Tomorrow, your kids may be binge-watching some cartoon on some streaming services. They may even do so whilst consuming copious amounts of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs. But they will not be viewing a network broadcast slate of cartoons like generations of kids have. Why is that?
Charles Moss in The Saturday Evening Post has your answers in a article so perfectly titled, I just used it above. He also provides a whole lot more detail about the business forces that led to the animation domination of Saturday mornings, the migration to weekly afternoon, and the hang-wringing (in some quarters) all along the way.
Thanks to Netflix on disc (which, incidentally, still exists) and now streaming services, I have quite firmly gone away from almost all “Event TV,” though the threat of spoilers has led to accelerating some viewing.
But knowing that our kids will never know the ritualized weekend kick-off we did? A slight bummer.