Will kids go looney without Saturday toons?

Ever since the mid-1960s, Saturday morning has been the equivalent of Christmas for kids.

It is one of the few times network programmers pay attention to the peanut-butter-and-jelly crowd - airing hours of cartoons featuring everything from crime-solving canines to pesky rabbits. In its heyday, public-affairs shows and sports were banished until after noon, and kids couldn't wait to camp out in front of the TV in their pajamas to see what Scooby-Doo would do next.

But America's traditional cartoon culture is changing in ways that could affect the Saturday morning regimen in households across the country. The era in which Saturday morning on the traditional networks was mainly cartoons, and mainly for children, is over: Networks are nudging out cartoon slots to make way for live-action comedies for teens and weekend editions of the "Today" show. The reason? Saturday mornings are busier now. And networks can hardly compete with the cartoons available to kids all the time on cable TV.

NBC announced earlier this month that it is leasing its Saturday space to Discovery Kids, from the Discovery Channel. Fox is considering leasing as well, and is eliminating its weekday afternoon kids block starting in January. "What you have, is essentially [broadcasters] saying, 'We're going to be a service provider for the nonchild audience,'" says Jennings Bryant, director of the Institute for Communication Research at the University of Alabama.

That may be a blow to Gen-Xers, who can't imagine their formative years without "Fat Albert" or the "Smurfs." But today's children will never know the difference, say observers. They were born into a world with a wealth of kid outlets from cable channels to video games to the Internet - and their cartoon choices on TV are wider and of better quality than those their parents had.

What they will be missing, though, is the shared cultural touchstones that come from everyone sitting down to the same programs at the same time through a medium that was free - much the way adults watched "Roots" or "MASH." Modern kids are more likely to recall "what Disney video they watched 10,000 times," says Timothy Burke, co-author of "Saturday Morning Fever" and a cultural historian at Swarthmore College.

Kids' cultural icons won't necessarily come from TV in the future, says professor Bryant. Nor are icons likely to take hold as quickly as they did when viewing was more concentrated. He anticipates video games and the Internet driving the common threads that run through popular culture. "The nonmass media ... will increasingly provide the stimulus for the new cultural phenomenons," he says, but notes they won't be "symbols whereby everyone recognizes what the icon is."

"By and large," he says, "you'll never see it at the same level as the Bugs Bunny phenomenon or the Road Runner phenomenon or the Mickey Mouse Club - where everyone in a generation recognizes who these characters were."

Page: 1 | 2