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Los Angeles Premiere of Rugrats Go Wild

Source: Kevin Winter / Getty

Do you ever fantasize about waking up on a Saturday morning and your only responsibility is to sit on the couch, eat cereal and watch cartoons? Us too. Saturday morning cartoons were really the highlight of our childhoods. A special time and era when everything seemed to be overly simple and perfectly good.

But then something changed. As the years went by and more channels were created, Saturday morning cartoon segments pretty much became extinct. According to 2016 Gizmodo article:

It’s the end of an era, but it’s been a long time coming: NBC ditched Saturday morning cartoons in 1992, CBS followed suit not long after, and ABC lost its animated weekend mornings in 2004. The CW, a lower-tier broadcast network, was the last holdout in a game that the Big 3 left long ago.

But what was the huge changed that killed the Saturday morning animation block as we knew it?

Cable, streaming, and the FCC. In the 1990s, the FCC began more strictly enforcing its rule requiring broadcast networks to provide a minimum of three hours of “educational” programming every week. Networks afraid of messing with their prime-time slots found it easiest to cram this required programming in the weekend morning slot.

Yikes. Sure, you can catch your fave cartoons on Disney plus or Hulu these days — but often times these streaming platforms don’t have the good stuff.

Many of those classic 90s shows, like Doug and Recess have stood the test of time — but some have totally been forgotten about:

Waynehead 

 

Hit the flip for more epic Saturday morning cartoons you probably forgot existed.

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