Saturday morning cartoon

Saturday morning cartoon is the colloquial term for the typical television animation programming that was typically scheduled on Saturday mornings on the major American television networks since the mid 1960s. This genre is often referred to by its critics as "illustrated radio", because of its focus on voice performances, music, and sound effects over animation and visual quality.

Early Saturday morning cartoons

Although Saturday morning had always featured a great deal of children's fare before, the idea of commissioning animated television series for broadcast really caught on in the mid-1960s, when the networks realized that they could concentrate kids' viewing on that one morning to appeal to advertisers. Furthermore, limited animation, such as the kind produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions, was economical enough to produce in sufficient quantity to fill the four hour time slot, as compared to live-action programming. The experiment proved successful, and the time slot was filled with profitable programming.

Related Topics:
Limited animation - Hanna-Barbera Productions

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