Last week, the last of the Saturday morning cartoon blocks aired. The CW, which was the only broadcast network still bothering to air ’em, cancelled them and replaced them with live-action educational programming.
So, a bunch of articles on the internet today are boo-hooing the end of an era. Mostly it’s nostalgia. Mourning their lost childhood. Remembering, with glee, how they used to wake up at the crack of dawn on Saturday, pour themselves a big bowl of Sugar Frosted Fruity Cocoa Honey Bunches of Sugar (with crunchy marshmallows!) and watch show after show after show.
Me, I lived with parents who believed too much TV rots your brain, so as soon as they discovered I’d watched more than an hour of the stuff, they demanded the TV be turned off and I do anything else.
Admittedly, most of it was crap. Toy companies were using cartoons to peddle their wares. I’ve watched some of those shows since and thought, “What was I thinking? I had no taste.” The Garfield cartoons, fr'instance, were so poorly written, they almost made me stop reading the comic strip. (Almost. The strip’s still funny.) But kids have no taste. They’re learning taste. And I was learning it, gradually.
Fr'instance: Weekdays, the local independent channels would rerun old cartoon shorts. Old Popeye cartoons, old Warner Brothers cartoons, old Tom & Jerry cartoons. You know, the good stuff. Then, Saturday mornings, Hanna-Barbera produced The Tom and Jerry Show, which was awful. Instead of the cat and mouse constantly trying to dismember one another every chance they got, they were now an inoffensive pair of friends, wandering around having harmless adventures. It was junk. But it wouldn’t outrage the Parents Television Council, which was the point.
Still, some cartoons were good, and I gradually learned which ones they were, and watched ’em. But in my teenage years, I stopped watching the Saturday morning stuff. I had a paper route, and every Saturday I’d wake up at 5 a.m. and go throw papers, then get home and watch the early-morning news till the cartoons started at 7, then watch Super Friends… then fall asleep, and by the time I woke up the later blocks of cartoons had been pre-empted by college football. “Stupid college football,” I’d grumble. “Why can’t you get your own cable channel?”
Well, now cartoons have their own cable channel. Even better.
See, this is the thing: It’s the 21st century, people. We have Cartoon Network. We can stream cartoons 24 hours a day on Netflix, with no commercials; or on Hulu, which locks up all the time, but still, fewer commercials. We never have to worry about them getting pre-empted by Saturday morning college football.
We can skip all the dumb ones entirely. Unless you have kids, who wind up discovering the dumb ones and insist on watching ‘em. My niece and nephew have discovered
We can buy
You want every last Batman cartoon made, go for it. You couldn’t find Mickey Mouse on Saturday mornings, but you can definitely get him on disc. You can get all the Warner Brothers shorts, uncensored, meaning you can now see all the carnage (and casual racism, unfortunately) which were edited out of the TV broadcasts. You never have to worry about the networks pre-empting or cancelling your
Create your own Saturday morning lineup, if you wish. ’Cause we don’t need the Saturday morning shows. Times have changed, and things are better.