Many Americans still have fond childhood memories of a Saturday morning ritual that involved watching TV cartoons. But it appears that the traditional block of animation programming has finally become a thing of the past.
On Saturday, September 27th, The CW aired the last cartoon block on all of network television, ending a decades-long tradition.
While this doesn’t mean that Saturday morning cartoons will completely vanish - there are still some cartoons airing during that traditional time – it does mean that the previously consistent four hours of uninterrupted cartoons are gone.
The reason for the change is simple economics – cartoon viewership dropped dramatically over the past three decades - from 20 million viewers in the ‘80s to only about 2 million viewers in 2003, according to the Animation World Network.
There was a push in the ‘90s by the Federal Communications Commission to more strictly enforce its rule requiring broadcast networks to provide a minimum of three hours of “educational” programming each week.
Since the networks were afraid to tamper with their prime-time slots, it found a solution to this rule by cramming the required programming into the weekend morning slot – even though the actual educational content of the cartoon programming was debatable.
In 2008, the Fox network cut its cartoons from Saturday morning, while ABC signed its former “One Saturday Morning” block to Litton. Then in 2013, Vortexx became the only non-educational, non-live action programming block geared towards children on Saturday mornings on The CW, which was the last to ditch its cartoon block programming.
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