Saturday morning craptoons

Remember back when Saturday was a day you went out of your way to wake up early, even though it was possibly the only day you knew you could afford to sleep in? Thank you very much, Sunday school. But it was worth all that and more just to see the classic Saturday morning cartoon lineup that network television had to offer. With cartoons like "Garfield and friends," "Ghostbusters," "Batman: The Animated Series," "Scooby-Doo" (when the gang was young, much like us), "X-Men" and the legendary "Looney Tunes" to name a few, there could not be a better start to the weekend. \nCredit must be given where it is due, and just as the Beatles revolutionized rock music so did "Looney Tunes," which debuted in 1930, revolutionize the cartoon world. Creator Mel Blanc helped open the door for every cartoon that eventually made it to television. \nSaturday morning became the prime time for cartoons in the '80s, and when a show made it to this prestigious time slot it would be the equivalent of a sitcom being added to NBC's Must-See Thursday. Sure, the afternoon time slot was decent, but you could see the Disney afternoon five days a week. \nFrom the late '80s through the early '90s Saturday morning cartoons were at their peak, with an estimated 24 million viewers tuning in every week (compared to a meager 2 million viewers this past year). There were so many options back then, too many in fact. Sometimes I would be forced to watch tidbits of "Bobby's World" during the "Spider-Man" commercials. Today your choices are pretty much limited to "Pepper Ann" or old reruns of "The Golden Girls." \nWhile the list of awesome cartoons from the classic Saturday lineup seems limitless, there couldn't be all killer and no filler. So educational shows were staggered throughout the morning schedule. If you were a science buff (and if you weren't, one of your junior high science teachers was), you certainly remember "Beakman's World" and his CBS counterpart "Bill Nye, the Science Guy." While I tried to avoid these so-called scientists at all costs, I ended up seeing nearly every episode of "Bill Nye" thanks to my eighth grade science teacher, who oddly enough shaved his legs and could balance a bicycle on his chin. Though Nye's jokes were utterly dry and in reality he probably didn't know an electron from his butt before he hosted the show, I give him props for being the wacky robot correspondent on the short lived Comedy Central show "Battlebots." \nThen, to cap off a brilliant Saturday morning was a show that is synonymous with our generation: "Saved by the Bell." Thanks to the four-time-a-day reruns of Zack and the gang I have probably seen every single episode of the show, save for a few in the junior high years when they still lived in good ol' Indiana. \nAfter "Saved by the Bell" was gradually phased out in favor of "Hang Time" and "City Guys," Saturday mornings took a turn for the worst. "Ghostbusters" was one of the first to go, "Garfield and Friends" was taken off the air soon after, "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" went through odd animation changes before slowly dying out and only Stan Lee himself can explain the mysterious disappearance of the cartoons featuring his superheroes. \nNew cartoons came along, but as we grew older, the shows grew crappier. During this past summer I woke up especially early one sunny Saturday morning for the first time in awhile to check the status of Saturday morning programming. Of the three cartoons I was able to find ("Recess," "Pepper Ann" and "Sabrina the Animated Series") none of them were even close to being as good as the worst of their predecessors. And it's not that I have outgrown cartoons because I would watch "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" everyday if it were still on television. \nSo what happened that caused the decline of Saturday morning cartoons? The answer is multi-fold. \nOne major factor that put an axe into the back of Saturday morning was and still is Nickelodeon, the network for kids, which diverted children away from the major networks that housed Saturday morning cartoons. Another major cause was the Children's Television Act passed by Congress in 1990, which required television stations to run a certain amount of educational programming. Those clowns in Congress did it again. While CBS has recently added several Nickelodeon cartoons to its Saturday morning lineup, the damage has already been done and Saturdays will never again be as great as they once were. \nWhile we are old enough to deal with the loss of Saturday mornings, the real victims of this crisis are our unborn children who will never experience the joy of Saturday morning cartoons. When I was a young lad, I was fortunate to have the Ninja Turtles and Batman around to protect me from my worst nightmares. Hopefully, "Pepper Ann" will be a good substitute for today's youth. But somehow I doubt it. \nThere is something to be learned from the Saturday morning slaughter. Enjoy your youth while you can because childhood is not an age -- it is a state of mind. Cartoons are not for kids alone. Just because we grow up doesn't mean we have to grow old. So never forget what it's like to be a kid because only then will you truly be old.