A History of Saturday Morning Programming

Saturday morning TV has changed a lot since I was a kid. It seems to change over and over again. Whatever one network is doing at one point isn’t something that they’ll keep doing. Now, I’m largely referring to network TV and what they have done regarding TV shows on Saturday morning. I almost thought that all networks had given up airing any programming for kids on Saturdays, but it turns out that with a bit of research, I was able to find out that it still exists. But it is constantly changing.

A lack of original programming can be commonplace on the network TV channels. Indeed, CBS used to air shows that were on Nickelodeon, then Nick Jr. NBC used to air the shows that were on Discovery Kids. ABC aired mostly Disney channel shows all the time. NBC also aired Qubo.

Now I had originally thought that there was no longer any programming on Saturday mornings for children anymore. After doing some research about it, I learned that I was wrong. It just seems like the constantly changing programming is what throws people off and make you wonder why to even bother watching if what you watch just goes away.

Let’s start with ABC’s history. At the beginning, they were probably everyone’s favorite. They aired One Saturday Morning which was five hours of summer once a week. I liked and watched nearly everything on this for a while. Then it got kind of lame. Then it switched to mostly just reruns of Disney channel sitcoms that still fit with the educational and informational programming standard and other Disney channel shows that aired. What annoyed me about this was it was the same old episodes and they wouldn’t show the later seasons of a lot of these shows. The biggest thing that I cared about here was Power Rangers, which used to air on FOX. I have no idea what they air nowadays since I don’t care about these shows anymore.

I liked it when CBS aired Nickelodeon shows as that meant that I could see Nickelodeon when I otherwise wouldn’t be able to. I wish they kept doing that when Power Rangers moved to that network. After a while, they seemed to downgrade to the younger, Nick Jr. shows which I didn’t care about at my growing age. They aired various children programming for a while after that which was stuff that might have aired on other channels before. I lost track and interest sometime around here.

The WB aired a very popular Kids WB programming schedule for a while. Ultimately, even when the WB network was replaced by the CW, this programming block remained for quite a while. It would change at some point later, but I’ll get to that. It was also aired in the daytime programming hours except for the last year of the WB network’s history.

NBC aired mostly Discovery Kids shows when I first became acquainted with it. I liked these shows a lot, but then they were taken away from me when they aired Qubo in its place. I liked and watched most of that. I got to see some Big Idea things I hadn’t seen before. They controversially cut out the Christian references in the shows like VeggieTales, which I understood and expected even though most others didn’t like this and did it without the approval of the creator himself. There might have been other times that I cared about this after Qubo went away, but I’m not sure what it was or how important I would have briefly cared about it.

FOX had the very popular FOX Kids timeslot. It was the original home of Power Rangers before it moved to Disney then Nickelodeon. FOX Kids was actually lowly rated and they sought to get rid of the programming. They switched to just Saturday instead of all throughout the week as they did before. They also switched to the FOX Box which eventually became 4Kids Entertainment.

It was around this time that it seemed that the FOX network gave up on programming and so it the CW network. It seemed as if all of the remaining FOX shows were dumped on the CW and thus, the CW 4Kids block was started. This lasted a bit before they started something else instead. They went to other programming that I was ever so briefly into. But I stopped caring about pretty much all TV on Saturday mornings at this point as I valued catching up on sleep on those days to be more important instead.

Well, that’s all that I cared about posting in this blog post. I’m not sure what else there is to say. I figured that since this blog was still on Saturdays with updates, I might as well do something that related to that day. I’m not sure how much longer this blog will continue with these Saturday updates. I’ll let you know if something changes regarding that. It might not be for a while, but many things can change as time goes by: just like yesterday, used to be tomorrow.