Current State of Saturday Morning Cartoons
While animated production is still present on one broadcast network on Saturday mornings (The CW), it has been noticeably reduced. 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. NBC abandoned its Saturday morning cartoon lineup in 1992, replacing it with a Saturday morning edition of The Today Show and adding an all live-action teen-oriented block, TNBC, which featured Saved by the Bell, California Dreams, and other teen comedies. Even though the educational content was minimal to nonexistent, NBC labeled all the live-action shows with an E/I rating.
CBS followed NBC's example by producing a Saturday edition of The Early Show in the first two hours of its lineup and an all live-action block of children's programming. The experiment lasted a few months, and CBS brought back their animated CBS Storybreak series.
In 2004, ABC was the last of the broadcast networks to add a Saturday morning edition of their morning news program, Good Morning America, in the first hour of its lineup. Prior to that, and particularly in the early 1990s, it was not uncommon for affiliates to preempt part or all of ABC's cartoon lineup with local programming.
Fox carried little or no E/I programming, leaving the responsibility of scheduling the E/I shows to the affiliates themselves; since January 2009 Fox carries no children's programming at all. The WB was far more accommodating; for several years, they aired the history-themed Histeria! five days per week, leaving only a half-hour of E/I programs up to the local producers to program.
Boomerang, a spin-off channel of Cartoon Network, currently specializes primarily in reruns of Saturday morning cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s (the majority of which come from Hanna-Barbera, which, like Boomerang, is owned by Time Warner). It is not unusual to see the major networks rotate reruns of older series (usually less than ten years, because of E/I content) instead of airing a new production, since the children who watched them the first time are not the same children who are currently watching Saturday morning cartoons; Cookie Jar Group's programming blocks have made extensive use of this strategy, as do channels that are intended for digital subchannels (e.g. Qubo).
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