The Rise and Fall of Saturday Morning Cartoons

Saturday morning cartoons were around when I was a kid in the 1960s, but in the 1980s, they were ramped up to define a generation. Every cartoon was designed to sell toys and cereal, and children who watched them learned how to immerse themselves in a "franchise."

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But things got better in the '90s, so those same kids kept watching them. Now those kids of the '80s and '90s are the perfect age to market nostalgia to, as you can tell by the flood of movie remakes and whole forums dedicated to bygone shows. But their own children will never know what it was like to set aside one whole morning for week's worth of cartoons.