Early years After the
Paramount Decree broke up
block booking practices, in the 1950s, animation production shifted from theatrical shorts to television animation.
Jason Mittel argues that by the end of the 1960s, this shift to television also unintentionally shifted popular understandings of animation. With the rise of the Saturday morning cartoon block, Mittel observes that animation transformed from "a mass-market genre with so-called 'kidult' appeal and became marginalized into the kid-only Saturday morning periphery." Until 1963, the Saturday morning programming block across
all three major networks consisted primarily of telecasts of older cartoons made for
movie theaters,
reruns of animated series originally broadcast in
prime time or reruns of younger skewing
live-action television series such as
My Friend Flicka or
Sky King. Beginning with the
1963-64 television season,
CBS took the first steps in setting up Saturday morning programming block consisting of two hours of back-to-back
animated series consisting of with rights acquired to
Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales and
The Quick Draw McGraw Show after the two had been seen in
first-run syndication and pairing them with returning series
The Alvin Show and
Mighty Mouse Playhouse. CBS and
ABC would typically order an average of 16 episodes to run six times over the course of two years, while
NBC's orders were characterized by 13 episode batches to run 4 times over the year in order to cover the 52 week television schedule. These groups voiced concerns about the presentation of
commercialism, violence, anti-social attitudes and
stereotypes in Saturday-morning cartoons.
Fred Silverman, who at the time was head of
CBS' daytime programming and brought about many of these action-oriented cartoons with his "superhero morning" initiative, refuted the claims that ACT and parental concerns were the deciding factor in the decline of these shows and instead said that ratings for superhero cartoons in general had begun to slip by the end of the 1960s and that declining ratings were a greater deciding factor than parental advocacy groups for causing these series to be phased out. In 1978, the
Federal Trade Commission was openly considering a ban on all advertising during television programming targeting preschoolers, and severe restrictions on other children's program advertising, both of which would have effectively killed off the format; the commission ultimately dropped the proposal. The networks were encouraged to create educational spots that endeavored to use animation or live-action for enriching content, including the
Schoolhouse Rock!,
Time for Timer and
The Bod Squad series on
ABC which became fondly-remembered television classics, while CBS had the
Bicentennial Minutes and their long-running children's oriented news series,
In the News. In Canada concurrently, the
National Film Board of Canada produced a roughly equivalent domestic series called
Canada Vignettes and their successors the
Heritage Minutes, although they were intended to be aired throughout the usual broadcast day. With the 1970s came a wave of animated versions of popular live-action prime time series as well, mainly with the voices of the original casts, such as
Star Trek: The Animated Series, as well as imitations of the highly successful
Scooby-Doo combining teen characters and
talking animals with supernatural mystery stories.
Deregulation By 1982, under President
Ronald Reagan, the FCC had loosened programming and advertising regulations. One of the earliest first cartoons to take advantage of this deregulation push was
Hanna-Barbera's
Pac-Man which was the first
cartoon to be based on a video game and its success leading to the era of "half-hour toy commercials", starting with
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and continuing with such series as
The Transformers and
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These were heavily criticized by ACT, but were nevertheless successful. As well, several more lighthearted series appeared, popularized by Hanna-Barbera's
The Smurfs and
Jim Henson's
Muppet Babies. These included series based on popular
video games, such as
Saturday Supercade. Beginning in the late 1980s, networks commissioned new series based on legacy properties that would appeal to
nostalgia and to a
whole family audience, including ABC's reviving the
Scooby-Doo franchise with
A Pup Named Scooby-Doo and commissioning
The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from
The Walt Disney Company, both series being major successes. The move was largely driven by the adoption of the
people meter, which ABC believed that younger children could not operate and which ABC blamed for the network's poor viewership with its younger-skewing lineup featuring the likes of
The Little Clowns of Happytown. CBS likewise focused its content on established properties, bringing the comic strip
Garfield (which had produced a number of successful specials already) to Saturday morning with what would become the long-running
Garfield and Friends and pairing the show with live-action children's series hosted by fictional characters originally created for adult audiences,
Pee-wee Herman (''
Pee-Wee's Playhouse) and Ernest P. Worrell (Hey Vern, It's Ernest!''). and live-action teen-oriented series. Multiple factors contributed to the change, among them an increasingly competitive market fueled by the
multi-channel transition, a boom in
first-run syndicated content and the introduction of
home video and video games; increasing restrictions on advertising and
educational content mandates; and broader cultural changes stemming from an increase in
no-fault divorces and the end of the
post-World War II baby boom. Attempting to pair the newscasts with the remaining cartoons was largely unsuccessful because the two program formats drew widely different audiences that did not lend themselves to
leading in and out of each other, leading to viewership oddities (such as
NBC's children's block having an average viewership age of over 40 years old); by the mid 2010s, all of the major American networks had shifted to live-action documentary programming, ostensibly targeted at teenagers to meet the educational mandates but less likely to cause a clash with the newscasts as the programming was genericized as much as possible to resemble
reality television programming for general audiences found on most cable networks (or in the case of
Dr. Chris: Pet Vet, general reality programming from overseas re-edited to comply with American mandates). This documentary programming also benefited from having less restrictive rules for advertising compared to programming targeted to children. Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were largely discontinued in
Canada by 2002. In the United States,
The CW continued to air non-E/I cartoons until September 27, 2014; among the "Big Three" traditional major networks, the final non-E/I cartoon to date (
Kim Possible) was last aired in 2006. As of 2026,
Univision and
MeTV are the only two
commercial broadcast networks to still broadcast animated programming within a Saturday morning timeslot through their respective
Planeta U and
Saturday Morning Cartoons blocks. On May 1, 2024,
Weigel Broadcasting announced a partnership with
Warner Bros. Discovery to launch a new 24/7 spin-off animation network called
MeTV Toons. The network launched on June 25, 2024 and is dedicated to broadcasting classic animation programming from the 1930s to the 2010s, following a similar format to the formative years of WBD's
Cartoon Network and
Boomerang. == Legacy ==