (not risqué, risky - too weird to get popular) have all been cancelled and there's just nothing there. Makes me really sad - I LOVE saturday morning for cartoons, just any cartoons. Spoon up some sugar bombs with the kid before mom wakes up - hell, maybe even wake and bake before I wake the boy up - and watch the hell out of four hours of cartoons.
Also, I agree with other posters that toy tie-ins are totally important! Yes, it's a scam to take your money as a parent, but it rocks to connect with both the cartoon and the kids by having the digivices, the action figures, etc. - it gives you a whole mythology to explore early creativity, etc. I guess in the new family-values world that mythology is provided by religion, but not in my house, bub.
F*** sunday and church, my son and I want cartoons back on track.
Saturday cartoons? Why, you have ballet classes! (Score:5, Interesting)
Anxious parents overload their children, pushing them too hard, too soon. It is becoming increasingly common for parents to enroll their young children in after-school activities (sports, music, ballet). Here is an interesting quote from Time magazine: "Kids who once had childhoods now have curriculums; kids who ought to move with lunatic energy of youth now move with the high purpose of the worker bee."
I do not know what the author considers to be quality time, but taking kids to ballet school and driving together in the car is definitely not quality time.
This seems like as good a time as any (Score:2, Interesting)
The Adventures of Don Coyote and Sancho Panda
Fantastic Max
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Voltron
Gummy Bears
Midnight Patrol (does anyone else remember this one?)
Sonic the Hedgehog (That's Sonic SatAM, the cool and well animated one, not the crappy ones)
probably a bunch more I can't remember anymore
And possibly my worst favorite SatAM memory:
the death of Gargoyles...why did they ever move it out of the afternoon lineup? grr
It also is interesting to see some of the old classics (for me anyways...I know that's a relative term) being brought back, like the new He-Man cartoon (not to be confused with The New Heman, which sucked) and the new Turtles cartoon.
another point (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Dragon Ball Z. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I remember saturday mornings (Score:4, Interesting)
I am 36, which means I remember Cartoons starting when I was 5 in 1971, up to when I left home at 19 and no longer had younger brothers and sisters watching them.
No one hear has mentioned Boomerang, the Cartoon Network spin-off which showcases Hanna-Barbara cartoons from 1958 to 1985.
Yes, now seen as an adult, some of the shows I thought were cool, are, well, junk. However, some things still hold up well. Like Johnny Quest
Also no one has mentioned such Jay Ward classics as Rocky and Bullwinkle. A show written for kids, with dialog for the adults and humor that cut to the heart of the cold war.
I remember back in the 70's when the networks would have a Friday night where they would show off their new Saturday morning linuep. One of the things we would look forward to after school started up again in September is seeing what new cartoons would be on.
Inspector Gadget and Robotech were worth watching. At 18, I grew tired of the He-Man,GI Joe tie-ins. They had enough bullets flying around to call it world war 3, but no one ever dies, They can't die, K-Mart had 100 units of each figure on the shelf, killing of the character would have been bad business.
Yes, the quality of the animation is terrible now days. There are a few modern gems. I find Ren and Stimpy funny and pretty incorrect.
I would have to agree that most cartoons are not very good, because they are not witty and there is no adult humor in them, or that they are so PC. Let's dialog about our feelings. The Simpsons has not been on so long because they dialog about their feelings, it's because they take no prisoners.
It's pretty sad realy, even back in the 70's most of the great cartoons had been made in the 60's.
Sunday mornings in India... (Score:4, Interesting)
'Heyday' of cartoons (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny how everyone perceives the 'heyday of cartoons' simply as the time they themselves watched cartoons as a kid, with everything after that being crap. Different generations - different 'heydays'.
JP
Saturday morning - RIP. (Score:4, Interesting)
I think network tv is missing the real market for Saturday morning cartoons - adults that grew up with it. I think a lot of us would tune in (with our own kids) to watch good cartoons. We could be spending a couple hours every Saturday morning with our kids just having a laugh. Some good cartoons like Looney Tunes. Toward the middle of the day fade the programming from animation into more grow up stuff. Bill Nye the Science Guy, Junkyard Wars, etc.. sort of educational things children and parents might watch together.
I dunno (Score:1, Interesting)
Basically two things have happend
i, cartoons have become very PC, mostly because of concern over toy manufactors marketing to kids, by using violence as a quick out, ie TMNT, and any of those shows which run the some transformation sequence every week like Power Rangers. - not sure if this is a good or bad thing as they have just replaced violence with obessive (gotta get them all) collecting like Pockemon and its knockoffs prove.
ii, The demographic has shifted due to the creation full time cartoon channels on cable and ofcourse video games.
(Most of the posts that people are making pretty much break down to these two points.)
Personally, I feel that anything which may have kids getting off their fat arses and atleast spending some time outside, ala Simpsons style when marge made Ichy and Scartchy suck, has to be a good thing... maybe there's a massive PTO letter writing conspiracy with just that goal in mind.
However we all know that the networks will just fill the slot with hour upon hour of clip shows trying to sell the latest backshreets boys CD to childern too young to remember New Kids on the Block.
Never let morality stop you from doing what is right
Johnny Quest vs The Gub'men (Score:2, Interesting)
or "When they came for the cartoons I did nothing because I wasn't a cartoon"
Weren't there some government hearings on cartoon violence a few years ago? Didn't the television folks agree to straighten up and fly right? It sounds like that's about the time cartoons started getting lame. Coincidence? I don't think so. I got curious about what happened and did some googling.... [google.com]
STEP 1. OMG! Marvin the Martian [ufl.edu] just blew up the Earth, and that's supposed to be funny?
from TRUCE [truceteachers.org] - Teachers Resiting Unhealty Children's Entertainment
"Too much of what children see on television is violence as entertainment. It undermines lessons we teach at home and school about how people treat each other, and encourages the use of violence to solve problems and to have fun. We have seen the effects of this glamorized violence in such events as school shootings."
STEP 2. I am shocked and appalled and am going to do something about it.
from lionlamb.org [lionlamb.org]
"The mission of The Lion & Lamb Project is to stop the marketing of violence to children. We do this by helping parents, industry and government officials recognize that violence is not child's play - and by galvanizing concerned adults to take action."
"Lion & Lamb works to reduce the marketing of violent toys, games and entertainment to children in two distinct ways. We work with parents and other concerned adults to reduce the demand for violent "entertainment" products, and with industry and government to reduce the supply of such products."
"We believe that attitudes about violence as "entertainment" can be changed over time. Just as attitudes about drunk driving and smoking have changed, we believe that Lion & Lamb can help forge a national consensus that violence is not child's play. Just as it has become "uncool" to pollute and to litter, we are working to change the tolerance level for violence as a "cool" theme for toys and other entertainment products for children."
STEP 3. Well, if you think about it, we can't do it ourselves, so we need the government to force everyone to do the right thing.
"Too often, both government and the entertainment industry place all responsibility for monitoring the games children play on the shoulders of their parents. Certainly, parents need to be vigilant and provide their kids with guidance. But in a culture where $1 billion a year is spent by industries of all sorts to advertise their products directly to children, parents can't stem the tide of "entertainment" violence on their own." - snippet from an article [lionlamb.org] at LionLamb.org
STEP 4. The Government is only too happy to oblige. Who could vote against protecting children?
"Senator Paul Simon, speaking to a conference organized in Beverly Hills on August 2 by the National Council for Families and Television, told some 650 representatives of the broadcasting business who were present that he was giving them sixty days to come up with a plan to regulate themselves with respect to the portrayal of violence--or else they would face some sort of government regulation." - from newcriterion.com article archived from Sept. 1993 [newcriterion.com]
Step 5. Mission Accomplished
"Culminating a protracted campaign against TV violence, both Houses of Congress have passed legislation requiring that new televisions be equipped with the so-called v-chip -- a computerized chip capable of detecting program ratings and blocking adversely rated programs from view." - from an article [aclu.org] in the ACLU Archive
Re:The real reason (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The end of an era (Score:3, Interesting)
Like many forms of entertainment there is a cultural basis established with it and people will interact due to that shared culture. Look at the internet, people run websits about games, get involved in communities over them, play games with other people, form clans, and even lasting friendships. I know at least one person longer than any human I am currently in contact with outside of my family due to a website we worked on... the internet keeps friendships going during the transience of the late teens and twenties.
Maybe I should trash on vapid, time-wasting hobbies like fishing, reading, cycling, or sports. I mean, hell... what good are sports? All you do is gain skill at moving a silly ball around an artificial enviroment and perhaps some physical benefits. It's a shame that all they're learning about is the sport they engage in and precious little else.
My apologies, but really. When you look at it almost any hobby is insular to a point and tends to teach little else but the hobby itself and perhaps a few things related to it. I also find it odd when people mention reading as being significantly better than television or video games or such. Yes, reading is a valuable skill (I read voraciously now and always have and tend to notice the effect it's had on my vocabulary as well as reading level and other such skills) but a child (or adult for that matter) can read total crap and gain very little just as they can play shitty games or watch terrible television programs and get the same value out of it.
End of Saturday Morning Cartoons (Score:5, Interesting)
Cartoons during the 80s anyway (when I was watching them) typically had very morally absolutist/dualistic themes permeating their storylines. You had a group that was identified as "good," another group that was identified as "bad," and the line between the two was very clearly defined. This of course was before the advent of postmodernism, which includes among other things the concept of moral relativism...ergo, the concept that there's no such thing as moral absolutes. The other thing that was different is that back then the entire concept of political correctness didn't exist either. Society now is so inundated with the clamouring cries of this or that minority group that it's virtually impossible to conceive of a storyline for just about anything without the risk of offending *someone*. I'm not sure why it's happened in the last 20 years, but before about 1990, people used to be nowhere near as easily offended as they are now. There's talk of releasing watered down versions of The Lord of The Rings, the Bible, and pretty much everything in between in order to make them bland and as inoffensive as possible.
The bottom line is that if you can't say something without having to worry that it's going to bring all sorts of crap down on your head because of possibly offending the gay movement or some other equally paranoid, emotive, and fanatical minority group, you most likely will end up not saying anything at all. To me, this has far more wide-ranging implications also than just the death of cartoons...we're talking about freedom of expression as a whole.
Re:Remember nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
no tie-ins? (Score:2, Interesting)
Care Bear Shoelaces - Click for a larger picture or to add to your basket [strawberrycentral.com]
Care Bears
Strawberry Shortcake [strawberrycentral.com], I remember my sister collecting some of thease.
My Little Pony [mylittlepo...lector.com], I had to watch the film... ahhhh...
Rainbow Brite [rainbowbrite.net]
mean nothing to those under 25??? (Score:2, Interesting)
My point is that Saturday morning cartoons mean something to some of us younger than twenty-five, despite what the article stated.
Where's anime when you need it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yet the anime and manga industries thrive in Japan. While that industry and our cartoon industry have many differences, I'll bet we're talking about the same demographic.
Children may be evolving emotionally faster, but the blame can be placed directly on American cartoons' coefficient of crappiness. Emotionally mature adults gobble up anime all the time.
adults as children (Score:2, Interesting)
Scientists (yes 'them') reckon that domesticated cats are like this- still in many ways kittens because their easy lifestyle in the homes of hu-mans allows them to.
Er, like, "Discuss!"
graspee
Re:I remember saturday mornings (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it simply a count of divorces per marriages in a particular year? If so, doesn't that discount marriages that last for a long time?
JoAnn
Re:Remember nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
Yu-Gi-Ohhhhhh!!!!!
Too many people try to grow up too fast these days, throwing away their childhood in exchange of a stressed adulthood.
Here's something someone e-mailed to me a little over 3 years ago. It fits here. (I didn't write it, and neither did the person who sent it to me. I don't know who the author is and don't feel like google'ing to find out.)
My Adulthood Resignation:
I am hereby officially tendering my resignation as an adult.
I have decided I would like to accept the responsibilities of a 6 year-old
again.
I want to go to McDonald's and think that it's a four-star restaurant.
I want to sail sticks across a fresh mud puddle and make a sidewalk with
rocks.
I want to think M&M's are better than money because you can eat them.
I want to lie under a big oak tree and run a lemonade stand with my friends
on a hot summer day.
I want to return to a time when life was simple. When all you knew were
colors, multiplication tables and nursery rhymes, but that didn't bother you,
because you didn't know what you didn't know and you didn't care.
All you knew was to be happy because you were blissfully unaware of all the
things that should make you worried or upset.
I want to think the world is fair. That everyone is honest and good.
I want to believe that anything is possible. I want to be oblivious to the
complexities of life and be overly excited by the little things again.
I want to live simple again. I don't want my day to consist of computer
crashes, mountains of paperwork, depressing news, how to survive more days in
the month than there is money in the bank, doctor bills, gossip, illness, and
loss of loved ones.
I want to believe in the power of smiles, hugs, a kind word, truth, justice,
peace, dreams, the imagination, mankind, and making angels in the snow.
So . . . here's my checkbook, my car-keys, and my credit card bills!
I am officially resigning from adulthood. And if you want to discuss this
further, you'll have to catch me first, 'cause
"TAG! You're it." !!!!!
Dude, Ren and Stimpy... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about classic cartoons? (Score:2, Interesting)
True. I did notice a trend to copy the format, and many of the gags, from some of these early classics for later toons.
CN runs a 'toon heads', late sunday night if I'm not mistaken, that attempts to showcase particular cartoonists, characters or genres (the wartime ones, for example) and provides commentary and frame of reference for some of these works.
In one case, they did a "first classic, later ripoff" type show where they showed the original toon and then the subsequent one that "borrowed" from the original. The "house of tomorrow" was done something like four times, getting lamer each iteration.
But, I did see the one they did on wartime toons. I did know a bit about the origins of lines like "SHUT OUT THAT LIGHT!" and "was this trip *really* necessary", but it was fun to have a lot of the gags explained in context of some of the "homefront" wartime experiences (civil defense blackouts, ration cards, rubber shortage, hershey bars and nylons, etc).
Making gags about these common experiences probably helped many to cope with the situation.
BTW, one of my favorite gags of all time was the one where the kitten is being chased by a big dog, an older black cat gives the kitten a whistle and tells the kitten to call him whenever the dog bothers him. The kitten blows the whistle, the black cat marches onscreen, crosses the dog's path, and something bad happens (a piano falls on him, etc).
That gag gets repeated, oh, like 50 times in the 2:30 cartoon. I still laugh my ass off every time I see it. In the end, the dog swallows the whistle and gets the hiccups, causing the whistle to go off each time. Shit starts falling from the sky -- first a bathtub, then a safe, a bus, etc. Each time, the doc hiccups, the whistle blows, he looks up and scrambles out of the way just in time.
In the last second before the toon fades to black, a whole damn battleship falls out of the sky.
I still watch Saturday morning cartoons (Score:3, Interesting)
There are also the "salute to WB legends" shows, like the Tex Avery and Chuck Jones shows. Those are fun to watch because they address the cartoons from an academic standpoint and you get to appreciate what was groundbreaking in particular episodes.
One problem I've seen with cartoons these days are the music. Look at cartoons from the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's and the music is all classical, or even somtimes jazz. The animation is made to work with the music, too. If you watch the current crop of cartoons, it all sounds like an afterthought - a cheap, uninspired afterthought. Oh, the cast is going to a tropical island? Let's play the show's crappy theme song with steel drums! The end result is a cartoon that hyperactive kids can tolerate, but the shows will be completely unwatchable in ten years. Do you think anybody in ten years is going to want to watch old episodes of 'Ed, Edd, and Eddy?' Old Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons can still make you laugh. Seems like everything today is just Hanna-Barbera - one or two good shows if you dig around, but it's probably not worth all that work.
If some genius would bring back these on DVD.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Saturday toons died when the toys died. (Score:2, Interesting)
Nowadays, however, cartoons are far more different. Sure there are product tie-ins but the toons are more dialogue driven and rarely focus on the overall conflict of good vs. evil. Likewise heroes often take a backseat to more identifiable characters with more realistic qualities. When I was a kid the Autobots used to save children from the evil Decepticons, Now as an adult, the children save the Autobots. I think that says a lot about what cartoons as a whole have evolved into.
But moreover it's that lack of interactivity with current toons that send kids flocking to video games and even in some ways to the Internet more so than the tube. I think kids are becoming conditioned to the fact that TV is a passive medium, you sit in front of it and it entertains you and you walk away. And really that's the entire problem in a nutshell. I mean I remember being a good consumer and buying those toys in the 80's, but I also remember spending hours coming up with my own stories, my own conflicts and my own characters through those toys. I don't think children have that now and it's a shame. Those shows in the 80's spawned interactivity (and creativity for that matter) and that element is gone now. Kids are tough customers, you lose their interest for a second and you've lost them forever.
The new Saturday morning... (Score:3, Interesting)
... looks a lot like Wednesday nights but for kids.
So long to real kid-oriented cartoons and hello to kid-versions of adult shows. I spent part of this past Saturday watching TV with my daughters (first graders) and what's big on the morning shows now? A kid version of Survivor. Complete with a dumbed down version of paper/scissors/rock that I supposed was intended to teach some sort of strategic thinking; educational only if one considers out-and-out guessing a kind of ``strategy''.
I wonder what the heck ever happened to real educational TV. When I was a kid there was the ``Discovery'' series (Discovery 67, Discovery 68, etc.), Mr. Wizard, etc. Later on there was another show you could catch on PBS (I think) called something like `Physical Universe' (started out as a lecture but had good illustrative CG graphics to demonstrate the principles being talked about). There was Bronoski's `Ascent of Man', Burke's `Connections', Sagan's `Cosmos', and others. True, those last few aren't exactly kid stuff but at least some kids would find that interesting and I can tell you that my two girls would have found much of them interesting. (Actually, they have seen `Connections' before and thought it was very interesting.) Somebody has already mentioned `Biil Nye the Science Guy' and `Beaker's World' which weren't bad but geared more toward the ADD afflicted to allow kids to really learn very much.
Nowadays, we have Disney hawking `Winnie the Pooh' as educational TV (OK, so they call it `illuminating television'; always good for a belly laugh) and, now, the Survivor clones. At least when I was a kid there were choices that included some educational content. It's gotten to where I think the most important thing that my kids will learn from television is how to turn it off.
Fsck the Schoolhouse! (Score:3, Interesting)
If you want to see what SatAM cartoons would be if the fsckn child psychologists and the teachers took it over, watch PBS' SatAM programming. Or Noggin. Or the second wave (post-"Rugrats Movie") Rugrats. Boring, boring boring...
There is a reason why Japanese series have almost put the entirety of the animation industry in the United States out of business. Japanese TV doesn't mandate the kind of "educational" content rules that US TV does. I don't know how it survives in Canada, other than by the intervention of the Film Board of Canada and the "Canadian Content" regulations.
VCRs negate the need for the time slot (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sunday mornings in India... (Score:3, Interesting)
Although interestingly enough, there IS a Japanese series that recently made it to the US called Arjuna...it's not about the legendary hero of the Mahabharata, but rather about a "magical girl" character who is chosen by the old Gods to defend the planet from demons (they are called Raaja but I suppose Rakshasha is the more proper term) and from ecological destruction. Bandai Entertainment developed the series in Japan and is releasing it dubbed/subbed in the US. Here's the link:
http://www.arjunaproject.com/ [arjunaproject.com]
Maybe in the US (Score:2, Interesting)
BBC1 9am - 12pm = Cartoons and Music
ITV3 9am - 12pm = Cartoons and Music
Ch5 8am - 1pm = Cartoons (mostly CGI)
Sky1 7am - 1pm = Cartoons + WWE