Rob Baker writes…
As I've followed a Facebook group called "TV Cartoons that Time Forgot," where I believe Jerry Beck is a moderator, as folks continued discussing so many old Saturday Morning cartoons, one thing finally stood out to me: That such a huge number of SatAM cartoons only lasted one season!
So I mentioned this on one post (which now seems to have surpassed over 200,000 followers, while inexplicably showing fewer posts being made to it?), that one-season thing. Yes there've been occasional exceptions to this within the 60s and 70s (such as Fat Albert) but for the most part, even popular cartoons re-branded every year so we had the New Scooby Doo Movies, Archie's Funhouse, etc. So Jerry Beck, I recall, weighed in and stated that it was because for Saturday Morning, everything had to be "new." That made some sense! I remember the exciting promos being run, the CBS "Cartooniverse" etc., and for kids, that may have once been extremely vital, to keep them excited over all the new stuff happening.
But I find not really anything to research that spells it out any more clearly nor definitively. I know that as we got into the 80s, many cartoons did run many seasons, the Chipmunks, the Smurfs, The Garfield, you know. So that must've also been seen as a vast policy change, though I remember some diversity still existed like Alf Tales versus a spinoff of sorts which dealt with the Alf characters acting out classic stories; same with Alvin Goes to the Movies; a few things like that.
I'd love to know what all you know, if anything, about that. I've told this Beck answer to a few people, as it seems unfair in the long run that Hong Kong Phooey only ever had 16 episodes all said, which were run ad nauseum while we kids still ate it up anyway. It's strange that there were SO many Hanna-Barbera shows and none of them seemed to last worth a darn, like why did they even bother if they kept getting cancelled? So it's clearly part of some strategy. That's what I'd like to learn about and maybe have your site to offer up as a great answer to that!
Simplified question, if you like: So many Saturday Morning Cartoons only lasted one season in the early years, which seems strange because some of them were really popular. Were they just cancelled or is there a better explanation for why they were treated this way?
You may be reading more into Jerry's answer than he intended but here's my answer: It had a lot to do with two problems that the programmers faced when they were buying shows to run on Saturday morning back in the days when CBS, NBC and ABC ran shows for kids then…problems which didn't exist for the folks down the hall programming live-action shows for prime time.
One was the lead time necessary for animation. The new shows that were ordered for the season beginning in September usually had to be ordered by around the end of February. The other problem was that the way the math worked on the budgets, you — I'm making you the programming person in this explanation — had to order a year of shows at a time. You ordered thirteen episodes that would each run four times to fill out 52 weeks.
The guys in the prime-time division could order thirteen episodes of a new sitcom. They could order six. And as those shows were shot, they could visit the sets and watch the filming or look at rough cuts of episodes in progress. They could look at the first few episodes of Happy Days and say, "Hey, let's give that Fonzie character more screen time"…and Fonzie would have more screen time in the episode shot the following week.
Or they could order thirteen of a new show called Three's Company (this is just one example of many) and then after the first few aired and got good ratings, they could quickly order more episodes so Show #14 could air the week after Show #13 and be followed immediately by Show #14 and Show #15 and so on. You couldn't get new episodes of an animated series that quickly…and the way things were budgeted, you really couldn't buy Show #14 until the following season. You had to run that first batch of thirteen over and over.
So let's say, Mr. Programmer, that you order thirteen episodes of a new show we'll call Stinky-Poo. You buy it in February to be delivered beginning in September…and while you can read scripts and look at storyboards and attend voice recording sessions, you really don't know what you've got until they deliver the first episode of that show in September. And if Stinky-Poo turns out to be stinky-poo, guess what: There's nothing you can do to fix it.
And furthermore, there are twelve more coming down that assembly line and they're probably going to stink too. I can't think of any Saturday morning cartoon that got a lot better as it went along. Once in a while, you can bail on a show. Your network can kick in the money to take a new show off the air before it's run four times…but you can't do that too often and you can only really replace it with a rerun, not a different new show.
As I mentioned in another post here, the test of a show was not how good the ratings were the first time you aired the thirteen. Lots of shows did well when they were new but when they began airing reruns, the kids decided to watch the reruns of something else. A hit show was one that held its audience in reruns or perhaps even went up in the ratings.
So beginning in September, you air those thirteen episodes of Stinky-Poo…and maybe you slip in a rerun on Week #9 or Week #10 to stretch out the supply of never-before-run episodes. Or maybe you slip in reruns because the studio is having trouble meeting air dates and Show #13 won't be done by Week #13. But at some point around November or December, you're into all-reruns and you can start looking at ratings and trying to determine if the show has developed a loyal-enough viewership to stay with it for another year you need to purchase way in advance.
Around November or December, you have to be seriously thinking about what you're going to renew for another season and what you're not going to renew. Because around February, you have to commit to the schedule you're going to start airing the following September. If Stinky-Poo has collapsed in the ratings, that makes it simple. You cancel it. If its ratings have been good and the numbers are holding strong or even improving, you pick the show up for Season #2.
Ah, but what if it's in the middle, which is where most shows wind up? It's not a tremendous hit but it's also not a complete failure. There's something there the kids like. So what do you do then? The answer often was this: You freshen. You split the difference between an all-new show and another year of the exact same program. That's when you might decide to do The Stinky-Poo Movies or Stinky-Poo's Funhouse or maybe introduce Stinky-Poo Junior into the show. It also tells the audience that it's not the same thirteen Stinky-Poo episodes that they had committed to memory by the third rerun.
A lot of shows fail for the same reason a lot of restaurants fail or a lot of movies fail: They just don't click with the customers. Some shows succeed because they do but there aren't enough of those so you have to do something. So you take that car which runs fine but it isn't as attractive as it might be and you slap a new coat of paint on it. You could get some good mileage out of it then. Hey, how about Stinky-Poo's Superstar Cosmic Space Adventure Fairy Tales? That might get us a pickup for thirteen more.
