SatAM question

How come virtually every saturday morning children's cartoon had an episode where the protagonist fell in love with a character of the opposite gender, but in the end it turns out the aforementioned character was EVIL so the main guy/girl gets back to "hanging out with their best buds "?

because saturday morning cartoons are cliche'd?

Probably because the censors foiled the writers' efforts to vary the cliche by having the protagonist fall in love with a character of the same gender.

I don't recall it ever happening on Garfield and Friends...


My favorite saturday morning cliche is the old TwoTeensWhoLikeEachOtherButWon'tAdmitItToAnyone saying "he's not my boyfriend/she's not my girlfriend" at the exact same time after some more popular teen assumes that they are boyfriend/girlfriend, or, as we said in 6th grade, and "item".

lol. Glad I got outta that. I'll take a different cliche of that.

billytheskink wrote:

Probably because the censors foiled the writers' efforts to vary the cliche by having the protagonist fall in love with a character of the same gender.

That actually DID happen with Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi, which confused the creator since it "would've brought in more audiences anyway". Most of the cartoons that pulled off the stuff I mentioned in the OP always ended with a moral, so I guess the lesson in those token episodes was "heterosexuality is totally bad and will only end in tears and/or the tiny robotic parts of your lover, which was fake and actually created by the main villain".

I mean if I were one of those insane tinfoil hat-wearing "gay agenda" retards I would've been sort of scared by this cliche.

Iguana wrote:

billytheskink wrote:

Probably because the censors foiled the writers' efforts to vary the cliche by having the protagonist fall in love with a character of the same gender.

That actually DID happen with Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi, which confused the creator since it "would've brought in more audiences anyway". Most of the cartoons that pulled off the stuff I mentioned in the OP always ended with a moral, so I guess the lesson in those token episodes was "heterosexuality is totally bad and will only end in tears and/or the tiny robotic parts of your lover, which was fake and actually created by the main villain".

I mean if I were one of those insane tinfoil hat-wearing "gay agenda" retards I would've been sort of scared by this cliche.

Fortunately, I missed that episode of Puffy Ami Yumi.

Cartoon cliches, especially in cartoons aimed at and involving characters from the 7-14 year old set, too often seem to come from the perspective of someone who was often picked on and never popular in school.
The kids who spent all their time drawing in their copies of Huckleberry Finn, sneaking comic books in between the pages of World History 1783-1869, and eating paste probably didn't have much luck in the adolescent dating scene. And these are the kids who grew up to create, write, and draw cartoons.
No luck with women in high school (it didn't become kosher for high school girls to dig nerdy guys until pop punk exploded, long after most of the cartoon industry's current players graduated) equals cartoons about characters who have similar experiences. And when they do find "love", it's too good to be true, and they get stabbed in the back/betrayed/humiliated/etc.

Maybe I'm thinking along the wrong lines here, but it's tough for me to watch Nickelodeon and not think "Gee, Butch Hartman must have had a rough time at school; I mean, for an American kid who didn't have to worry about whether or not he would be able to eat that night."

Now I don't know if this cliche scared the insane tonfoil hat-wearing "gay agenda" retards, but I'll bet Puffy Ami Yumi did. And with good reason.

apparently romance is dangerous to the young and young minded. Meh, I stopped caring.

billytheskink wrote:

billytheskink wrote:

Probably because the censors foiled the writers' efforts to vary the cliche by having the protagonist fall in love with a character of the same gender.

That actually DID happen with Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi, which confused the creator since it "would've brought in more audiences anyway". Most of the cartoons that pulled off the stuff I mentioned in the OP always ended with a moral, so I guess the lesson in those token episodes was "heterosexuality is totally bad and will only end in tears and/or the tiny robotic parts of your lover, which was fake and actually created by the main villain".

I mean if I were one of those insane tinfoil hat-wearing "gay agenda" retards I would've been sort of scared by this cliche.

Fortunately, I missed that episode of Puffy Ami Yumi.good reason.[/quote]
It never went beyond some concept art sketches.

Quote :

Now I don't know if this cliche scared the insane tonfoil hat-wearing "gay agenda" retards, but I'll bet Puffy Ami Yumi did. And with good reason.

...why? It's just a weeaboo cartoon.

Quote :

Fortunately, I missed that episode of Puffy Ami Yumi.

It never went beyond some concept art sketches.

Quote :

Now I don't know if this cliche scared the insane tonfoil hat-wearing "gay agenda" retards, but I'll bet Puffy Ami Yumi did. And with good reason.

...why? It's just a weeaboo cartoon.[/quote]

Iguana wrote:

...why? It's just a weeaboo cartoon.

It was a terrible, terrible show and deserves any and all disparaging remarks directed toward it.

When shows like Puffy Ami Yumi get on television, we should be scared of....something, probably the generation of kids who grow up watching it.

meh, I know that feeling. I get it when I'm forced to watch chowder. Its called dumbfuckery.

Tentacle_king's_revival wrote:

meh, I know that feeling. I get it when I'm forced to watch chowder. Its called dumbfuckery.

chowder wasn't bad

not sure about that....it seemed to have less substance than Fosters.....I could actually force myself to watch fosters...

Substance in a CN original?

I haven't seen a whole lot of Chowder, but what I have seen I generally have liked.

Ed, Edd, and Eddy, Dexter's Lab, both had moar substance. Sorry, mindless comedy doesn't do it for me.

Ed, Edd and Eddy and substance?

moar than chowder.

I wouldn't accuse either one of substance abuse, but I think Chowder is the funnier of the two.

that's fine. I just get ticked off a pure ignorance. and chowders variety reminds of toddler programing. I babysit sometimes, and that shit gets old and annoying quick.

Why is it every Saturday morning cartoon is now made by 4kids or is shit replayed on the Disney Channel?

jordan00 wrote:

Why is it every Saturday morning cartoon is now made by 4kids or is shit replayed on the Disney Channel?

Because there's no ratings or money in Saturday mornings anymore. The cable networks made everyday saturday morning (theoretically).
The broadcast networks outsource their saturday morning block, they save money, they meet government standards for "educational" programming, the outsourcees (4Kids) make money, we get to watch Dinosaur King and Sonic X...

There are certainly shows that don't match the criteria you laid out, but among the three networks that run programming from 4Kids and the Mouse those shows are few and far between, mostly on what's left of KidsWB.

If you speak Spanish, however, you can get dubbed versions of Beakman's World and Dora the Explorer on Univision.

or there's always the internet....

There internet viewers and money are too fractured to allow anything like the old saturday mornings to develop.

Kids today have no time for saturday morning cartoons. All they have left is to train for the next war on Halo. These kids today have to grow up too goddamn fast if they want to compete in keep-everyone-busy Amerikkka.

a_new_peace wrote:

Kids today have no time for saturday morning cartoons. All they have left is to train for the next war on Halo. These kids today have to grow up too goddamn fast if they want to compete in keep-everyone-busy Amerikkka.

I don't think it's that kids don't have time as much as it is that they don't have to make time on saturday mornings to see the best and the newest cartoons, or any cartoons really. Not that video games and the internet and the like haven't played a part in the downfall of saturday morning, but I'd be surprised if kids today watched significantly less cartoon and kids programming than they did 15 years ago. I think the cable networks (Disney, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon) are the biggest reason for this decline.

Unlike the broadcast networks, cable networks allowed kids to watch brand new cartoons in primetime or after school hours. They allowed kids to see cartoons during every day of the week, and with kids often being less-than-picky television viewers it did not matter that cable's programming was often rerun-heavy, unoriginal, and poorly animated.

In any given week, the broadcast networks (not counting public television) give kids about 5 hours of cartoon programming on saturday (5 networks airing cartoons at the same time), plus maybe an hour or two on weekdays if a local channel syndicates something. That's about 15 hours that cartoons are on television per week, at the most, with the newest and most interesting shows appearing only on the morning of one weekend day.

On cable, though, you have networks that show cartoons for 8, 10, 20 hours a day. If you have a particularly far reaching set of cable channels then you can pretty much find a cartoon on one or more networks whenever you turn on the television. So, instead of 15 hours per week, you can watch cartoons for 100 hours or more, with the newest and most interesting shows appearing during the week and in primetime, as well as on saturday morning.

Kids don't watch saturday mornings like they used to because they don't have to, because they can watch cartoons pretty much whenever they want. They have so many options for cartoon viewing now that it has fractured veiwership to the point where it isn't often profitable to produce several well-written and well-animated cartoons, especially for saturday morning broadcast television.