Shaping up to be a classic, The Powerpuff Girls have worked over audiences creating their own powerful niche. TM & © 2001 Cartoon Network. An AOL Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved.

Some original projects, such as Ed, Edd n Eddy, are passable. Other programs like Cow and Chicken or Dexter's Laboratory have a steady following. Still other programs, primarily The Powerpuff Girls, have slipped the leash and are on the eventual way to classic status. Cartoon Network continues to develop its own shows and will do so for the foreseeable future; Cohen and company have made a $350 million commitment to original programming, and at this time there are reportedly 25 animated shorts in sundry stages of development. Each one has the potential to develop into a series within the next two years. Add to that the commitment that CN is making to anime (Gundam Wing and Techni Muyo are now on the scene in addition to CN's other imports), and there is far less time available for Hanna-Barbera leftovers such as Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan.

Wait...Who's Watching What?
Still, how can one let a library spanning forty years of Saturday morning animation lie fallow? Adults make up 35% of CN's viewing audience, and its viewership spends an average of seven hours per week "tooned" in to the station. The average viewer is 81% more likely to have four or more television sets in the home than non-viewers. This suggests that there is certainly enough time, TV sets and adults to go around for the vintage toons, but I find myself puzzled by a couple of other statistics, and these deserve examination since they left me wondering at which audience the Boomerang network is truly aimed.

The Flintstones, network television's first primetime animated series, was originally produced by Hanna-Barbera Studios for ABC-TV from 1960-1966 and is now showing on Boomerang. TM & &

As noted earlier, Boomers represent people born in the years 1946-1964 (ages 55-37). If we add five years to these birth dates to reflect more accurately the times in their lives when Boomers were first addicted to cartoons, the range of programming would reflect the years 1951-1969. Demographic studies suggest that the typical head of the household among CN's audience is in the 25-34 age range, which suggests birth dates ranging from 1967-1976. If we were to apply the same five-year rule, the range of programming would represent something like 1972-1981. This range more accurately reflects the prevalent programming on Boomerang. In an interview with l.a. life on April 1, 2000, Boomerang senior VP Mark Norman suggested that the network would be concentrating on the years between 1963 and 1976. If the viewership of Boomerang, as Ms. Cohen suggests, is sharing the beloved cartoons of their youth with their own progeny (allowing time for their children to hit the age of five), who is that viewership? According to an article in Marketing Click (3/99), "More children's television is viewed in households with GenX parents and kids under 12 than those with Boomer parents, according to Mediamark Research Inc. GenX households were almost twice as likely to have tuned in to the Cartoon Network during a recent six month period than Boomer households..."

Therefore, one conclusion we could draw is that Boomers are overrated as a viewing audience for animated cartoon shows. Another conclusion we might reach is that Boomerang, while it does show cartoons pre-dating 1967, may not be completely intended for the baby boomers and their kids after all. At the time that most of Boomerang's current fare was playing on Saturday morning, true Boomers were sweating out recessions or lurching towards yup-dom; Jabberjaw was the last thing on their minds. Boomerang seems more a strategy to attract GenXers and their offspring, who also cross over to CN for the newer and hipper toons. Thus, CN and Boomerang team up for the tastiest pieces of the demographic pie. Boomerang also serves the purpose of clearing the decks for CN's original programs while maintaining the original network's 35% adult viewing base and fully utilizing Turner's colossal cartoon library.