Saturday Morning Cartoons Are Officially Dead
Posted on Monday, September 29th, 2014 by Peter Sciretta
I feel like I’m really getting old because I’m tempted to tell stories of “back in my day” and “when I was a kid,” but time passes and with every new generation things change. I used to look forward to Saturday mornings for the block of morning cartoons that ran on weekends. From 8am to noon, most of the television networks were filled with the latest and greatest cartoon series, sandwiched between commercials for the best new toys of the era. (Some of those series were, in fact, also commercials for toys.) Over the years, the cartoons have started to disappear from Saturday morning. Why? A combination of cable networks which allow 24-hour access to cartoon programing and a 1996 FCC mandate.
Over the weekend, The CW’s Vortexx programming block (which included episodes of Cubix, Sonic X, Dragon Ball Z and Kai, Digimon Fusion, Yu-Gi-Oh! and more) aired for the last time. Next week The CW will replace the animation with “One Magnificent Morning”, a live-action television block filled with educational shows for kids. This is officially the end of broadcast television’s Saturday Morning Cartoons, as it has been known since the 1960s. Find out more about why the Saturday Morning Cartoons have been killed off and take a look back at the glory days of Saturday Morning Cartoons of the 1980s and 1990s.
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