History
Children's television is nearly as old as television itself, with early examples including shows such as Play School, Captain Tugg, The Magic Roundabout, Howdy Doody, Ivor the Engine, Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Bill and Ben', Captain Kangaroo and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In the United States, early children's television was often a marketing branch of a larger corporate product, such as Disney, and it rarely contained any educational elements (for instance, The Magic Clown, a popular early children's program, was primarily an advertisement for Bonomo's Turkish taffy product). This practice continued, albeit in a much toned-down manner, through the 1980s in the United States, when the Federal Communications Commission prohibited tie-in advertising on broadcast television (it does not apply to cable, which is out of the reach of the FCC's content regulations). Though there is some debate on the intended audience, later non-educational children's television programs included the science fiction programmes of Irwin Allen (most notably Lost in Space), the fantasy series of Sid and Marty Krofft, and the extensive cartoon empire of Hanna-Barbera.
In the United States, from the 1960s through approximately the 1990s, children's programming was primarily concentrated on the Saturday morning cartoon block. All three of the major television networks carried Saturday morning cartoons and various other children's programming during this time. While most shows had short, 13-week runs, others could last for decades (an example is Scooby-Doo, which ran on a near-continuous basis in numerous incarnations from 1969 until 1991). A combination of factors led to the collapse of Saturday morning cartoons; some include the near concurrent entries of Cartoon Network, Fox Kids and Nickelodeon (with its Nicktoons) into the animated market in 1992 with cartoons in non-traditional time slots, the implementation of the Children's Television Act educational television mandate in 1996, and a general erosion of sponsorship base and viewership for broadcast programs. These factors, however, were a boon to animation studios in Canada, where subsidies for Canadian content were aids to the continued production of animated series there (particularly the newly in-demand educational series).
Many children's programs also have a large adult following, sometimes due to perceived quality and educational value, and sometimes among adults who watched the shows as children or with their own children and now have a nostalgic emotional connection (an example is the continuing popularity of programming from Nickelodeon, which prompted the network to launch The '90s Are All That, a late-night block featuring reruns of 1990s Nickelodeon shows). The relatively low-cost nature of much early children's programming has given it a campy reputation, which is a second source of entertainment for adults who, as children, were unaware of the medium's limitations.
Read more about this topic: Children's Television Series
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)