Fan Page: Saved By The Bell

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

BEHOLD THE HARBINGER OF THE SATURDAY MORNING CARTOON APOCALYPSE! "Saved By The Bell" debuted on Saturday Mornings in 1990 and the landscape of Saturday Mornings were changed forever. The next few seasons saw an ever increasing amount of live-action teenage sit-coms such as "Guys Next Door", "California Dreams" and "CityKids", as well as non-animated offerings like "Saturday Morning Videos", "NBA Inside Stuff, "Beakman's World" and "Bill Nye The Science Guy". Local stations started selling their Saturday Morning programming slots to Real Estate infomercials and religious programming, or filling it with cheap syndicated re-runs of sit-coms and old movies. Saturday Morning as we knew it... was dieing :(

This trend spread like a Cancer through the Children's Entertainment Industry. The Disney Channel started filling their hours with shows like Lizzie McGuire and That's So Raven instead of actual Disney cartoons. Nickelodeon started their "SNick" line-up of original programming aimed at teens. Soon, the only place you could find cartoons on Saturday mornings were a fist-full of pay cable channels and FOX Television Network, the final outpost of Saturday Morning Cartoons in an apocalyptic wasteland that was once a lush Garden Of Eden full of ripe cartoons that could be picked and consumed at our leisure.

Personally, I think it can all be blamed on Jessie having taken those pills...

Agree or disagree, have an opinion, feel free to leave it in the comments below. And if Saved By The Bell is for some reason one of your favorites, don't forget to go vote for it in our new-and-improved Best New Show Of The 1989/1990 Season Poll!

Comments

[mindy-mousie.livejournal.com]

I adored Saved by the Bell and watched it from the early years to the college years. My favorite characters were Screech and Slater.

I do remember that steady decline of cartoons on Saturday mornings. All the networks wanted more educational programming on Saturday mornings by the mid 90s. I guess that's when I had to ditch Saturday mornings and turn to other shows and on home video tapes. :( Sad.

[demonicgerbil.livejournal.com]

The networks were required by an act of Congress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Television_Act) to have more 'educational' programming and less of what their viewers actually wanted on television.

So if you wonder why kids today don't get the full Saturday Morning experience, it's because a bunch of old people detached from reality decided that Saturday mornings sucked.

[venger.livejournal.com]

That pic is fantastic, LOL!

I hated Saved By The Bell when it first started coming on... and then grew to love it years later in syndication. Go figure.

It will never, ever stop being hilarious when Jessie takes those pills. "I'M SO EXCITED!!!" LOL!

Did Bill Nye come on outside of the Seattle area? When I first moved out here ten years ago I had never heard of him (or "Almost Live") and people were shocked... until I told them I didn't grow up here.

Although I agree that Saved By The Bell was the first sign of the impending Saturday Morning Apocalypse, personally I feel that the true death of Saturday Morning Cartoons was when POWER RANGERS arrived. Live-action! :P After that took off it seemed like there was nothing left... I feel like I remember X-Men being the last great Saturday Morning Cartoon.

As far as SNICK though, I think that was Nickelodeon's high point. It was all downhill after "Clarissa Explains It All" and "Are You Afraid of the Dark?". But then again, Nickelodeon had live-action shows from the beginning... "You Can't Do That On Television" seems to be totally forgotten, where do kids these days think the green slime came from? hehe :P

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

There had always been live-action shows on Saturday Mornings... Pee Wee's Playhouse, Captain Kangaroo, The Skate-Birds, Kid Super Power Hour With Shazam, Captain Kool & The Gang, Land Of The Lost, etc... Power Rangers were just an extension of that, nothing new. Saved By The Bell was our first non-fantastical, real-life Saturday Morning Teenage Sit-Com and it was an absolute game changer that spawned imitators as well as a tonal shift of Saturday Mornings being reclaimed by teenagers and older folks. It was a clear and definitive statement of "Saturday Mornings are no longer for Children".

Bill Nye started here in Seattle, then got his own show via The Disney Channel and ABC Saturday Morning :)

[venger.livejournal.com]

haha Very good points, and I feel a little stupid for forgetting a few of those. :P I'm not sure what year they started showing WWF on Saturday mornings, I feel like it was about 11am or so, post-Power Rangers... I would sleep over my friend's house every weekend later in high school, by the time we woke up on Saturday morning, whatever cartoons were left would be over, and wrestling would be on.(This was how learned the who's-who of WWF. LOL :P) It was then that I realized that Saturday Mornings as they once were had ceased to exist.

Had no idea Bill Nye was on Disney! haha Shows what I know. :P

[aurora77]

I watched Bill Nye in California.

[demiducky25.livejournal.com]

We could watch Bill Nye in NJ too (I never really did but my husband and his sister LIVED on that show).

[ghrelin.livejournal.com]

You are so right!! I think by the time those live action shows were coming out I was already getting a bit too old for saturday morning cartoons (I was like 12 or so) but I remember the pathetic attempt that was "California Dreams." Wasn't that made by the same ppl who made Saved by the Bell?

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Probably the same people... or at the very least a very very VERY well done copy of their format/style!

[ghrelin.livejournal.com]

lol there was nothing well done about it, it was pure crap XD (if I thought so at age 12 then it must really have been bad!)

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

I think the decline had more to do with changing demographics, the arrivals of video games targeting younger ages, and the rise of cable programing in general including Nickelodeon. But the biggest factor of the change was the Telecommunication act of the early 90's which forced channels to show more educational television (who wants to watch educational tv on a Saturday morning) and the Children's Television Act of the same era which barred cartoons from advertising tie- in products during their shows. Transformers could no longer advertise Transformers toys on the cartoon, GI Joe could not sell GI Joe during the GI Joe cartoon, etc.

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

A very good theory and one I personally believed in myself up till about five years ago when i realized - FOX has been able to produce an old-fashioned Saturday Morning every year since 1991 when they first started, chuck-o-block full of cartoons about toys, comic books and video games while remaining educationless. And the programs that overtook Saturday Morning on the other networks - infomercials, paid religious programming and sports - were all far from educational (unless you count learning about Real Estate and/or "The Lord" as educational). The WB (and later CW) networks have also been able to pump out some pretty persistent chunks of Saturday Morning animation as well, so I don't think that The Children's Television Act had as much to do with it as good old-fashioned GREED. From what I've heard (speaking with a few programming directors and Marketing folks in my official "Day Job" years ago), it went down like this: Once they saw that ratings didn't change in any significant way once they replaced expensive animation with the relatively cheap-to-produce Saved By The Bell, they knew they could put just about anything on Saturday Morning without causing too much of a backlash like had been caused by pre-empting regular programming for sporting events (which always caused a bit of complaint letters to come flowing in). And so Saturday Morning became a dumping ground for infomercials, religious programming and whatever else they had sitting around that needed to be aired, just like it had been in the days before Saturday Morning Cartoons (if you can believe such a thing ever existed).

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

I believe the Television act was crucial because it put a damper on things at a critical time. By the time networks figured out the law really could not be enforced and if was it it amounted to fines that were less than what they could make by ignoring them anyway the key market had already moved on, grew up and the next wave of children were already seduced by other things. Saturday mornings, even on Fox news just wasn't an important part of childhood any longer.

As for Fox, shows like Animaniacs were part of the weekday programing that also showed on Saturday Mornings but by 2008 these too were more or less gone. By around 1995, give or take Saturday morning had become a second chance to see weekday afternoon programming but it just wasn't any longer a very important part of a child week.

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

I think you're thinking of something entirely different... Faox has had a 4-to-5-hour block of Saturday Morning Childrens Programming since 1991 full of stuff exclusive to Saturday Morning! The Tick, Kirby, Sailor Moon, X-Men, Spider-Man (like different versions of it), Sonic, Chaotic, Winx Club, variations of Yu Gi Oh... they did this officially and consistently up till 2009 when they handed it over to the local affiliates, and some 85% (give or take a few percentage points) of the affiliates continued with the Saturday Morning line-up... all with the exact same restrictions and programming rules as were imposed on the other networks through the entire 1990's. The WB/CW consistently put out 2 to 4 hours of animated Saturday Morning television every week during that same time.

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

I think we are talking about semantics here. When I refer to the Saturday Morning Line up I am talking about the sustained effort going back to the late 1960's to draw children specifically to watch Saturday Morning cartoons, creating in effect a social movement tied to a particular date and time frame. What is still around on Fox and a few others is really more of general programming to fill an otherwise empty time slot. There is no great effort to push kids to watch TV on Saturday mornings anymore.

Oh! And also!!!

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Back when I was in Marketing and in a position to find these answers, I asked why the new cartoon and movie versions of classic characters rarely ever looked like their more famous, established versions from comic books or other source material (Batman Animated is all blocky, Spider-Man is all textured and bumpy, Superman Returns has a weird pop-out S-Symbol on his chest, etc)... part of it is artistic choice, but the other part is all legal stuff because of the Telecommunications Act, the Children's Television Act and good old-fashioned Copywrite Law. It's all about establishing a new character that is not tied to the original copywrited property. The Movie Batman and the Cartoon Batman are two completely different entities in the eyes of the law, as are each and every incarnation of Batman in the movies. It's no longer okay to make cartoons about merchandise, but it's still perfectly okay to make merchandise of your cartoons... it's all about timing :)

Just a "Fun Fact" to toss out there :)

Re: Oh! And also!!!

[raven-blue.livejournal.com]

You are correct. Also the influence of Japanese Animation started playing a large part in character design.

Re: Oh! And also!!!

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

HUGE part in design, indeed :)

Re: Oh! And also!!!

[aurora77]

Yes, I love how it's come full circle. :D Interesting to study the evolution of animation and its influences.

[demiducky25.livejournal.com]

I'll admit it, I LOVE Saved by the Bell. My roommates and I had a bit of a revival in college and watched all of the seasons more than once because my one roommate owned all the DVDs. I can still sing the "Hot Sundae" (or was it "Hot Sunday" now that I think about it) song from the episode where Jessie takes the pills (and do some of the dance). I was very disappointed when about a month or so ago TBS took it off the air in the mornings because I would watch it before work sometimes (nevermind that I have 2 of the seasons on DVD and could watch it whenever).

[teddy0bear.livejournal.com]

I disliked saved by the bell. My sister and her friends used to make me watch it.
Boo. Boo.

Cartoons rule!