I saw a blog post that included a comic making fun of the idea that Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear were “adult cartoons”, as they were advertised in the 60’s. This seems silly considering the shows but the idea that cartoons and animation were purely the domain of children’s media is purely a product of the 80’s. That’s when American television animation doubled down on being toy advertisements because Reagan loosened TV regulations on programs aimed at kids. Allowing companies to target kids with shows produced as cheaply as possible with equally poor animation and stories to match solely to get them to buy. The 80’s is often considered the nadir of American animation. Some people now fondly remember the original 1985 ThunderCats, as the recent controversy about the design suggests, but that’s mostly nostalgia with that shows production standards being middling at best with production outsourced to cheaper Japanese animators.
The Audience of Classic Disney
Theses days classic Disney films as primarily thought of children’s entertainment but many of the Disney films from the 30’s through 50’s like Snow White were meant for a wider audience. The style of animation used in Golden Age Disney films was extremely labor intensive and expensive. Walt Disney basically bet the studio on Snow White which cost nearly $1.5 million (about $26 million in 2018 dollars) to produce, at the time only major films from MGM, the most lavish of classic Hollywood studios, cost more to make and for films that had a run time of 2+ hours not 83 minutes. The ballooning expanse is also why Disney abandoned that production style after Sleeping Beauty.
Steven Universe’s Broadcast Schedule
Sometime ago I watched Steven Universe and while researching the show the broadcast times stuck out. For a show of its popularity, and new episodes get pretty good ratings, Steven Universe is pretty rarely on television, during season 5 of the show new episodes were broadcast at 7:30 pm to 8 and reruns every weekday at 6 am. This is baffling if you’re familiar with the show from its loud, and pretty large, online presence until you look at the shows around that time slot and suddenly things become clearer, specifically the nighttime adult animation block which starts at 8pm and runs until 6 am. A block that starts either after new Steven Universe airs or ends before the reruns of Steven Universe airs. Steven Universe doesn’t get endlessly rerun like Teen Titans GO due to former’s audience being older than Cartoon Networks target demographic.
It will be interesting to see how Steven Universe is remembered down the line in this respect, because so much of the fondness for shows like Doug was a result of kids watching endless reruns of them. Its why I remember Xena despite not having seen it years because it was on broadcast television all the time when I was growing up. Although Steven Universe is also available online so maybe it won’t matter as much.
A Pocket Full of Scratch 