The Flashback Saturday Mornings
I have written about about this block
before , as I was marking the end of commercial Saturday morning broadcast TV children's TV back in 2014. This was the first block I wrote about then and thought maybe to give it another look and see if anything can be said differently, and what can be added. Let's take a look.
By the year 2000, Saturday Morning broadcast TV for kids was dead, what was on the air was the buying of time , really.. Also the results of media consolidation were in full force by this point as well, and that has to do with this story as much as anything else.
Our story starts with CBS. Due to changes in the Children's television act of 1990, more cable penetration, media consolidation, and the target audience's lifestyles changing, CBS had given up running their own children's block. By this time only FOX and The WB were still doing such. (Disney on ABC doesn't count in a technical sense; NBC was producing but for teens) CBS had given up a section of Saturday morning programming to their morning show. (CBS Saturday Morning) following what NBC had done in 1992, and giving an audience they could give more commercials , a program.
A condition of the children's television act is to limit advertising for children under 13 to 12 minutes on weekdays and 10.5 minutes on weekends ( guess where Saturday falls) this meant that some revenues would be gone but could be made up on a program for adults like CBS Saturday Morning. The block for children was cut to 3 hours to match the legal requirement (at the time to have 3 hours of Educational children's programming.) They decided to outsource that time to a company willing to have the commitment to the block they didn't want to have hands in. (In theory) Nelvana ran a block called Think CBS , later CBS Kidshow. (either that or its CBS Kids show or CBS Kids how or CBS kid show ) .
Now let's talk about UPN. UPN was a broadcast network owned by Viacom and until 2000, Chris Craft as well. The name is UPN meant United Paramount Network. Viacom owned children's cable network Nickelodeon. It would make sense that after Disney bought ABC and made a Saturday block run by Disney, to have UPN have a block by Nick on UPN. That didn't happen, they made a deal in 1998 to have Disney produce their block. (Partly Viacom owned network including some local stations owned by Viacom were airing a block run by Disney while Viacom ran Nickelodeon , that's a funny story) Nick and UPN was considered but Disney really must have wanted this. (
Source)
Viacom was able to purchase CBS in 2000. In a twist, the original Viacom was once CBS Films and owned with CBS but in 1971 the laws made it where a company that owned a network couldn't own a film and syndication unit.( A good rule, that was also killed by bad decisions) . Since our story is about one block (yeah you are taking forever)..
Nick....oh wait... Nick Jr. on CBS. So, in actual fact, they decided to skew younger and have the block be a Saturday extension of Nick Jr which didn't run on weekends. On September 16, 2000 the 3 hour block launched. Maybe the idea was since, FOX, the WB, and ABC were going after kids above 7 and Nickelodeon already existing and targeting the same audience, that skewing younger would be a mission. (Sad they didn't do Teen Nick on CBS and go after TNBC) The block was also originally ad free, because sure. Nelvana wasn't fully out of the works because they had worked with Nick to bring shows including preschool shows.
More after the Jump