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Traditional SatAM ending
- Thread starter crackedscreen
- Start date
How about try reading the article?
Real good move. Why not just give the time back to the affiliates and let them run some 'more' paid commercials.
And this means the final nail in the coffin for Saturday morning broadcast. Very sad, Saturday mornings are a shell of its own self, with local news, infomercial after infomercial and cheap E/I programs that hardly anyone watches (Well, not the Litton ABC stuff, but syndicated Jack Hanna, Pets.TV, Wild About Animals, Teen Kids News etc). Kids nowadays don't know that before they were born, millions of kids woke up before their parents did to watch Saturday morning cartoons on analog TV. They only know that their cartoons are on either Nick, Disney, Cartoon Network or on the iPad.
-crainbebo
-crainbebo
Yep, and since Disney/ABC, CBS/Viacom, and Comcast/NBC are invested in both cable and OTA, it makes sense to hook kids on cable when they're young. Wean them off free TV.
CBS and Viacom have been separate companies for the better part of a decade now. Comcast owns Sprout while Time Warner owns Cartoon Network.
If the FCC didn't kill the Saturday morning cartoon on commercial broadcast, they certainly hastened its demise with its well-meaning but ultimately crippling E/I and anti-toy-advertisement regulations. (The fact that the Transformers franchise, the most baldfaced glorified toy commercial ever devised, is now considered the height of 80s nostalgia, makes one wonder how well-placed the crusade against toy advertisements was to begin with.) Same with everything else: by proclaiming itself helpless to regulate cable, the FCC has regulated broadcast almost out of business, and at this point it doesn't even line up with how people consume television (the E/I rules still assume a broadcast station needs to be a true "broad"caster with many different kinds of programming, greatly limiting how subchannels can be programmed).
Except that happened a long time ago. What hastened its demise that kids want kids TV 24/7, not when the networks put it on. Kids are no different from their parents. They record shows and watch them when they want. Even their grandparents understand this.
Two of my favorite Saturday morning shows as a kid in the mid-'60s were "Linus the Lionhearted," a cartoon with strong ties to Post cereals, and "Shenanigans," a live-action game show that sold Milton Bradley toys and board games -- including a board game based on "Shenanigans" itself. These shows were fun, ulterior marketing motives and all.
What would it be like without the E/I regulations today, and anti-toy advertisement regulations? Would we still be seeing cartoons on afternoon broadcast TV? Would shows like SpongeBob and Fairly Odd Parents (both from Nick) be on syndicated or Fox/CW afternoon blocks? Or would it all be infomercial after infomercial?
-crainbebo
-crainbebo
I've tried, all I get are error messages...
A
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Generally speaking, if someone wants to start a new thread and they're too damn lazy to do anything but post a link, with no commentary or excerpts from it, then it's usually not worth taking the time to follow.
How about try actually putting some effort into writing a launch post instead of getting snarky at people who at least posted a reply.
Probably neither. I remember posting elsewhere (can't remember where now, "so sue me"...) that some Fox stations were not exactly thrilled about carrying that afternoon kiddie block. An old pal of mine was promotion manager for a Fox affiliate in NY state back then. He and the sales staff held a little party the day Fox announced they were dumping their cartoons, because they felt the toons weren't "feeding" desirable demographics into their early news. The replacements were a Springer-style talk show and "judge" shows. So I'd guess you would get those or more sitcom reruns instead.
The missing ingredient is anticipation. When I was a kid I looked forward to the Saturday morning cartoons. Now everything's available everywhere all the time. Cartoons? Big honkin' deal.
How hard is it to click a link? Yeah, and you're trying to talk to me about lazy.
You mean the same people that are "too damn lazy" to click a link?
I've said before in other threads that E/I regulations forced the OTA networks to drop commercial kid's shows and cartoons and move to the Litton type programming, although I also think they used it as a convenient excuse to expand their morning news shows to Saturdays and cut back to the required 3 hours for E/I. But all anyone has to do to see what will happen if E/I regulations are dropped completely is to look at Fox and their switch to infomercials, which is the worst thing that can happen. If E/I regulations were dropped completely the other OTA networks would at best go to more news and sports, or at worst turn the time back over to local TV stations where it will most likely be more infomercials. The big 4 networks and CW will never go back to Saturday morning kid's shows like it used to be. 
One thing I do think the networks could do better with E/I programming is to do the shows in a more entertaining way that will be more likely to attract kids. One example would be to do more shows like Beakman's World, which was both educational and fun. Instead they're selling out to Litton and/or infomercials.
One thing I do think the networks could do better with E/I programming is to do the shows in a more entertaining way that will be more likely to attract kids. One example would be to do more shows like Beakman's World, which was both educational and fun. Instead they're selling out to Litton and/or infomercials.
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What does difficult have to do with anything? If you want other people to click a link, you can either give them a reason to want to, or not. But if you don't give them a reason to want to, don't be surprised when they don't. You're the one starting the thread. You're asking people to click your link. It's your job to make them want to.
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