General Animation TV Ratings Thread

Oh, good Lord. Saturday mornings aren't dead. If you want to do something about it, why not try to get into cartooning or do something about it? Make your own entertainment. The point of having them when we were younger was to prepare us in the long-run to entertain ourselves.

Go play with your kids, see a movie, go out with your friends, read a book! Most of us had a good time with Saturday mornings when we were younger, so why complain? Get interested in something else and move on. :p
 
Saturday mornings are not really dead, they just have changed. Now most people have cable and that is what the kids watch. I also read somewhere that more kids do sports/activities on Saturday mornings than 20 years.
 
Saturday Mornings are dead? I thought that was well established when Fox decided to stop hosting the 4kids run blocks, and replace it with nothing but local programming. But on a positive note, Toy Story 1 & 2 airing hitting huge with the kids demographic makes me happy inside.
 
While it's true that the Saturday morning program block is basically an endangered species, the situation is that Satam blocks no longer have the mystique and prestige that they once had. Thanks to 24 hour cable channels, home video and the internet, Saturday morning blocks just aren't really needed much anymore. Why do kids need to stay glued to the tube to watch a 3-4 hour block of Saturday cartoons when they can now watch cartoons anytime of the day or night, any day or night of the week? It's like going out for ice cream when you have Ben & Jerry's at home.
 
That's why I'm confused with why we're using these ratings to label Saturday Mornings as dead right now. I think that they've been like that since a little bit before Kids' WB died, or even earlier than that. I'm not sure if I would saying that Saturday Morning blocks are dead. I think that it's more along the lines that the changes within television programs had a negative effect on these blocks. As Blackstar mentioned, there are a lot more options for kids to watch children's programs than fifteen years ago. Before, kids only had Saturday morning to watch certain shows, but with more kids channels and eventually things like Comcast's On Demand function, they don't really need to wait for that day to watch these shows.

It could also be that more people have access to at least basic cable now, which could possibly give them less reason to watch blocks like qubo. The fact that Nick has a huge hit like SpongeBob may also be a factor.

I am glad to see that the airings for Toy Story 1 and 2 did so well though. Both are great movies and it's nice to see that a lot of other people seem to enjoy them as well.
 
I think Saturday mornings have been dead, pretty much since broadcast networks didn't care anymore. I think it's been dead for years. It really started, when Pokemon was dying down in the early 2000's and by about 2005, it was obvious the networks weren't putting much effort into Saturday mornings anymore. ABC Kids, Qubo, and Fox seem to care the least, due to them airing very few, if any, new shows (Qubo does mix their shows, but much of the time, it's bringing old shows back. Fox seems to vary from place to place, but I don't think they put new shows on for E/I all that often). I think the only good broadcast network (which I don't have cable, so bear with me) is the CW4Kids. They actually try to put new episodes on, yet, for some reason, they get beat by ABC Kids, week after week after week (okay, some weeks they won, but it hasn't lasted). I think once the CW4Kids/Toonzai ends (which appears to be very soon, as I don't know how much longer the block will last), the you can stick a fork in them, they're done.

I feel as though kids these days, are too lazy to change the channel. Can't they see that ABC Kids hasn't aired a new episode of Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zach and Cody, and That's So Raven in years? :confused: Let alone the fact that some of those shows are done? If I was, a kid, there would be only two options for me. Either watch the CW4Kids or not watch anything.

I know that cable still has some blocks, that get much higher ratings than broadcast. I don't follow those blocks and I don't know much about them. If I had cable, on the other hand, I would probably get up and watch more shows. However, I don't think I would get up at 6 AM to watch Pokemon and 7:30 on weekdays for 5D's.

You can actually research and find many people complaning about how bad Saturday mornings have become. They say, "It's not as good as the older days." I'm just happy I got to see Saturday mornings (though not all of it, due to lessons and things that were going on), before Saturday mornings died.
 
If I jumped back to when I was a kid and someone presented me with two options:
a.) Wake up early in the morning to watch a few new episodes of shows I like being coupled with a bunch of shows I have to wait to end and...

b.) Get this new cable system which allows me to watch certain shows anytime I want or watch them over the internet.

You can imagine which option I'd go with. Of course people complain about things not being as good as the old days. The old days can be terrible, and they would still get all nostalgic about it because it's what they grew up with.

It's like the argument with Pokemon. You could take each new Pokemon and replace the old ones (Regional bird, the single electric type you find early on, the "rival" pokemon -- such as Electabuzz vs. Magmar, Lotad vs. Seedot, etc) and people still say the original ones were best with no real argument other than it's what they grew up on.

I also think Cable and Internet has become so common now-a-days, it's hard to bring up the debate "WHAT IF THEY DON'T OWN A TV OR COMPUTER".
 
There was also the rise of first run syndication during the 1980's with cable still in it's infancy. Syndication offered a little more freedom from the networks 'standards, and practices' guidelines. By the 1990's, cable started to gain it's momentum after the Children's Television Act began to cripple broadcast TV's dominance. Effecting both the networks, and syndication.
 
Well, I think it's obvious that internet and cable were the reasons why Saturday mornings are dead. I just think that they've been dead for a while. Other people think that it's still alive. It's a matter of opinion.
 
To me there are 4 main things that lead to the "death" of Saturday Mornings, Cable,info-mercials, the Internet and DVDs.

1) When I was growing up during 80's and early 90's not everyone had cable, it was mainly an extra for more well off families and I also lived in a lot of rural areas where cable wasn't provided, now in the 2000's Cable is a lot more common and with so many "Kids" channels and the fact that they premiere programs on different nights leads Saturday Mornings not being the only game in town. Also the fact that a lot of the Networks Parent Companies also own various Cable channels means they cut out some competition.

2) Info-mercials to me are the bane of Television, I remember last year when I was going to go on vacation I was going to be in town a day or two before I left and so I decided to check out the TV listings to see what was going to be and I was very disappointed to see that instead of syndicated programs like when I grew up most of the stuff being aired on the local affiliates were info-mercials.

3) With the Internet, you can go online and find a lot of your favorite shows online, whether it's on the official studio/channel website or some place like Youtube, there's just so many different options.

4) DVDs, like with the Internet, it's so much easier to pop in your favorite cartoon when you want to watch then having to make sure to wake up on Saturday Morning to make sure you catch the new episode.

Now as to keeping the memory of Saturday Morning alive, one thing that I got started on during college and it was actually my roommate who got this going was that, one day we were talking about how it was when we were kids and I mentioned to her that I had just gotten Jem on DVD and she mentioned how much she loved it as a kid. So we went through my DVD collection and she was a big Anime fan and we grabbed a bunch her stuff and we made our on line up. To this day, at least once a month when I have a free weekend with no plans, I'll go through my DVD collection and pull out cartoons whether they are the classic stuff, ones' from the 80's and 90's and even some Anime favorites and put together my own line up.
 
Saturday mornings are not dead for me. I have a lot of cartoon season sets on DVD, and every saturday morning, I wake up at 7 and I pull things from my collection, and watch them until 12. Watching cartoons on saturday mornings is something that at the age of 27, I've never grown out of loving. I watched saturday morning cartoons on network tv up until the end of Kid's WB. I'm sure I'm in the minority on this, but the last two seasons of Kid's WB were perfect. I could watch every show from 7 to 12. But When 4KidsTV took over, I tried to get into it, but I couldn't(I'm not a fan on anime), and they cancelled to many of the shows I loved. When 4Kids took over, I started watching my cartoon DVD's. And I hope that no matter where my life will take me, the one thing I hope I'll be able to do is to keep watching cartoons on saturday mornings. :D

Edit: I gotta admit that I miss the bumpers, toy advertisements and contest comercials.
 
I do the exact same thing on Saturdays and Sundays as well. As to the bumpers and commercials, some shows like Transformers Generation 1, GI JOE and Voltron still have theirs and some of them you can tell when they would break for commercial. I've found a couple of really good Youtube Channels that are full of old toy commercials from the 80's and 90's, if you want PM me and I'll give you the links to them. It just helps to add the entire experience.
 
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