When I was a kid, one of the times I looked forward to most was Saturday morning. My brothers and I would wake up somewhere around 8 am and perform the following tasks as if our brains were pre-programmed to do so while we were incubating in our mother’s womb:
- Migrate to the Family Room
- Pull out that thing known as the “power knob” on the floor console TV
- Manually turn the channel selector “dial” (usually to channel 7)
- Park ourselves on the floor or couch
- Watch cartoons
These were real, (what are now known as) classic cartoons such as the Bugs Bunny Road Runner hour, Underdog, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Scooby Doo, The Jetsons, Flintstones, the Pink Panther and on and on. While we enjoyed these gems of cartoondom, we kept the TV volume on the down-low to keep our parents from waking up. This little time block of bliss was for us kids. We didn’t need the parents messing it up.
As with all good things, an end slowly and eventually becomes inevitable and unavoidable. New cartoons began to be introduced that just “weren’t the same”, or the introduction of imported cartoons from Japan just plain sucked, or whatever. Before you knew it, you were either forced out of this segment of reality escape because of the eventual lousy content or your Saturday morning life took on new dimensions, such as the need to sleep longer or you began getting a social life. Or, you just plain got older and outgrew cartoons altogether.
It’s been many years since I used to enjoy cartoons with my brothers. There have been times over the years, as I have grown older, where I have attempted to “check back in” with the cartoon world, specifically on Saturday mornings. I usually end up scanning hundreds of cable channel lineups without seeing anything that comes close to interesting me or being remotely familiar to me. There are some cartoons out there, but I don’t recognize any of them by name.
If I perform a search today for what I consider to be the classic Saturday morning cartoons, I find they are now relegated to a few specific digital channels and they are not easily found within the Saturday morning programming lineup. The basic programming that is available on the most popular digital channels on Saturday mornings these days isn’t anywhere close to what I had available to me when I was a kid. And I only had the three major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) available to me (there was no cable TV back then).
The Saturday morning landscape on the most popular channels has changed. It’s obvious that a cultural change or shift has presented itself gradually over the years and it is painfully obvious to people like me. It’s not about cartoons disappearing, it more about the quality of them has thrust downward.
It does seem that the Saturday morning cartoon tradition that me and countless numbers of kids experienced in the early and mid 1970’s is completely gone. This is expected as time goes by, but I have always secretly hoped that I could still find it somewhere, with the digital options available these days. But my point here is that the content that was presented to us back then was easily accessible and actually fun. Many digital channels have replaced this kind of Saturday morning programming with extensions of the talking heads shows that appear on Sunday mornings or infomercials. We have to muck through several searches to find this kind of content that was once available by just turning on the TV and changing the channel dial a few clicks.
It’s just plain gone.
This post is quite obviously based on my age. It is also based on my past experiences during a period in my life where many of the people my age experienced and enjoyed the same thing. We all realize times have changed. Don’t give me the “OK, boomer” response. But if digital programming that is available to the masses on Saturday morning is based more on people analyzing the last presidential election debate or primary results versus Wile E. Coyote having an Acme anvil dropped on his head and leaving the scene as a “walking accordion”, I’ll take the coyote any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
But just for fun, visit some of these classic clips on YouTube. Sorry, some of these may contain ads before the video presentation and the YouTube player is not fully accessible to those with some disabilities. YouTube sucks that way.
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