There is a price for the proliferation of television genres. As the number of cable channels continues to increase, the average number of viewers per channel will decrease. What this means for the viewing audience is that networks cannot expect advertisers to pay the same proportional rates they paid decades ago when there were, at most, five channels. “The animation business has always been driven by ancillary, meaning toys and games,” says Gaither. Transformers, He-Man, My Little Pony and G. I. Joe are prime examples of this. Gaither adds: “Frankly, prior to the ‘90s, when there were no FCC rules, it was very easy to launch an animated product based on a toy and you could very clearly see where the revenue stream would lie. After the FCC rules, you could no longer do that so directly. Unless you were vertically integrated like Warner Bros. Studios, which in putting a show like Animaniacs on FOX Kids then Kids’ WB!, then merchandising it through your studio and on videos around the world, there’s no way to stop that.” According to Cartoon Network's Simensky, if a show does not have the potential to be successful in the toy and game industries, the likelihood of a network picking it up is much slimmer.

Kids WB! is one of the stops for a property on its way up the revenue stream for the vertically integrated Warner Bros.

The greatest benefit to Saturday morning cartoons was their ability to create one venue for advertisers where they could reach 20 million viewers. If a toy company wanted to promote a novel product in the ‘80s, advertising on Saturday mornings was logical. On the other hand, an advantage to the proliferation of children’s programming on cable TV is that advertisers can more directly target their products to their core audience. Since children exist in such smaller niches, an advertiser can better pinpoint a germane time to advertise, thus reducing the cost for the advertiser.

The other sizeable change in the last two decades is the increase in children’s buying power and larger family assets due to dual family incomes.ⁱⁱ Children under the age of twelve are responsible for $500 billion in purchases per year.ⁱⁱⁱ As professors at Middle Tennessee State University noted in a conglomeration of studies, the annual amount children spend has been increasing by 20% each year for at least the last decade.^iv Ancillary becomes that much more important because kids are being allowed to spend more of their parents’ money. The toys and games associated with a children’s program can be more important than the program itself.

TiVo promises to change audience's consumption patterns to on-demand viewing. © 2002 TiVo, Inc.

Now the future of television is TiVo and other DVRs (digital video recorders). TiVo will cause the next great generational shift in the way children consume programming. Where cable TV facilitated viewers in watching a certain genre of programming anytime of day, DVRs will bring viewers one step closer to television on demand -- watching a specific show at any given time. “Once TiVo takes off, it will force networks to come up with a new way of getting advertisers,” observes Simensky. Since viewers will then have the ability to skip watching commercials, how will networks function without ad dollars as the primary source of revenue? O’Neal realizes that, “There will be a change. The beauty of the medium is that it evolves. The business models evolve. As the advertisers and the broadcasters and the techno-wizards who come up with these devices get together, they will discover a way for everyone to make their money. There will be some kind of sponsorship associated with shows. For example, at the bottom of the TV screen, it might say, 'Sony,' with a banner running across outlining new Sony products.” Television may return to having specific products sponsor a show: for example, in a decade one may watch Kellogg’s Cornflakes Proudly Presents The Simpsons. The bottom line is that the way 30 year-olds remember Saturday morning cartoons, the current generation of children may remember Nickelodeon once DVRs and digital television arrive in the mainstream.

The final question remains: will cartoons ever return to Saturday mornings to the same degree that they existed during the ‘70s and ‘80s? The answer is no. The reason for this is the same reason why people no longer watch silent movies or black and white TVs or primetime sitcoms where married couples sleep in separate beds: once things evolve, they seldom return to their simpler forms. Saturday morning cartoons were a phenomenon that now resides in the history books. It is an anomaly in the history of children’s broadcasting, the likes of which will never be seen again. For anyone who remembers the paramount of Saturday morning cartoons, they can keep those memories of childhood dear in their hearts along with other great relics from the ‘80s including parachute pants, Pogo balls and saying “Have a nice day!” because Saturday morning cartoons are gone for good on broadcast networks.

^{i William H. Shaw and Vincent Barry, Moral Issues in Business (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1992): 477-502.
ii Bruce Horovitz: “Cashing in on kids Retailers in search of customers for life,” USA Today (1997, December 18), Page 1A.
iii Ibid.
iv “Attention All Shoppers: Consumerism and Kids,” Youth Markets Alert, June 1994: 6(6).}

Gerard Raiti is a senior at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee where he is majoring in English, Music and Computer Science. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. Recently, he interned as a Business Intelligence Research Analyst for ClientLogic. He has been writing about animation for various publications since 1997 because he loves animation and all things Disney. He aspires to work one day at a network in children’s programming and development.