Saturday Morning Cartoons!!

Was there anything better than growing up with Saturday Morning Cartoons?

I don't think so. Nothing beat starting the weekend off with an entire morning of cartoons. You could hardly drag yourself out of bed by 8:00am for school during the week, but on Saturday mornings you had no problem getting up by 6:00am to start catching some toons.

For me Saturday cartoons started at around 5:30am. If you were a die hard you could get up at that time and watch some Rocket Robin Hood or The Mighty Hercules. Usually I didn't get up until around 7:00am, when the good cartoons were in full swing. I used to sit in the living room in my underwear with a big bowl of sugar cereal, like Froot Loops or Frosted Flakes (Does anyone remember Frosted Rice?) and glaze over while staring at the TV.

The shows used to be great and plentiful. Plastic Man, Captain Caveman, The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show, Scooby Doo, Smurfs, Justice League of America, Popeye, Tom & Jerry, Fonzie and Friends, Richie Rich, Flintstones, Fat Albert, Godzilla(with Godzookie), Yogi Bear and on and on. There was limitless selection. You could flip from NBC to CBS to ABC and they were all playing excellent cartoons. By around 11:00am the regular programming started to creep in and this would cause you to snap out of you daze and get on with the weekend. Good times. Good times.

The networks would get you all psyched up about their new cartoon lineup at the end of the summer. You'd see ads in all of your comic books and they'd have a Saturday Morning preview shows that gave you little teasers of all the awesome new shows that were coming. Somehow this would make starting a new school year, seem not so bad. Saturday Morning cartoons were like a reward for making it through another week of school.

Now the phenomenon of Saturday morning cartoons is dead. The 3 major networks have given up on kids.

NBC starts off Saturday mornings at 7:00am with a classic kids favorite, "Today". This goes on for 2 hours and then they really get the ball rolling with "LOCAL NEWS" for another 2 hours. At 10:00 they finally put something on for kids. 'Whatever', a show where teenagers discuss issues and entertainment, followed by 'Veggie Tales' for kids who like a little religion in their cartoons. Blech! Then they have 'Dragon' and '3-2-1 Penguins', which both suck bigtime. Then it's back to adult shows.

That line up stinks!

Over on ABC at 7:00am they are showing "Good Morning America"! WTF!! After this they actually show one hour that features two decent cartoons for kids. Then it's a double-shot of 'That's So Raven', followed by 'Hannah Montana' and 'The Suite Life of Zack and Cody'. All of which are non-cartoon shows aimed at the pre-teen demographic. Then it's on with the regular programming.

Now over to CBS. They start at 6:00am with "The Saturday Early Show". Now that sounds promising! Ooops. Wait, that's another news show. It ends at 8:00am and then comes the cartoons! Madeline (sucks!), Sabrina (acceptable), Trollz (not my style but could be OK) and Horseland (I don't even know what that is). At 10:00 they switch back over to regular programming with "LOCAL AFFILIATE NEWS".

I guess they just assume that kids are going to watch the cartoon networks. Which they do because they have no other choice.

"Yay! Let's get up early and watch the same frickin shows that are on at any given time, every single day of the week!"

Now that's something to look forward to!

Stupid TV!!