Saturday Morning Cartoons

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Paul F.P. Pogue

Saturday morning cartoons have been an integral part of the American television scene since the 1960s. Saturday morning is unlike any other time of the programming week in that the viewing audience is more monolithic than any other. At no other time do so many stations broadcast such similar material for such an extended period of time, all aimed at the same audience: children. Several generations of children have planned their weekends around the ritual of pouring huge bowls of sugar-saturated cereal and gathering about the television for the week's dose of animation.

The earliest incarnation of the Saturday morning cartoon came about almost as an accident. In 1949, producer Jerry Fairbanks sold NBC on the idea of a new series of cartoons developed especially for television. His product was a low-budget project titled Crusader Rabbit, created by Jay Ward and Alex Anderson. This simply-animated series followed the adventures of an intrepid rabbit and his tiger sidekick. "I don't recall anything special about Saturday morning at that point except that the networks had some vague idea that they wanted programs for kids," Fairbanks said, according to Hal Erickson's Television Cartoon Shows: An Illustrated Encyclopedia.

The idea certainly had merit. According to Erickson, statistics going back to the radio years showed that the peak tune-in hours for children were between 10 a.m. and noon on Saturday mornings and 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays. Crusader Rabbit was the very first cartoon created exclusively for television and the first to take advantage of this window of opportunity to market to children. Prior to Crusader Rabbit, the only cartoons that had appeared on television were repackaged shorts originally created for the big screen. In order to keep costs down and constantly turn out new material, Ward and Anderson pared Crusader Rabbit down to its absolute bare essentials. Characters moved an average of once every four seconds and tended to stay in static poses. The show ran for two years, from 1950-1952.

Crusader Rabbit failed to trigger a deluge of morning cartoons. Television stations preferred to stay with the tried-and-true (and much less expensive) format of a live-action host holding court over a studio audience of children and plugging the sponsors' products. But CBS took a gamble and placed a well-known character, Mighty Mouse, on Saturday mornings in 1955. Mighty Mouse Playhouse ran for 12 highly successful seasons and further edged live-action shows out the door in favor of direct-to-television animation.

That same year, another important development was taking place: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, two talented MGM animators, took over the animation division of MGM, only to be shown the door in 1957. The pair soon set up their own animation studio and started turning out television animation, usually aimed towards prime time or afternoon slots. Such shows as Ruff and Ready (the studio's first effort,) The Jetsons(1962), and The Flintstones (1960-1966) were strong successes for the fledgling studio, but it was in the Saturday morning field that its cost-effective techniques made Hanna-Barbera an industry powerhouse.

In order to feed into the huge time and work demands required to develop a half-hour of animation every week, Hanna-Barbera, Ward, and other early television cartoon pioneers developed a wide array of cost-cutting and corner-cutting techniques. Characters were often drawn with a minimum of motion; if a character was speaking, often the only thing moving on the screen was the mouth. Character design was also geared towards efficiency of action. Many Hanna-Barbera characters, such as those in The Jetsons or the seminal Ruff and Ready, were designed with wide collars so it would be easier to show them turning their head by simply flopping the drawing of the head on the collar.

In some cases, sharp writing made up for the deficiencies in animation. The Jetsons and The Flintstones were well known for their occasional double entendres. Jay Ward's adventuresome duo of Rocky and Bullwinkle and their friends appeared in a number of incarnations, including a few Saturday morning runs. They were better known for their sharp gags and jokes that worked on two levels than the rough, sketchy animation that characterized them. The Hanna-Barbera studio was not without its share of critics, many of whom felt that its quickie techniques cheapened all of animation. "Hanna-Barbera proved to the networks that by cutting corners (actually chunks), it was possible to make cartoons cheaply enough for television's needs," Erickson quotes Mark Nardone as writing in 1977.

As the 1960s progressed, animation was increasingly seen as a children's medium. As a result, animation was funneled away from the prime-time slots and into Saturday mornings. 1966 marked an important turning point in the history of Saturday morning cartoons; it was the first year that all three major networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) broadcast animation blocks on Saturday morning. The ongoing struggle for the support of advertisers, the attention of children, and the money of their parents was waged in earnest. Prime-time animation, though not completely dead, was a flagging form.