Saturday Morning Cartoons
Saturday morning cartoons have been an integral part of the American television scene since the 1960s. Saturday morning is unlike any other time of the programming week in that the viewing audience is more monolithic than any other. At no other time do so many stations broadcast such similar material for such an extended period of time, all aimed at the same audience: children. Several generations of children have planned their weekends around the ritual of pouring huge bowls of sugar-saturated cereal and gathering about the television for the week's dose of animation.
The earliest incarnation of the Saturday morning cartoon came about almost as an accident. In 1949, producer Jerry Fairbanks sold NBC on the idea of a new series of cartoons developed especially for television. His product was a low-budget project titled Crusader Rabbit, created by Jay Ward and Alex Anderson. This simply-animated series followed the adventures of an intrepid rabbit and his tiger sidekick. "I don't recall anything special about Saturday morning at that point except that the networks had some vague idea that they wanted programs for kids," Fairbanks said, according to Hal Erickson's Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia.
The idea certainly had merit.
This page contains 201 words.
Saturday Morning Cartoons article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 2,493 words
(approx. 8 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Saturday morning cartoon Article
