A sad farewell to an old friend

I’m getting old.

I should have seen it coming, really. All the warning signs were there. I’ve never really liked dubstep. That new Ello thing started to replace Facebook, and I don’t care. Heck, the other day somebody was wrong on the Internet, and I didn’t correct them. Not even their grammar. That’s our generation’s equivalent of telling a bunch of kids to get off my lawn.

I’m not saying that getting old is all bad. I mean, just imagine how much money I’m going to save at the movies now that I qualify for the senior discount! But there are a few bad things that go along with it. When you get to my age, your friends start dying.

And this week, I lost one of my closest friends of all.

For those of you who haven’t heard: this week was the first time in more than 50 years that no major network aired Saturday morning cartoons.

No "Digimon" (1999-2012).  No "Alvin and the Chipmunks" (1983-1990).  No "Super Friends" (1973-1986). Not even the heavy hitters like "Pokémon" (1997-present) or "Yu-Gi-Oh!" (2000-2004) made the cut. A staple of American television has been completely wiped out.

It’s tough to say who’s really at fault here. You could blame the FCC for tightening its regulations on children’s programming. You could blame the viewers for relying more heavily on DVR recordings and online streaming. You could blame the production companies for putting out sub-par content and driving viewers away.

But let’s put thoughts of blame out of our heads for a moment. Instead, I want to talk about what all this means to us as the audience. What we’ve gained and what we’ve lost. Because, honestly, I find myself conflicted.

On the one hand, I feel like a part of my childhood just died. This whole situation is pretty tragic. There are few timeslots left that are dedicated exclusively to animation. We used to have whole channels dedicated to the stuff (like Cartoon Network or Boomerang) but those places have slowly changed over the last few years. Cartoon Network cut back on its animated content to add in live-action programs. Toonami, an animated time block of television aimed at older viewers, which originally premiered on Cartoon Network in 1997, was dropped in 2008. Though it found a new life on Adult Swim in 2012, it was trimmed from five days a week to one, and its start time was pushed back from 4 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. MTV has completely cut its animated programing. There aren’t a lot of places left where cartoons can air.

Volume is deeply tied to quality in animation. More shows getting produced means competition. Competition means that only the great shows survive. It’s no coincidence that the '90s were some of the most prolific years in American animation and that we got some of our best shows out of them.

Still, there is a silver lining here. See, having all these timeslots dedicated to animation wasn’t without its drawbacks. The vast majority of those timeslots were owned by major networks, and if you wanted any screentime, you had to play by their rules. These companies' ideas of what animated shows should be (either kids' shows or raunchy comedies) were pretty much all you could do. Anything else was relegated to cult status -- a la "Ӕon Flux" (1991-1995) -- or canceled by the networks as too big of a risk --like “Invader Zim” (2001-2006).

But the internet has changed things. It’s created an environment where animators can tell all types of stories without worrying about appeasing the network censors. If mainstream TV animation goes under, its best creators may wind up joining that group. I’d love to see where that leads.