The first weekend in America with no saturday morning cartoons

[check two]

Saturday morning American broadcast TV was once animation's home field. Filling a cereal bowl with artificially colored sugar pebbles and staring at the tube was every kid's weekend plan. Not any more: For the first time in 50-plus years, you won't find a block of animation on broadcast this morning. It's the end of an era.

Yes, The CW, the final holdout in Saturday morning animation, ran its last batch of Vortexx cartoons last weekend. This week, where you once saw shows like Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, you'll instead find "One Magnificent Morning," a block of live-action educational programming.

It's the end of an era, but it's been a long time coming: NBC ditched Saturday morning cartoons in 1992, CBS followed suit not long after, and ABC lost its animated weekend mornings in 2004. The CW, a lower-tier broadcast network, was the last holdout in a game that the Big 3 left long ago.

What killed Saturday morning cartoons? Cable, streaming, and the FCC. In the 1990s, the FCC began more strictly enforcing its rule requiring broadcast networks to provide a minimum of three hours of "educational" programming every week. Networks afraid of messing with their prime-time slots found it easiest to cram this required programming in the weekend morning slot. The actual educational content of this live-action programming is sometimes debatable, but it meets the letter of the law.

But more importantly, with hundreds of cable and satellite channels to choose from that don't have to abide the FCC's guidelines, whippersnappers kids these days can get their animation fix any day of the week. With the rise of cable and satellite, advertisers no longer had to cram all their kid-aimed commercials into the four-hour Saturday morning block. When the money left Saturday mornings, so did the cartoons.

Add in mobile streaming from Netflix, Hulu, and the like, and you'll realize that the spoiled brats we're raising today don't even need to dash to the TV in time to catch the opening credits. They can just watch whatever, whenever. Sheesh.

Still, there's something a little hollow about the notion that we woke up this morning to an America bereft of broadcast 'toons. I guess we all had to grow up sometime.

What was your favorite Saturday morning cartoon?

[GZAjector]

Whack shit

[David Daniel Davis]

I watched some of that One Magnificent Morning, it is predominantly animal themed nature documentaries that are to fill out the required educational content quotas for network television. Oh well, I have my Cartoon Network, Boomerang, all assortments of cartoon d.v.d. releases and taped episodes of shows that are not and probably never will be released for home media, so I will be okay.. My favorite Saturday morning cartoon was X Men, on the weekdays, it was Darkwing Duck and Animaniacs, watching those Animaniacs cartoons now as an adult makes me realize just how much adult humor was packed into that show that totally circumvented me as a child. There were two Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons on back in the nineties, the one that aired on A.B.C. was better than the one that aired on W.P.I.X., it was darker and more eerie.

[TAURO]

It's already happened here in the uk. It's really sad.

[IrOnMaN]

Terrible news but understandable. The kids of today are missing out on a lot. Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix are providing them with mediocre entertainment.

Basic TV is being pushed off of the air. I just hope that day doesn't come. People shouldn't be forced to pay an extra bill to be entertained.

[The Hound]

LOL

People are sad about this shit smh

Terrible news but understandable. The kids of today are missing out on a lot. Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix are providing them with mediocre entertainment.

Basic TV is being pushed off of the air. I just hope that day doesn't come. People shouldn't be forced to pay an extra bill to be entertained.

People shouldn't need television to be entertained in the first place ffs

[check two]

yeah, a lot of people have good childhood memories involving it

[b-dolo]

Weak, it is weird, I remember a time when kids show were only on Saturday morning or after school on weekdays. It was all so simple then