Saturday Morning Cartoons and why they're going to die

Hey,

I know that most people don't care about stuff like this, but I've always been a huge fan of Saturday Morning Cartoons. After a week of school, kids wake up early and are bored. Before they get older and can leave the house, they need something like Saturday Morning TV to entertain them. It works like primetime TV. Instead of "Did you see what happened on the OC last night?" the third graders say stuff like "Did you see who Yugi defeated on Saturday?" Sadly, due to several factors spiraling out of control at the same time, Saturday Morning may be no more, and sooner than you think.

1.The FCC's ridiculous regulations on both content that must be edited, and so called E/I show requirements. On Saturday Morning cartoons, no one can die, no one can be seriously injured, no one can say crap or heck, every kind of firearm must have the sound effect of a laser gun.

2.Anime. Sadly, instead of coming up with original ideas, Saturday is taking the best Anime aimed at teenage boys (Shaman King, One Piece, Pokemon, etc...) and hacking it up in a dub that is rarely even close to the original and tries to aim it at everybody from 5 year old girls to 14 year old boys. You have already heard my gripes with 4Kids, the company that makes most of these dubs. You can find one of these dubs in every half hour of Saturday morning, and FOX's morning (4KidsTV) is 95% of it (the only exception being TMNT)

3.24-Hr. Networks. Kids can be entertained every minute of the day by Nick, CN, or Disney, so it's that much harder for Sat. Morning to compete. Instead of stepping up to the challenge and making their shows truly special, they badly mimic the popular cable cartoons and sometimes even run reruns of them (Teen Titans, PPG)

4.Mergers. with mergers happening left and right, the owners of networks like CBS, NBC and ABC came into possession of kid centric cable outlets. So, for their Sat. Morning programming, they just show lite versions of the cable network's shows. (if you were wondering-CBS=Nick, NBC=Discovery Kids, ABC=Disney)

You might be thinking, who cares? The kids can watch everything now. They get their own channels. That's enough. NO, it's not enough. Saturday morning brought many wonderful cartoons to the world. How good would the Spider-Man movie have been without Spider-Man, the Series on Fox? Where else could small franchises like Sam & Max or The Tick or Ghostbusters have gone with a cartoon show? Would there be a Game Boy without the success of Pokemon (which was a GOOD dub for the first season) on Kids WB? The answers are that it would be a very different place if Sat AM cartoons weren't there, and, god damn it, I wanna see the next TMNT or Pokemon explode on Saturday morning. Not get decent ratings on CN.

-May you always enjoy the weekend as I do
Pudge