Saturday morning cartoon

Saturday morning cartoon is the colloquial term for the animated television programming which was typically scheduled on Saturday mornings on the major American television networks from the 1960s to the 1990s. This genre is often referred to by its critics as "illustrated radio" (a term coined by Chuck Jones), because of its focus on voice performances, music, and sound effects over animation and visual quality.

Technique

An animated feature film may use 24 different drawings per second of finished film, sometimes even more, if several characters are on the screen simultaneously. Due to lower budgets, Saturday morning cartoons are often produced with a minimum amount of animation drawings, sometimes no more than 3 or 4 per second. In addition, the movements of the characters are often repeated, very limited, or even confined to mouths and eyes only.

Early Saturday morning cartoons

Although the Saturday morning timeslot had always featured a great deal of children's fare before, the idea of commissioning new animated series for broadcast on Saturday mornings really 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 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. The experiment proved successful, and the time slot was filled with profitable programming.

Watchgroup backlash

Parents' lobby groups like Action for Children's Television appeared in the late 1960s. They voiced concerns about the presentation of violence, anti-social attitudes and stereotypes in Saturday morning cartoons. By the 1970s, these groups exercised enough influence that the TV networks felt compelled to lay down more stringent content rules for the animation houses.

Critics have complained that this proceeded to the point where the very depiction of conflict and jeopardy and the basic elements of drama and suspense were severely restricted, and the artists were left with few avenues of expression. The prohibition against the depiction of anti-social elements often prompted conformist stories, such as in the Smurfs series, where almost any individual initiative often resulted in trouble for the group and therefore had to be avoided.

Saturday morning animation programming restricted itself to certain clearly-defined types of shows:

non-violent superheroes (Super Friends)
touring musical groups (Josie and the Pussycats, The Jackson 5ive, Alvin and the Chipmunks; Hammerman)
secret fantasy folk (Smurfs, The Snorks, Gummi Bears)
teen life (Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids); teen detective (Scooby-Doo, Jabberjaw)
animated children's versions of prime time shows (Emergency + 4, Punky Brewster, ALF)
cartoons based on movies (The Real Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Teen Wolf, The Karate Kid, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures)
animated adaptations of comics and video games (The Archie Show, Pac-Man, Saturday Supercade, The Game Master, X-Men)
animated adaptations of actor in their childhood (Little Rosey); or actors given top billing in the show's title or starring in the top role (Wish Kid Starring Macaulay Culkin, Camp Candy, Mr. T)
reruns (or sometimes, newly produced episodes) of older prime-time animated shows (The Jetsons, The Flintstones)
classic theatrical animated shorts, usually severely censored (Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry)

In a more constructive direction, the networks were encouraged to create educational spots that endeavoured to use animation for enriching content. Far and away the most successful effort was the Schoolhouse Rock series on ABC, which became a television classic.

Decline

The decline of the timeslot began in the mid 1980s due to a variety of factors, including:

the rise of first run syndication animated programs, which usually had a greater artistic freedom, looser standards (not mandated by a network) and higher production values (such as GI Joe, Robotech).

increasing popularity of home video; this made quality animated productions (like the Walt Disney Company's classic animated features) easily accessible, which encouraged unfavourable comparisons with typical television animation.

the rise of cable TV channels like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network which provided appealing children's entertainment throughout the week, making Saturday morning timeslots far less important to viewers and advertisers.

Current state of Saturday morning cartoons

While animated production is still present on most broadcast networks on Saturday mornings, it has been noticeably reduced. Because of FCC-mandated regulations that began in the mid-90s, broadcast networks were forced to program a minimum of three hours of children's educational/informational programming. "Netlets" like Fox and The WB were all but exempt from that rule since they aired programming throughout the week, so their Saturday morning lineups were a virtual free-for-all.

Broadcast networks began to reorganize their efforts to adhere to the mandates. NBC abandoned its Saturday morning cartoon lineup in 1992, replacing it with a Saturday morning edition of The Today Show and added an all live-action teen-oriented block, TNBC, which featured Saved By The Bell, California Dreams, and other teen comedies. Even though the educational content was minimal to nonexistant, NBC labelled all the live-action shows with an E/I rating. CBS followed NBC's example by producing a Saturday edition of The Early Show in 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 their animated CBS Storybreak series. In 2004, ABC was the last of the broadcast networks to add a Saturday morning edition of their morning news program, Good Morning America in the first hour of its lineup.

By the mid-1990s, broadcast networks were now becoming units of larger entertainment companies. ABC was bought by The Walt Disney Company, who began airing all Disney-made programming by 2001 and cancelled non-Disney made productions, most notably The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show. After being purchased by Disney in 1996, ABC began airing their Saturday morning cartoons in a programming block titled Disney's One Saturday Morning before switching to a block of live-action and animated programs titled ABC Kids. Many of the block's shows are produced by Disney and also air on The Disney Channel or Toon Disney.

CBS was purchased by Viacom in 1999 and began airing Nickelodeon-made programming from 1999 until 2006, a year after Viacom was split in two with Nickelodeon going to Viacom and CBS becoming a part of CBS Corporation. The two parties will end the Nick-branded block this fall, which wll be replaced by the DIC Entertainment-produced CBS's Secret Saturday Morning Slumber Party beginning in Fall 2006.

From 1990 until 2006, smaller channels like Fox and The WB, aired child-friendly programming, both animated and live-action, on weekday afternoons in the hours after most American children were let out of school (outcompeting the syndicated afternoon children's programming on the remaining unaffiliated channels in the process). Several animated series of note, such as The Animated Series, Eek! The Cat, Bobby's World, and Animaniacs, came out of these afternoon programming blocks, and some later appeared on their networks' Saturday morning programming blocks.

By the 2000s, both Fox and Kids' WB! concentrated their broadcast lineups solely on Saturday mornings. Fox, which ended their weekday block in 2001, airs 4Kids TV (formerly Fox Box), a programming block owned and operated by 4Kids Entertainment on Saturday mornings. Kids' WB!, which ended their weekday programming lineups in January 2006, will be absorbed into The CW Network's lineup, which will retain the Kids' WB! name but comprised of mostly Warner Bros-produced series such as Tom and Jerry Tales, Legion of Super Heroes (animated series), The Batman, and a new, stylisticly-different Scooby-Doo series, Shaggy & Scooby-Doo Get A Clue!.

NBC, which had a partnership with the Discovery Kids network to broadcast the channel's original programming, will reenter the Saturday morning arena with new, original programming in September 2006 as part of the Smart Place for Kids "edutainment" partnership, which involves numerous parties, including parent company NBC Universal, ion Media Networks, Scholastic Press, Nelvana, and Classic Media, all of whom will be providing new series for the new Saturday morning block.

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