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The Disappearance of Saturday Morning (2003)
- throawaywpg 1y agogenerally speaking, Saturday Morning Cartoons weren't much better than toy advertisements
- saalweachter 1y agoYou say that as if toy advertisements aren't exactly what an eight year old most wants to watch.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hackpit 1y agoHard to beat Wile E. Coyote, ACME products, and the diligent effort to capture the Road Runner. But it was more about that Saturday morning for 1 hour was the only time we as kids were allowed to watch TV. Then it was "Go outside and come back at 5:00 for dinner, don't be late."
- GauntletWizard 1y agoI am really hoping that the "Coyote v. Acme" movie set to release next year, as well as "The Day The Earth Blew Up" from last year, revive interest in The Looney Tunes. They are iconic Americana, omnipresent for nearly a century, but mismanaged for the last 10-15 years. What could have been with Space Jam 2...
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYou bring up a good point — the best part about Saturday morning cartoons was that they ended (sometime around noon when "Wide World of Sports" or whatever came on) and we headed out into the big blue world.
- ghaff 1y agoYeah. Saturday mornings were either cartoons or going with my mother to to the farmers' market. Then afternoons were doing whatever outside most of the time.
- i_love_retros 1y agoKids these days don't seem to have much of a childhood. My fondest memories are summers where I would disappear late morning on my bike with friends, go on an adventure, and not come home until dinner time. Now it seems childhood is filled with sports practice, homework, summer camp, and fortnite.
- svantana 1y agoIt seems likely they will grow up to be nostalgic about those things, and equally worried about some aspect of growing up in the 2040s
- jemmyw 1y agoIt's different but it's still a childhood. Although I did all those things in my childhood, except fortnite was some other computer related thing. The difference I note is we spend a lot more time together as a family, whereas when I was a kid it was more with friends. I'm not sure it's a bad thing, I wished I had spent more time with my dad.
- alnwlsn 1y agoPeople my age are nostalgic for Minecraft. You could still disappear all day (and night, too) and go on an adventure... in Minecraft. It might not be the best or healthiest thing, but it's where the memories are.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago"stranger danger". Most people don't seem to want their kids to run free any more.
- cogman10 1y agoMost people don't want to be arrested for leaving their kids unattended. [1] [1] https://www.parents.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-her-kid-walk-alone-8747874 https://www.parents.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-her-kid-wal...
- clarkmoody 1y ago
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoIt was George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken for me... good times
- bbanyc 1y agoThe funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t necessarily kid stuff either - they were full of topical references that nobody has understood since the 1940s.) Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoATSC 3.0 is a stone throw away from streaming. Over the air and non-live broadcasts will very soon be as dead as AM radio.
- deadbabe 1y agoI think what made Saturday mornings so special was that you were in school for 5 days right before it. For a kid, 5 days is a long time. For a 5 year old kid, a 5 day school week is the equivalent of a 30 year old working for 30 days straight, then imagine you have a 12 day vacation. That's how time felt, and why those first few hours of Saturday morning were so cherished, it signaled the beginning of a weekend of possibilities.
- taneq 1y agoAnd as a parent you realise that they put those cartoons on so the kids had something to do while you got a bit of a sleep-in for once. ...and to sell toys to those kids while you weren't watching, of course. ;)
- MontgomeryPy 1y agoYes. It was the only time and place to see cartoons as a kid then. Missed Saturday AM TV? Gotta wait until next Saturday AM. As for ad effectiveness, wow, every single kid in your class saw that new HotWheels car advertised.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y agoMy first day of school was the day before I turned 7... first grade. I didn't go to kindergarten because in my rural school, it was only a half day program, my mom didn't have a car to pick me up when the school day ended (school bus only in the mornings and afternoons). Perhaps things are screwed up a bit more fundamentally if we're sending 5 yr olds to school. Or maybe it's not about the education, maybe everyone needs the government-funded daycare. It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm.
- kergonath 1y ago> Perhaps things are screwed up a bit more fundamentally if we're sending 5 yr olds to school. I don’t know, I went to school at 3 and I turned out fine. Same for my kids. It’s good to be with other children at that age. > It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm. It is the norm here. If anything, 5 is quite old to start school. The alternative is one of the parents giving up their career because the vast majority of people cannot afford full-time day care. But there’s not only that. At that age children need stimulating environments and learn a lot, fast by being with others in a secure environment. You really see the difference between those who started at 3 and those who started at 6 in terms of cognitive, social, and motor development.
- teiferer 1y agoTitle improvement anybody? This is about kids TV in form of cartoons in Saturday mornings and how that has changed in the recent decade or two. Only relevant for a particular demographic and culture. Not an insignificant one, but the title "Disappearance of Saturday Morning" is much too general. Maybe "Disappearance of Saturday Morning Kids Cartoons on TV"?
- soulofmischief 1y agoIt's the title of the article.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoFor over two years now I have had a dedicated Raspberry Pi running an app I wrote that plays a kind of TV schedule all day long. It was my way of capturing something like the programming I grew up with as a kid. I have to have all the content on attached storage since I don't want to rely on online sources. But then of course the app is simply pulling up a file at a given time of the day and playing it with a media playback library in Python. Unlike television when I was young, there are no commercials. Dead time is filled at random from lists of "shorts" that are kept on the hard drive as filler. (These in fact might include Looney Tunes cartoons or shorts, music videos, etc. scraped from YouTube.) The schedule aspect means that there is a theme to the content and when it plays rather than just serving up random content from the drive. The Wednesday evening movie is always a western for example. Learning shows (courseware) and yoga in the morning, kid's shows around after-school time, a comedy series in the evening, mysteries on Mondays, etc. The biggest shortcoming of the app is that I have no trial way to create the schedule short of a Mac OS app where you have to hand-add each show. When I get time I want to have a mechanism to specify "time slots" for content and have the app do an adequate job of preparing at least a stand-in schedule. (Maybe I'll finally get around to getting this going this Fall or Winter. I hesitate to even point out the repo since it is so half-baked, but if you check my GitHub and look for "UHF", you'll find the last checked-in versions.) On any given day, I can load a web page I set up that shows today's schedule. Since the schedule that the app uses is just a JSON file, the web front-end just uses the same JSON file: parses to find today's content: https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/ https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/
- KoolKat23 1y agoErsatzTV will suit you well, or perhaps atleast provide inspiration to deal with the issue you mentioned.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI'll play with it, thanks.
- splitbrain 1y agoThis sounds interesting. How big is your library of content? And did you do this for yourself or the whole family? If the latter, how does your family interact with it? Is it automatically running on a central TV? Or on their personal devices?
- simmonmt 1y agoThe Children's Television Act didn't have anything to do with it? My understanding is that that's what brought in the E/I programming that fills (filled? it's been a few years since I looked) the space Saturday morning cartoons used to occupy on the broadcast networks. I've no doubt the other things the author lists contributed too, but it's surprising to either see E/I omitted or to learn that it had no noticeable causal effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_television_programming_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...
- giantrobot 1y agoI was surprised as well. It seems the CTA really helped kill kids programming on broadcast stations. In the LA market there was Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons. By 2000 both NBC and CBS (IIRC) had stopped Saturday morning programming and ABC's entertaining content had been replaced by E/I dreck.
- qingcharles 1y agoEveryone here is shitting on E/I, but I really enjoyed a lot of that programming. It still goes out regularly on broadcast TV.
- cogman10 1y agoFrom what I recall in the 90s (and this is just my own memory). I remember enjoying the cartoons even with the E/I regulations. None of the cartoons I got were really the GI Joe style advert cartoons. But what I also remember is that the broadcast networks over the years started reducing the number of cartoons they broadcast. I remember watching cartoons until like noon in the heyday. By the end of our broadcast cartoons, they were strictly a 1-to-2-hour event. I suspect that part of the reason for that is cartoons became a lot less lucrative with advert requirements. It wasn't until my parents got satellite TV (which got a LOT cheaper over my childhood. The old behemoth dishes were a sight to behold) that I experienced cartoons more like the GI Joe period. Cartoon network, nick, disney all had hours of unregulated cartoon nonsense with hours of kid targeted commercials. And, by then, Saturday morning was dead as a cartoon time. Why wake up early for cartoons when you could simply turn on the cartoon channel?
- neuroelectron 1y agoLast thing we need is kids socializing around shared experiences now that they can't go outside.
- georgeburdell 1y agoStrange that the article rips on declining cartoon quality in the early aughts when the 70s and 80s had endless Hanna-Barbera shovelware cartoons
- cogman10 1y agoDon't forget the Mattel cartoons. Those are unwatchable.
- MarkusQ 1y agoThere's a trick question people starting out in investment get asked: "An asset has fallen 90% in the past year. How far can it fall from its present value in the coming year?" Just because it was shovelware, doesn't mean it didn't get worse (e.g. from shovelware to schmaltzy sanitized shovelware).
- zomg 1y ago80's baby here. not only were the cartoons amazing on saturday morning, but somehow the milk was colder and the cereal tasted amazing!