Will kids go looney without Saturday toons?

Part of the reason is that everybody is watching at different times. Now that they know they can find something on TV to watch 24 hours a day, children - like adults - have adapted their TV-watching habits to fit around their increasingly busy schedules. "You see the first signs of it in the late '80s, but the '90s is an entirely different paradigm for watching television," says Professor Burke. "There isn't a concentrated day of four to five hours of intense television watching. It means that Saturday mornings have been reclaimed for soccer practice."

Originally, he says, Saturday went to the kids because "no adult would be caught dead watching" so early. But infomercials and weekend editions of morning shows are more prevalent. ABC, the only one of the original Big 3 networks to air five hours of kids TV on Saturday mornings (courtesy of parent company Disney), is even exploring the idea of adding a Saturday edition of "Good Morning America." NBC and CBS already air editions of their morning shows.

With cable networks focusing on kids, traditional broadcasters no longer have to feel responsible for serving children much beyond the three hours of educational programming the government requires of them, says Bryant. And kids' shows don't generate big ad dollars for networks, especially in a recession.

"One of the reasons there's a sea change at the moment is because the networks are not getting the same returns in the kid business on their investment. And that's due to the softness in the market, along with the incredible competition," says Cyma Zarghami, executive vice president of Nickelodeon.

The traditional networks did spark widespread hits as recently as the 1990s, with Fox's "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" and the WB's "Pokémon." More recently - even before NBC's deal with Discovery - networks were borrowing from cable channels with bigger libraries: ABC uses shows from Disney, while CBS has seen improved ratings recently by using pre-school programs from Nickelodeon in its Saturday lineup.

But it is kids with cable who have a better chance of seeing the shows with all the buzz, like Nickelodeon's "Spongebob Squarepants," or the Cartoon Network's crime-fighting "Powerpuff Girls."

Nickelodeon - now 22 years old - has the top-rated programs on all of cable TV (excluding premium channels). No. 1 is "Spongebob," a cartoon about a kitchen sponge who lives at the bottom of the ocean. It is neck-in-neck with another Nick favorite, "Rugrats."

It is cable channels where the cutting-edge kids' cartoons are being created today. "The great success of cable programmers has raised the bar for everyone - helped create a more demanding audience, which in turn has led to better programming all around," says Jonathan Barzilay, senior vice president of ABC Kids and cable channel Toon Disney.

Adults longing for the nostalgia of their youth, will have to look to The Cartoon Network and websites like yesterdayland.com. As pop-culture professor Bob Thompson puts it, with cable, "All of the sudden, Saturday morning isn't all that important anymore."

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