3. The networks acknowledged they could profit more with sports and news
NBC president Brandon Tartikoff saw that Saturday morning cartoon evaluations were slipping in 1988. This included juggernauts like The Smurfs. Along these lines, he started investigating different choices for the day and age. At the time, the normal Saturday morning cartoon cost $300,000 to produce (Smurfs are extremely costly). Tartikoff and his group did some calculating and found that it would be considerably less expensive to air news programs, or stretch out Today to the end of the week. After four years, in 1992, that is precisely what NBC did.
The network additionally understood that it could feature sports on Saturday mornings. In 1991, the network signed a five-year deal with Notre Dame to air the school’s home football games on Saturdays. The agreement cost NBC $38 million, which works out slightly over a $1 million a game. That was less expensive than delivering six hours of kid’s shows. The six hours would’ve cost networks around $3.6 million. In addition, NBC could charge more to advertise amid sports (beer, engine oil and so on) than it could for with kid’s shows.
4. Pitching Saturday mornings to syndicates was a simple approach to raking in money
By the early 2000s, neither ABC nor CBS was creating their own Saturday morning content. Instead, they were leasing out that time. Until 2002, ABC had aired a block called “One Saturday Morning,” until the point when replacing it with shows that had beforehand been aired on their corporate kin, Disney Channel. CBS gave off its valuable Saturdays to Nick Jr’s. shows for pre-schoolers and infants. Fox hung on until 2008, when it gave over a major piece of Saturday mornings to “Weekend Marketplace.” This was an umbrella title for a block of infomercials.
Disney-owned ABC disposed its line-up of Disney Channel reruns and sold the slot to Litton, a syndicator of low-budget instructive TV (travelogues and animal shows). By 2014, the one and only channel with its own particular branded Saturday morning content was the CW with “Vortex.” This was a block of anime-sort shows like Sonic X and Dragon Ball. However, this vanished in 2014for One Magnificent Morning, which is, obviously, more animal shows.
