The Four Color Media Monitor

Truth Revolt reported that Saturday morning cartoons are no longer carried by any of the major TV networks, and CW was the last to carry any. I'm surprised a lot of the major comic book sites haven't commented on this, since comics and animated TV cartoons have long led a close relationship with each other, and there have been plenty based on comics since the mid-60s. I watched a few in my childhood too, like the first Spider-Man cartoon from 1967-70 and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends from 1981-83. I wonder if the reason the major comic sites haven't brought this up is because of the FCC's step in the late 90s (via SlashFilm):

A 1996 Federal Communications Commission mandate, issued in the wake of the Children’s Television Act, requires stations to program a minimum of three hours of children’s educational/informational (“E/I”) programming per week. To help their affiliates comply with the regulations, broadcast networks began to reorganize their efforts to adhere to the mandates, so their affiliates would not bear the burden of scheduling the shows themselves on their own time thus eliminating the risk of having network product preempted by the mandates. This almost always meant that the educational programming was placed during the Saturday morning cartoon block.

That was at the time the Clinton administration was in charge. What are the odds the major comic sites don't want to address the demise of Saturday morning cartoons because they don't want to blame Clinton's government for any part they had in precipitating the end of cartoons on Saturday morning network TV, and not because the cartoons were nowhere near the intellect seen in most comics of the past?

Labels: animation, politics