Beginning deal with UPN In January 1998,
UPN began discussions with
The Walt Disney Company (owner of rival network
ABC) to have the company program a daily two-hour children's block for the network, airing on weekdays (during the morning or afternoon hours) and Sunday mornings. Attempts to reach a time-lease agreement deal with Disney were canceled one week after negotiations started due to a dispute between Disney and UPN over how the block would be branded and the amount of E/I programming that Disney would provide for the block; UPN then entered into discussions with then-corporate sister
Nickelodeon as both networks were owned by
Viacom at the time to produce a new block, but never came to fruition and Nickelodeon eventually came to an agreement with
CBS and
Nickelodeon on CBS premiered two years later. That February, UPN entered into an agreement with
Saban Entertainment (then a subsidiary of
Fox Family Worldwide, which Disney later acquired in 2001 and reunited 18 years later following the
merger of
21st Century Fox along a library of children's content), which distributed two live-action series recently aired on the
UPN Kids block around that time,
Sweet Valley High and
Breaker High, to broadcast the Sunday-to-Friday block. In March 1998, UPN resumed discussions with Disney and the following month, The Walt Disney Company and UPN came to an agreement to provide Disney-produced programs on the network on weekdays (from 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 a.m. or 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.) and Sunday (from 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.). The block was originally announced under the working title
Whomptastic to distinguish it from Disney's recently-launched
One Saturday Morning block for
ABC. However, amid the success of
One Saturday Morning, the UPN block was rebranded prior to launch as ''Disney's One Too'', aiming to capitalize on
brand awareness. The block premiered on September 6, 1999, replacing UPN Kids, which closed the day before on September 5 after four years. In the final season of UPN's weekday morning block, it adds Digimon anime after leaving Fox Kids. The block aired for the last time on August 31, 2003, with the time periods given back to UPN's affiliates. This left UPN as the only "big six" broadcast television network without a dedicated children's programming block (and for the rest of its existence through its shutdown on September 15, 2006, nearly all UPN stations would not air any children's programming), as well as joining
PAX-TV (which discontinued its
Pax Kids block in 2000) as one of only two major commercial broadcast networks without a children's block. However, PAX, which had recently rebranded to
i: Independent Television (now
Ion Television) in June 2005, would reverse course in 2006 with the introduction of
Qubo (which launched on the same day as UPN's shutdown) but it shut down nearly 15 years later because of Scripps' acquisition. Additionally, some Fox stations that declined to carry
4Kids TV passed on that block to an affiliate of UPN,
The WB, or an
independent station, in order for the Fox affiliate to air general entertainment programming or local newscasts on Saturday mornings (for example,
WFLD in
Chicago moved 4Kids TV's schedule to the co-owned then-UPN affiliate
WPWR, while WFLD aired infomercials).
Aftermath UPN was not the first "big six" network to remove children's programming:
NBC became the first to remove children's series entirely in August 1992, when the network launched a live-action block for teenagers called
TNBC; children's programming returned to NBC in 2002, through a time-lease agreement with
Discovery Kids. In the years since the block was discontinued, all other major broadcast networks, including UPN successor
The CW (sister of the "Big Three" network
CBS), would gradually abandon children's programming by selling their respective children's blocks to
Litton Entertainment, who produces primarily unscripted E/I content targeted nominally at teenagers (but having an older demographic overall by ratings), or in the case of Fox, removing children's programming entirely. Fox's sister network,
MyNetworkTV, has never supplied children's programming as part of its lineup; both networks leave the responsibility of acquiring E/I programming to the affiliates, primarily through the syndicated block
Xploration Station in the case of the former. ==Programming==