The Disappearance of Saturday Morning (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The Disappearance of Saturday Morning (2003)

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68 pointsKoftaBob53 comments

For over two years now I have had a dedicated Raspberry Pi running an app I wrote that plays a kind of TV schedule all day long. It was my way of capturing something like the programming I grew up with as a kid.

I have to have all the content on attached storage since I don't want to rely on online sources. But then of course the app is simply pulling up a file at a given time of the day and playing it with a media playback library in Python.

Unlike television when I was young, there are no commercials. Dead time is filled at random from lists of "shorts" that are kept on the hard drive as filler. (These in fact might include Looney Tunes cartoons or shorts, music videos, etc. scraped from YouTube.)

The schedule aspect means that there is a theme to the content and when it plays rather than just serving up random content from the drive. The Wednesday evening movie is always a western for example. Learning shows (courseware) and yoga in the morning, kid's shows around after-school time, a comedy series in the evening, mysteries on Mondays, etc.

The biggest shortcoming of the app is that I have no trial way to create the schedule short of a Mac OS app where you have to hand-add each show. When I get time I want to have a mechanism to specify "time slots" for content and have the app do an adequate job of preparing at least a stand-in schedule. (Maybe I'll finally get around to getting this going this Fall or Winter. I hesitate to even point out the repo since it is so half-baked, but if you check my GitHub and look for "UHF", you'll find the last checked-in versions.)

On any given day, I can load a web page I set up that shows today's schedule. Since the schedule that the app uses is just a JSON file, the web front-end just uses the same JSON file: parses to find today's content:

https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/

ErsatzTV will suit you well, or perhaps atleast provide inspiration to deal with the issue you mentioned.

I'll play with it, thanks.

This sounds interesting. How big is your library of content? And did you do this for yourself or the whole family? If the latter, how does your family interact with it? Is it automatically running on a central TV? Or on their personal devices?

I have like a 500GB drive with about enough content for a year of programming.

It was for me — although it is fun to think the kids could plop down and watch Speed Racer like I did. Unfortunately the girls were grown up before I created it.

Yeah, it's running all the time. The wife stops and watches from time to time — having to check the web site to see what a particular movie is. She got drawn into Columbo on Wednesdays when she was supposes to be working (from home as it were).

I'll stop too from time to time to watch an old Little Rascals or How It's Made. There's something about it just coming on rather than your having to make an effort to pull up the content. I guess just like TV.

Yeah, I know several people who will turn on a streaming channel of old shows and watch whatever comes on, when they could just as easily pick their favorite episodes. I wonder if it's because we grew up with that, making it a comfort thing, or if there's really something more appealing about not knowing exactly what you're going to watch next.

Same thing with music: I have thousands of songs downloaded and can listen to my favorites anytime, but I kinda miss having a good radio station I can tune in and hear something I wasn't expecting, even if it's not as good.

I think I like the serendipity of wandering by and The Last Picture Show is on, or whatever.

As for music — I have all my stuff on a large SD card and it is in a player 24/7 on shuffle/repeat. So, yeah, I never know what's coming on. (Playing on a lowish volume in a different room, FWIW.)

The Children's Television Act didn't have anything to do with it? My understanding is that that's what brought in the E/I programming that fills (filled? it's been a few years since I looked) the space Saturday morning cartoons used to occupy on the broadcast networks. I've no doubt the other things the author lists contributed too, but it's surprising to either see E/I omitted or to learn that it had no noticeable causal effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...

I was surprised as well. It seems the CTA really helped kill kids programming on broadcast stations. In the LA market there was Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons. By 2000 both NBC and CBS (IIRC) had stopped Saturday morning programming and ABC's entertaining content had been replaced by E/I dreck.

Everyone here is shitting on E/I, but I really enjoyed a lot of that programming. It still goes out regularly on broadcast TV.

From what I recall in the 90s (and this is just my own memory). I remember enjoying the cartoons even with the E/I regulations. None of the cartoons I got were really the GI Joe style advert cartoons.

But what I also remember is that the broadcast networks over the years started reducing the number of cartoons they broadcast. I remember watching cartoons until like noon in the heyday. By the end of our broadcast cartoons, they were strictly a 1-to-2-hour event.

I suspect that part of the reason for that is cartoons became a lot less lucrative with advert requirements.

It wasn't until my parents got satellite TV (which got a LOT cheaper over my childhood. The old behemoth dishes were a sight to behold) that I experienced cartoons more like the GI Joe period. Cartoon network, nick, disney all had hours of unregulated cartoon nonsense with hours of kid targeted commercials.

And, by then, Saturday morning was dead as a cartoon time. Why wake up early for cartoons when you could simply turn on the cartoon channel?

Prior to Cartoon Network, and computer animation, there was:

    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    X-Men
    Doug
    David The Gnome
    Care-bears
    My little pony
    Hello Kitty
    He-Man
    Garfield
    The Littles
    Duck Tales
    Thundercats
    Simpsons

Today we have:

    Family Guy
    Bobs Burgers
    South Park
    King of the Hill
    Simpsons

3D animation took over and if you can do 3D, why make it look like a cartoon?

obviously there’s more… but just pointing out the shift away from cartoon.

It's very interesting how the industry spent decades refining the art of 2D animation, only for most of them to throw it all away when 3D became cheap and good.

Especially Disney.

What do you mean by 3D animations? AFAIK, there's still a ton of cartoons produced using 2d animation techniques for children/teens, they are simply all done using computer animation.

> King of the Hill

In case it's not yet widely known, KOTH is available on archive.org

https://archive.org/details/king-of-the-hill_202103

and coming back for another season on Hulu

https://youtu.be/GleTI7jDWOs

Today there are still cartoony cartoons like The Dragon Prince, Miraculous, and Bluey but generally the decline in animation quality because of "3D" is noticeable. I keep hoping that Disney will make a comeback and bring us more shows like amphibia, owl house, and gravity falls (Hailey's on it was pretty good too). Cartoon network had adventure time, steven universe, infinity train, over the garden wall, Craig of the creek, Iyanu, etc. Streaming services like netflix put out cartoons too like Kipo and Hilda.

The cartoon landscape is different now, but it's not gone and if you wanted to you could easily wake up early on a Saturday morning and binge great cartoons all day.

Blender’s grease pencil enhancements should help some but ultimately we need better tools for 2D cel animation in our 3D art tools. There’s only so much ToonBoom can do.

This is interesting. Even as an adult I was always a big fan of Saturday morning cartoons. And I have a very distinct memory of somewhere around 1999-2001 that fading out of existence and being replaced by the sort of schlock you describe.

I think what made Saturday mornings so special was that you were in school for 5 days right before it.

For a kid, 5 days is a long time. For a 5 year old kid, a 5 day school week is the equivalent of a 30 year old working for 30 days straight, then imagine you have a 12 day vacation. That's how time felt, and why those first few hours of Saturday morning were so cherished, it signaled the beginning of a weekend of possibilities.

And as a parent you realise that they put those cartoons on so the kids had something to do while you got a bit of a sleep-in for once.

...and to sell toys to those kids while you weren't watching, of course. ;)

Yes. It was the only time and place to see cartoons as a kid then. Missed Saturday AM TV? Gotta wait until next Saturday AM. As for ad effectiveness, wow, every single kid in your class saw that new HotWheels car advertised.

My first day of school was the day before I turned 7... first grade. I didn't go to kindergarten because in my rural school, it was only a half day program, my mom didn't have a car to pick me up when the school day ended (school bus only in the mornings and afternoons).

Perhaps things are screwed up a bit more fundamentally if we're sending 5 yr olds to school. Or maybe it's not about the education, maybe everyone needs the government-funded daycare. It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm.

> Perhaps things are screwed up a bit more fundamentally if we're sending 5 yr olds to school.

I don’t know, I went to school at 3 and I turned out fine. Same for my kids. It’s good to be with other children at that age.

> It amazes (and frightens, just a little) me that you talk about it casually as if it should be the norm.

It is the norm here. If anything, 5 is quite old to start school. The alternative is one of the parents giving up their career because the vast majority of people cannot afford full-time day care.

But there’s not only that. At that age children need stimulating environments and learn a lot, fast by being with others in a secure environment. You really see the difference between those who started at 3 and those who started at 6 in terms of cognitive, social, and motor development.

>I don’t know, I went to school at 3 and I turned out fine.

This anecdote is not just as problematic as most anecdotes, I think it is more so. The point of public education is allegedly not that "kids turn out fine" (whatever that means), but that they receive a minimum education. If you got 4 years more than me, was there 4 years' more worth of advantage bestowed upon you? If you merely approximated my level of education, then it would seem the government wasted 4 years worth of resources on you. Multiplied times every student in the nation, this is absolutely enormous. And that's not even counting the potential for psychological damage... you might be fine, slightly more resilient than some, but others might be suffering from any number of disorders that can't easily be traced back to early schooling. Less time to form family bonds, less time getting a more informal education, etc.

>It is the norm here. If anything, 5 is quite old to start school.

It wasn't the norm until quite recently. Even in the 1980s, it was not the norm. That you think it is a norm shows just how much such a policy can distort an entire population's perceptions.

>At that age children need stimulating environments and learn a lot, fast by being with others in a secure environment.

Such you are told. You assume it must be true. And yet, student performance at all age levels continues to decline, even as they're sent to school younger every decade.

>You really see the difference between those who started at 3 and those who started at 6 in terms of cognitive, social, and motor development.

The numbers don't support your claim.

These days if you aren’t putting kids into school very early they now become far more liable to turning into mindless iPad kids staring into a screen all day and having no social skills. The world is not as stimulating anymore where you can just go out and watch a chicken hatch or play on a dangerous playground with other kids and learn a lot about the world.

> This anecdote is not just as problematic as most anecdotes, I think it is more so.

This not an anecdote. Most European countries I know have mandatory school starting from 5 or 6, with the possibility of attending pre-primary school (with names that vary across countries) from 2 or 3, which most people tend to do for the reasons I mentioned. This worked for hundreds of millions of children, not just me.

> The point of public education is allegedly not that "kids turn out fine" (whatever that means), but that they receive a minimum education.

The point was that going to school before 5 was horrible. It’s not. A lot of kids do it and it works.

> If you got 4 years more than me, was there 4 years' more worth of advantage bestowed upon you?

You should take that chip off your shoulder. You are reading too much from what I wrote. I did not make a claim of superiority.

> If you merely approximated my level of education, then it would seem the government wasted 4 years worth of resources on you.

If you go down that path any public education is a waste of resources. The state (not the government) invested in my personal development and the ability of both my parents to remain in the workforce, if you really must think in monetary terms.

> And that's not even counting the potential for psychological damage

Right, prove it then. As I mentioned, this is the norm in many European countries, in which children do not seem to have much more psychological issues than in the US, for example.

> It wasn't the norm until quite recently. Even in the 1980s, it was not the norm. That you think it is a norm shows just how much such a policy can distort an entire population's perceptions.

You are way off. The law establishing public school for 3 years old children was voted in 1881 here. It became the norm when women had to enter the workforce and population concentration in cities weakened family links. This was way before 1980.

> Such you are told. You assume it must be true. And yet, student performance at all age levels continues to decline, even as they're sent to school younger every decade.

Amazing. It’s as if there were many factors at play.

> The numbers don't support your claim.

Which numbers do not?

Waiting the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas also took like half a year as a kid. If your birthday was in the summer, you'd be waiting a couple years for it. One school year felt like 3 or 4 years .

I'm 40 and it's been getting faster consistently since my mid-20s or so.

I'd say a year now feels about as long as 3 months did c. 10 years old. Summer rolls around and I blink and it's already getting too cold for the beach again.

People come up with various reasons for it, with a popular explanation being novelty or something, but I've had a bunch of very novel years and it never seemed to make a difference. It's just a little faster every year.

Kinda depressing to think that, by subjective perception of time, I'm likely already in the last 20% or so of my life.

It’s actually worse than that. If you live another 40 years, as a 5 year old that’s like knowing you will be dead at age 10, roughly the same amount of time perception.

You might not believe me, but it seems like seconds on a clock tick by at least 25%-50% faster than when I was a kid.

ATSC 3.0 is a stone throw away from streaming. Over the air and non-live broadcasts will very soon be as dead as AM radio.

Hard to beat Wile E. Coyote, ACME products, and the diligent effort to capture the Road Runner. But it was more about that Saturday morning for 1 hour was the only time we as kids were allowed to watch TV. Then it was "Go outside and come back at 5:00 for dinner, don't be late."

I am really hoping that the "Coyote v. Acme" movie set to release next year, as well as "The Day The Earth Blew Up" from last year, revive interest in The Looney Tunes. They are iconic Americana, omnipresent for nearly a century, but mismanaged for the last 10-15 years. What could have been with Space Jam 2...

You bring up a good point — the best part about Saturday morning cartoons was that they ended (sometime around noon when "Wide World of Sports" or whatever came on) and we headed out into the big blue world.

Yeah. Saturday mornings were either cartoons or going with my mother to to the farmers' market. Then afternoons were doing whatever outside most of the time.

Kids these days don't seem to have much of a childhood. My fondest memories are summers where I would disappear late morning on my bike with friends, go on an adventure, and not come home until dinner time.

Now it seems childhood is filled with sports practice, homework, summer camp, and fortnite.

It's different but it's still a childhood. Although I did all those things in my childhood, except fortnite was some other computer related thing.

The difference I note is we spend a lot more time together as a family, whereas when I was a kid it was more with friends. I'm not sure it's a bad thing, I wished I had spent more time with my dad.

It seems likely they will grow up to be nostalgic about those things, and equally worried about some aspect of growing up in the 2040s

People my age are nostalgic for Minecraft. You could still disappear all day (and night, too) and go on an adventure... in Minecraft. It might not be the best or healthiest thing, but it's where the memories are.

"stranger danger". Most people don't seem to want their kids to run free any more.

Most people don't want to be arrested for leaving their kids unattended. [1]

[1] https://www.parents.com/mom-arrested-for-letting-her-kid-wal...

And in modern times, we can't forget the concerned citizen calling the police when seeing young kids out on their own. So childhood has become semi-illegal, depending on the mood of the officers on duty.

It was George of the Jungle, Tom Slick, and Super Chicken for me... good times

The funny thing is the classic Looney Tunes weren’t made for Saturday morning kids shows, but for movie theaters to be shown between the newsreel and the feature. (And weren’t necessarily kid stuff either - they were full of topical references that nobody has understood since the 1940s.)

Warner Bros has been a lousy manager of the Looney Tunes property lately but I expect they’ll remembered fondly for decades more, while most of the repetitive schlock that was made for Saturday morning will be forgotten.

Last thing we need is kids socializing around shared experiences now that they can't go outside.

Strange that the article rips on declining cartoon quality in the early aughts when the 70s and 80s had endless Hanna-Barbera shovelware cartoons

Don't forget the Mattel cartoons. Those are unwatchable.

There's a trick question people starting out in investment get asked: "An asset has fallen 90% in the past year. How far can it fall from its present value in the coming year?"

Just because it was shovelware, doesn't mean it didn't get worse (e.g. from shovelware to schmaltzy sanitized shovelware).

80's baby here. not only were the cartoons amazing on saturday morning, but somehow the milk was colder and the cereal tasted amazing!

generally speaking, Saturday Morning Cartoons weren't much better than toy advertisements

You say that as if toy advertisements aren't exactly what an eight year old most wants to watch.

Title improvement anybody?

This is about kids TV in form of cartoons in Saturday mornings and how that has changed in the recent decade or two. Only relevant for a particular demographic and culture. Not an insignificant one, but the title "Disappearance of Saturday Morning" is much too general.

Maybe "Disappearance of Saturday Morning Kids Cartoons on TV"?

It's the title of the article.

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