The death of cartoons on broadcast TV

M

milaroo

New member
Back when I was young in the early 1990s, there were a TON of weekday cartoons. At the time, I lived in Santa Rosa, CA, and my family was pretty working class. We weren't poor by any means, but we couldn't afford cable. But I still enjoyed myself. Why? Because there was always something good to watch. Disney Afternoon and Fox Kids was basically my life, and I always watched them everyday without fail.

Channel 44 was also great, because it had basically every single cartoon available in syndication. Some of them were dumb, like Littlest Pet Shop and Bucky O'Hare for example, but most of them were awesome. Sonic, Mega Man, Biker Mice from Mars, they were just great. I was also one of the few who got to see Sailor Moon in a fairly decent time slot (2:30pm). All in all, it was very enjoyable.

Fast forward 15 years.

There is NOTHING available for kids on weekdays anymore. Well, unless you count PBS, which I don't. I honestly can't believe it. Like, what happened? I don't understand why broadcasters have just seemingly abandoned the children's TV market. Especially since roughly 25% of US households still receive just the over-the-air networks. It truly baffles me. What do you think about it?
 
It is because the networks have changed to catering only to the housewife demographic during the daytime, which is a pretty sizeable audience, arguably far bigger than that of the young children audience. Also, many of those networks are part of the same companies as the children's TV networks are, such as Nick and CN, so continuing to have cartoons on network TV just didn't make sense to the execs anymore.
 
Also, crappy Judge Shows cost pennies to produce, and with the hellish competition from...gasp...up to 3 cable networks, they felt that children's programming (which as history tells us, they never knew a dang thing about) wasn't making hand over fist over hand in money. So therefore, they'd rather just be cheap than risk money coming up with something that actually is competitive. And they can all just enjoy their blood money. They're going to lose it really soon!
 
People have more access to cartoons than ever before - iTunes downloads, DVDs, more channels with cartoons, etc. So I guess they figure they can't compete or just don't care? I was very young and don't remember much, but I know CBS and ABC were THE places to catch cartoons. You also got stuff like She-Ra and He-Man on weekdays, but I don't recall where or when you could see them. It's a shame, really. I miss those old Saturday mornings.
 
They just don't care. They don't even want to compete. In the old days, people actually put care into their products, and if they didn't do well, they'd ride the slump until they either lost a crap load of money, or until things perked up again. 3 channels and PBS don't seem like that stiff competition, especially to people who can't afford cable and DVD's. No one wants to ride the slump. They want to do the same things over and over until they lose some money, then bail out with whatever they can grab, leaving everyone in the lurch.
 
In 2000, the FCC made a rule which restricted the amount of advertising as well as the content of advertising in programs aimed at children. In the following years, it made such programming unprofitable to most television stations. I don't believe the stations themselves got out of the cartoon business because they wanted to, I believe they got out because it became unprofitable due to the 2000 FCC ruling. I couldn't care less about today's cartoons that are aimed at children, but this FCC rule should be ditched or at least modified.
 
Do you ever actually provide a relevant comment in a thread, or do you just find places to stand and shake your head solemnly and pull a clich? quote out of somewhere?

On the actual topic, with broadcast rights, legal ownership and the like much more locked down than they were in the time period the original poster mentioned, it's likely that even if broadcast networks were still showing syndicated animation reruns, the pool of shows available in syndication would be much, much smaller. Think to yourself for a minute - I'd bet everyone can name at least three cartoons that they saw somewhere in syndication as recently as 5-6 years ago that aren't on that channel anymore.
 
You know what bugs me about syndication now? not just cartoons, but sitcom reruns. They were all bought up by the mondomassive cable conglomerates, and said cable channels don't even air them anymore. I hear tell TV land has "original programming" and reruns of the "classic" Extreme Home Makeover.
 
nwm2112 hit it on the head, I believe. Although like Dr. Tooth said, there are requirements in place to keep children's programming on local stations, what we're already seeing and going to continue to see is stations airing less and less programming in addition to their required E/I children's stuff, eventually getting to the point where the only things on Saturday mornings will be those couple of mandated hours, nothing more and nothing less.

And why should they? It's just not profitable. What these parental groups who want so few minutes of ad time, and want to ban certain products from being advertised don't realize is that when you fight for imposed government regulations that take the free enterprise out of the business, then you're just giving them reason to not want to be in the business at all. Instead of the parents doing their job, they expect the FCC to do it for them, while at the same time expecting the stations to still run quality stuff and be glad to do it out of the goodness of their heart and because they have some social responsibility to do it.

But TV stations shouldn't have this "social responsibility" - they are a business, meant to make money, and that is their only responsibility. So when you say some of the highest paying advertisers of snack foods or what have you can't advertise, that takes away SO much incentive to be in that business. And when you then impose regulations that so many hours of children's programming be shown, all you're doing is making sure that what little programming will remain in this new highly restrictive field will be the cheapest crap you can get, just to meet the regulations, because if you're not going to be making any money off it, why even try for anything more than bare minimum?

But, yeah, it sucks. Especially for action cartoon fans like myself, because none of the cable networks seem interested in anything more than one or two action shows at a time, at best. Right now, in U.S. action animation on cable, we've got Ben 10 and Avatar. That's pretty much it. Even taking into account what Kids' WB! and 4Kids has, it's pretty pathetic as the rest of the networks scramble to fill time with nothing but cable reruns. When I was 13, there was SO much stuff on local channels alone - BKN had a slew of awesome stuff ranging from cheesy-but-charming like Roswell Conspiracies, to down-right excellent like Roughnecks. Of course, with both Kids' WB and Fox Kids doing both weekday morning and weekday afternoon programming in addition to the syndicated stuff, a very good deal of it focused on action animation, it was really a great time to be an animation fan.

It just seems weird to go from having so much to having so little in such relatively little time.
 
I suppose somehow broadcast networks came to the conclusion that there was more money in leaving out kids' TV. I don't see how they came to such a conclusion, but it seems that they did.

At this point, though, it seems most households with children have cable TV, and that should do more than enough to satisfy.
 
I did some research and I think I might have finally figured out what happened. Apparently, in 1996, Congress passed something called the Telecommunications Act. Well, I dug through some old articles from the time and then looked through the bill's text in the Library on Congress' website. And what I found truly shocked and frightened me.

First off, the bill removed a ton of the restrictions on ownership of radio and television stations. Hence why there's been so much consolidation in media lately. This really sucks of course because a lack of competition means that no one needs to strive for better quality programming. Basically, just one big hand out to conglomerates

But back to my original question about the lack of cartoons nowadays. Well here's where the bill gets just pathetic. It established the stupid TV rating system and V-chip requirements. Of course, this is pointless because most parents nowadays are either too stupid or just plain lazy to actually use both of those, so what a waste. It also required all TV stations to air at least 3 hours of E/I programming each week. This also made things difficult because, with few exceptions, most of the kids shows at the time were not E/I material. Finally, like the previous people mentioned, it issued guidelines of what could and could not be advertised during kids shows. There goes the money.

The effect of all this was to profoundly weaken broadcast stations, not to mention make it almost impossible to anyone to make a profit from kids shows. Dragon Ball Z was a perfect example. It got edited to all hell and was a complete failure in syndication precisely because of this. So when it moved to cable, it became a hit, because cable basically has no restrictions at all.

Bottom line, the act was like landing on the zero in roulette, everyone lost.
 
Yep, I remember (and was strongly against) the '96 Telecommunications Act, whose primary purpose was to allow media conglomerates to buy out radio stations in large quantities, leading to the rise of Clear Channel dominating radio (and one reason why it's quite bland today...).

As for the other points mentioned:

- Per their being allowed use of the public airwaves (a limited resource---hence the FCC's job of regulating broadcast frequency allocation via distributing TV and radio licenses), television and radio stations are *supposed* to serve the "public interest" in order to keep their broadcasting licenses, said term defined by, well, the FCC (which in the past meant stations airing things like Sunday morning political roundtable discussion shows or the like, and these days apparently means not airing Janet Jackson's nipple or letting Bono say the f-word or whatnot...). Of course, these days, that requirement's probably fallen by the wayside with the wave of deregulation over the past 20 years...

- To rehash a previous point, my list of reasons why broadcast children's TV has died off are basically:

* Technology: DVDs, video games, etc. making more competition for kids' attention.

* Cable TV: NIckelodeon, Cartoon Network (when they're not airing live-action junk) or Disney Channel giving kids plenty of cartoons to watch at all times of the day and week.

* The wave of media consolidation in the past 15 or so years leading to only a handful of huge conglomerates controlling not only production of animation in the US, but also previously made TV shows and available media outlets for them---i.e., 20 years ago syndication was alive and well, with various older shows (Flintstones, Looney Tunes, etc.) to draw from; now, if Time-Warner decides (despite multiple TV channels) there's no room to air Looney Tunes on *any* of them (and they're too big of pack-rats to remotely consider letting stations they don't own air them [something that apparently is finally thawing slightly with the Silver Age WB humor/action shows airing on Jetix, but still prominent]), well.... Thus, even if a local TV station *wanted* to air cartoons (even old ones), this factor might mean they couldn't get their hands on anything popular (Flintstones, Looney Tunes, DuckTales, Thundercats, whatever)...

* Adult news programming and first-run syndication has become highly profitable for local TV stations and networks, hence the spate of "judge" shows, talk shows, news, and even infomercials. And with a lot of these types of shows clogging weekday afternoon timeslots, plus that news is the most profitable thing a local TV station can air (hence 4 hours of the "Today" show on weekdays plus local newscasts at 4, 5, 6, 10 and 11 on many stations), there's not much incentive left to air kids' shows...

All of this was in full force by the late 90's, the time when E/I and other things that've been blamed (Pokemon, etc.) came along...

-B.
 
Those are good reasons, but also pathetic excuses. somehow, 3 channels that not everyone gets doesn't sound like solid enough competition to me. Seriously. it's Just CN, nick, and Disney. Not like an entire wall of competition. They bowed out. They don't even want to try. And you lose if you don't try by default.

A bunch of pants in a knot parental groups that whine and whine that their kids watch commericals that make them want something (that's what commercials do, geniuses!) helped to kill kid's TV. Now, because that stuff isn't profitable, we have trash television that shows the worst in people. Greedy idiots snapping at sarcastic rude judges. Promiscuous idiots that sleep around and wonder which one of a trillion partners is the babydaddy. And Reba macIntyre's horrible horrible sitcom in the CW's junkpile of long cancelled (and rightly so) crapcoms.

how that makes them all that money, i'll never know.
 
You spoke my mind far clearer than I ever could have.

Also, as a person with firsthand experience, in my breakroom at work, we get two channels: FOX and the CW (and for some reason the CW is always on). Occasionally these two channels will air cartoons in the morning, but, as many have said, they are the sh***iest, poorest excuses for cartoons ever made. And the only other crap that's on are "crapcoms" like King of Queens, pointless and poorly produced shows aimed at teens (ie Reaper), numerous fake judge shows, and some shows aimed at blacks (slap me if I'm not being PC).

Main point: I just f***in' hate the CW, as do you.
Also, sorry for being a bit off topic here.
 
WHAT did you say about Reaper?! :mad:

Anyways, I am upset about the networks bowing out because they didn't even try to compete. It sucks that we have so little variety on TV as a whole. I mean, you have TNT running Law and Order 50 times a day, and TBS has come at us with this "very funny" crap, ABC Family is essentially a TBS clone, ugh...

Sorry for the rant, but I had to do something for my hundredth post-a-versarry.
 
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