Hard to beat Wile E. Coyote, ACME products, and the diligent effort to capture the Road Runner. But it was more about that Saturday morning for 1 hour was the only time we as kids were allowed to watch TV. Then it was "Go outside and come back at 5:00 for dinner, don't be late."
I am really hoping that the "Coyote v. Acme" movie set to release next year, as well as "The Day The Earth Blew Up" from last year, revive interest in The Looney Tunes. They are iconic Americana, omnipresent for nearly a century, but mismanaged for the last 10-15 years. What could have been with Space Jam 2...
You bring up a good point — the best part about Saturday morning cartoons was that they ended (sometime around noon when "Wide World of Sports" or whatever came on) and we headed out into the big blue world.
Kids these days don't seem to have much of a childhood. My fondest memories are summers where I would disappear late morning on my bike with friends, go on an adventure, and not come home until dinner time.
Now it seems childhood is filled with sports practice, homework, summer camp, and fortnite.
And in modern times, we can't forget the concerned citizen calling the police when seeing young kids out on their own. So childhood has become semi-illegal, depending on the mood of the officers on duty.
The funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t necessarily kid stuff either - they were full of topical references that nobody has understood since the 1940s.)
Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.
I think what made Saturday mornings so special was that you were in school for 5 days right before it.
For a kid, 5 days is a long time. For a 5 year old kid, a 5 day school week is the equivalent of a 30 year old working for 30 days straight, then imagine you have a 12 day vacation. That's how time felt, and why those first few hours of Saturday morning were so cherished, it signaled the beginning of a weekend of possibilities.
This is about kids TV in form of cartoons in Saturday mornings and how that has changed in the recent decade or two. Only relevant for a particular demographic and culture. Not an insignificant one, but the title "Disappearance of Saturday Morning" is much too general.
Maybe "Disappearance of Saturday Morning Kids Cartoons on TV"?
For over two years now I have had a dedicated Raspberry Pi running an app I wrote that plays a kind of TV schedule all day long. It was my way of capturing something like the programming I grew up with as a kid.
I have to have all the content on attached storage since I don't want to rely on online sources. But then of course the app is simply pulling up a file at a given time of the day and playing it with a media playback library in Python.
Unlike television when I was young, there are no commercials. Dead time is filled at random from lists of "shorts" that are kept on the hard drive as filler. (These in fact might include Looney Tunes cartoons or shorts, music videos, etc. scraped from YouTube.)
The schedule aspect means that there is a theme to the content and when it plays rather than just serving up random content from the drive. The Wednesday evening movie is always a western for example. Learning shows (courseware) and yoga in the morning, kid's shows around after-school time, a comedy series in the evening, mysteries on Mondays, etc.
The biggest shortcoming of the app is that I have no trial way to create the schedule short of a Mac OS app where you have to hand-add each show. When I get time I want to have a mechanism to specify "time slots" for content and have the app do an adequate job of preparing at least a stand-in schedule. (Maybe I'll finally get around to getting this going this Fall or Winter. I hesitate to even point out the repo since it is so half-baked, but if you check my GitHub and look for "UHF", you'll find the last checked-in versions.)
On any given day, I can load a web page I set up that shows today's schedule. Since the schedule that the app uses is just a JSON file, the web front-end just uses the same JSON file: parses to find today's content:
The Children's Television Act didn't have anything to do with it? My understanding is that that's what brought in the E/I programming that fills (filled? it's been a few years since I looked) the space Saturday morning cartoons used to occupy on the broadcast networks. I've no doubt the other things the author lists contributed too, but it's surprising to either see E/I omitted or to learn that it had no noticeable causal effect.
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[ 183 ms ] story [ 2325 ms ] threadNow it seems childhood is filled with sports practice, homework, summer camp, and fortnite.
Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.
For a kid, 5 days is a long time. For a 5 year old kid, a 5 day school week is the equivalent of a 30 year old working for 30 days straight, then imagine you have a 12 day vacation. That's how time felt, and why those first few hours of Saturday morning were so cherished, it signaled the beginning of a weekend of possibilities.
This is about kids TV in form of cartoons in Saturday mornings and how that has changed in the recent decade or two. Only relevant for a particular demographic and culture. Not an insignificant one, but the title "Disappearance of Saturday Morning" is much too general.
Maybe "Disappearance of Saturday Morning Kids Cartoons on TV"?
I have to have all the content on attached storage since I don't want to rely on online sources. But then of course the app is simply pulling up a file at a given time of the day and playing it with a media playback library in Python.
Unlike television when I was young, there are no commercials. Dead time is filled at random from lists of "shorts" that are kept on the hard drive as filler. (These in fact might include Looney Tunes cartoons or shorts, music videos, etc. scraped from YouTube.)
The schedule aspect means that there is a theme to the content and when it plays rather than just serving up random content from the drive. The Wednesday evening movie is always a western for example. Learning shows (courseware) and yoga in the morning, kid's shows around after-school time, a comedy series in the evening, mysteries on Mondays, etc.
The biggest shortcoming of the app is that I have no trial way to create the schedule short of a Mac OS app where you have to hand-add each show. When I get time I want to have a mechanism to specify "time slots" for content and have the app do an adequate job of preparing at least a stand-in schedule. (Maybe I'll finally get around to getting this going this Fall or Winter. I hesitate to even point out the repo since it is so half-baked, but if you check my GitHub and look for "UHF", you'll find the last checked-in versions.)
On any given day, I can load a web page I set up that shows today's schedule. Since the schedule that the app uses is just a JSON file, the web front-end just uses the same JSON file: parses to find today's content:
https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...