Why are some TV channels terrible now?
 

I watched Cartoon Network and Boomerang non stop as a kid, but now I see that all of the good shows are now gone and ended, and Boomerang no longer runs any past TV shows. Nick Toons also has a problem as well. Even MTV sunked low when they stopped airing good music videos and Beavis & Butthead.

What in the world happened?

The demand for quality programming slips with the decreased ratings, something that is happening to tradtional TV and cable across the board. One of the channels you mentioned, Nicktoons, is in such a bad state that it's effectively used as a dumping ground for shows doomed for cancellation.

You grew up. Cartoon Network and Boomerang didn't. :)

Actually, there are many factors:

1: Children's Television Act

2: Traditional scheudled television (and radio) are lying on their deathbeds, as Internet streaming services take over.

Online streaming exists now.

So which previously banned user is this guy?

I was wondering the same thing.

Me? Well, technically I am not a previously banned user, I joined back in January of this year but was inactive until either March or April.

I remember being so excited about the Cartoon Network back when it was created. Same thing with the Sci-Fi channel. I remember being so disappointed when each went to original programming.

But that was back before vintage stuff was so accessible via DVD, Streaming and general download. For a while, it was hopeful that CN and SF were going to have all of that obscure 70's and 80's material on it.

It's still weird and sad to me that I can flip past ABC, CBS, etc on weekend mornings anymore and find infomercials, not cartoons...

I have to say I do miss Saturday morning cartoons.

Reasons that TV channels are terrible now would be bad management, lack of talent, laziness, not taking chances, no creativity, lack of money, bad use of the money they do have, bad writing, bad decisions, political agendas, social agendas, rerunning the same shows all the time, and time changes all things.

Man, I remember when Saturday Morning felt like it was eight hours long. Sugar cereal and living room action figure wars. Then wrestling at 12. Every weekend felt like an event. Good times.

Even Sundays were cool since USA would have He-Man, She-Ra, Jem and stuff like that on in a block a lot of the time, and then wrestling would be on again. Weekends were a big deal as a kid back then. And they felt like they lasted a whole week because you'd do so much stuff, more in two days than you'd do in a whole week now, but they also felt like they ended too soon. Crazy sh*t.

The children's educational television act is what killed Saturday mornings. We can also blame it for the la k of advertising for kids, which only served to make the situation less kid-friendly. Airing cheap "educational" shows and even cheaper infomercials with advertising aimed more toward adults added to that, and then Saturday sports shows put the last nails in the coffin. Just watched a video on this yesterday, in fact.

Saturday mornings still exist in the UK, sort of. ITV show cartoons from 6 through to 9:25 AM, and Channel 5 airs pre-school programming mostly all morning before running Spongebob and WWE (before that, it was TMNT 2012 and Rise of TMNT), over on the CBBC Channel, you have the Saturday Mash-Up, although I think having a variety programme that shows games and cartoons on a channel entirely dedicated to kids programming anyway is a little pointless and it should air on BBC ONE or TWO.

Yeah, the advent of cable/satellite channels for kids was pretty much the final death knell for Saturday cartoons, along with the arrival of internet streaming services allowing kids to watch ANY cartoon, anytime, anywhere.

In 2002 I was so jealous because the town that I lived in didn't have Cartoon Network available through our cable provider. At that time the channel had everything. It had reruns of some of my favorite cartoons ever: G.I. Joe, Thundercats, Batman: The Animated Series, and Superman: The Animated Series. It had new programming featuring some truly great shows: the 2002 Mike Young Productions He-Man and Justice League. When my town finally did get the show in 2004, the channel had already started to change. Gone were the reruns of G.I. Joe, Thundercats, Batman, and Superman.

But the network would still continue to put out cartoons that I enjoyed: Justice League Unlimited, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Batman: The Brave & The Bold, and (2011) Thundercats. However, when the network basically put an end to action cartoons around 2013, the channel REALLY started to go down hill. The final nail in the coffin came with the horrible treatment that the network gave to 2015 Transformers: Robots in Disguise and Justice League Action. Once those shows concluded their runs, I said goodbye to the channel.

yeah... I miss Saturday morning cartoons. I guess the last show I watched semi-faithfully was TMNT 2012 before it would start bouncing all over the place.

I just stopped watching TV in general after probably 2015 or 2016. I would rarely watch Toonami recordings of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or Hunter x Hunter. But then, eventually, my parents got YouTube TV...

Yeah...YouTube TV...excuse me, but why would YouTube start doing programming for...? That sounds really dumb.

Please, link to that video film.

I miss the old Saturday Morning cartoons too and Sundays were cool as well in Ireland in the late 90s with stuff such as TMNT and the Bugs Bunny Show. Like in the UK, new ones are still being shown here on RTÉ Two and TG4. None I’d like to watch sadly.

It was a random video in my YouTube feed, I believe it was called The Real Reason Saturday Morning Cartoons Disappeared, or something to that effect. I will have to hunt it down, since I never actually marked it or anything. I think it was from one of the various "fact finder/did you know" type channels for tv and movies, but I don't recall which one.

I also notice that Cartoon Networks air a crap ton of Teen Titans Go, so that makes me realized why I haven't watched Cartoon Network in years or maybe almost a flat out decade. Because that was my most watched channel besides G4TV and a little bit of Nicktoons, thanks X-Play, Digimon, and Yu-gi-oh.

Here's the video for anyone interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cpUDtW1cV8

Dead thread?

I'll bite and give my opinion. I haven't watched any of these networks with any regularity in years. Boomerang we've never even had. Don't think we ever had Nicktoons either. Cartoon Network we did. Not sure where it is, but I still have my Cartoon Network VHS which consisted of promo material for the station back from the mid-90s. I was really looking forward to eventually being able to watch the network. We had Nickelodeon too, and that's a network my family had going back to the early 80s. It seems my family, up until recent years, have always had some form of cable so I was lucky to have networks like Nickelodeon, USA (which had the USA Cartoon Express, Cailiope), TBS, and TNT. All of these networks used to air cartoons of some kind at some point. TNT even used to show reruns of the Muppet Show.

Anyway, in some ways I think age may have a little to do with why they may seem bad now. I mean, as for Nickelodeon, I was starting to outgrow some of the programming round about the mid-90s. Shows like All That, Kenan and Kel, My Cousin Skeeter, etc., I actually really disliked. I didn't care for the style of humor and I legit just HATED and loathed My Cousin Skeeter. I don't remember or recall why now, just that I didn't like it. At that point, I gravitated towards the shows like The Secret World of Alex Mack, the Journey of Allen Strange, Hey Arnold (as far as a Nicktoon went where I watched it at its premiere because I was really interested in it after having seen Harriet the Spy in theaters earlier that year), old reruns of You Can't Do That on Television, Fifteen, Welcome Freshman, Clarissa Explains it All, etc. I felt the same way about the Disney Channel. I felt that the 80s (well, the little I saw of it...could only see it when we had free previews) and 90s was better than the 2000s...but could still be my age since the style of programming wasn't interesting to me after a certain point.

The way I preferred Cartoon Network was how it was in the 90s. Boomerang also made sense since they would air the older works there. Cartoon Network now, to my knowledge, is just Teen Titans Go. I liked Sonic Boom, but heard that got moved to Boomerang which meant it was doomed for failure. I think it's just people not watching television as much anymore along with people consuming most media online. The networks don't have to put in as much effort anymore, especially if they have a streaming platform.

Saturday morning programming I felt started to die off a bit after more cable stations offered cartoon and kids programming, and more people were subscribing to it. They didn't have to air their content under the same restrictions like the other stations. The other factor I always assumed was an issue was the FCC and stuff being more strict in the content after a while. As I mentioned elsewhere on the forum, by the time the 90s rolled around, it seems things were getting much more strict with the type of content they could show. They also had that issue with commercials aimed at kids during that Saturday morning programming for the network stations (ABC, CBS, NBC). As I've always jokingly stated, the 80s felt like a decade-long kids commercial. lol

There are some other networks I used to watch regularly that I think are bad now too...like MTV. Give me 80s/90s MTV any day over the mess they had after the decade. I felt the downfall of that was caused by shows like the Real World. It was find as an exception, but they seemed to add more and more non-music related shows and even back in the early 2000s, seems music videos were being fazed out. People wanting more reality show silliness, imo, killed MTV for me.

My daughter watches some of the stuff on Milkshake (the Channel 5 morning slots) and it's tied with Nick, which is why many of their shows broadcast between 6 and 9 in the morning. But that's seven days per week heh.

I guess it's because the public stations assumed that they needed to grow up per se'. But, they brought in a lot of boring programs that would put a lot of families to sleep within their own living rooms. My local station did just that.

It's a darn shame too because both Disney and Warner Bros. were the big powerhouse animation industries in the earlier years: sure, they were shamelessly competing with each other for the ratings, but quite a few of their old shows were memorable to watch before / after school and on the weekends.

People still watch tv?

Streaming service is there for a reason. No more commercial, watch what you want when you want it.

What we watch is s*it though. Go out and jog.

Love you brother. :lol:

Love me long time Five dolla!;)

But I onry have t'ree dolla! :lol::lol::lol:

Tree fify:)

For 3.50$, I'll take ya both!

Change $3.50 into $350 each and you might convince both of them to crash at your place for a week!
https://media2.giphy.com/media/jRcsvweuYibbW/giphy.gif

Everything is worse now. Food, women. Everything.

Well, I'll agree that all this vegan soyshit sucks...

... Not sure I'd be caught dead calling women worse in any context though...

To be honest, streaming services suck too. I want to watch THIS show, not 'shows similar to this show', and I am not gonna sub to 50 different streaming sites when you used to be able to watch most of those shows with only one basic cable subscription.

........I like where this is goin'.....! :tgrin::tgrin::tgrin:

Wouldn't 50 streaming subscriptions also cost about 500 USD/Euro? No wonder you can actually find Blu-Ray sets of shows from streaming services, there's no way you'd be able to pay for all of them.

Anyone remember Jetix?