03/10/2023: Saturday Morning Cartoons and the Passage of Time

Recently, I've been watching Xiaolin Showdown, a show that I used to watch on Saturday mornings on Kids' WB before it became The CW4Kids or Toonzai. The series follows four Xiaolin Trainees: Omi, Kimiko, Raimundo, and Clay. Each of them are meant to be the chosen Xiaolin Dragons of Water, Fire, Wind, and Earth respectively, and they need to get the Shen Gong Wu, magical artifacts that were scattered around the world by the Xiaolin Grand Master Dashi 1,500 years ago. However, the forces of evil are looking to get their hands on the Shen Gong Wu for nefarious purposes. The Heylin Witch Wuya and her evil companion Jack Spicer are always looking to find, win, or steal Shen Gong Wu to take over the world.

While I do like the show, it's not super important for what I want to highlight here: I want to talk about Saturday morning cartoons, something that is a deeply beloved part of my childhood. Growing up, our family didn't have cable TV, so I missed out on a lot of cartoons and shows that were otherwise foundational to people my age. Spongebob Squarepants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Samurai Jack, Ben 10, Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb, and many other shows airing on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney were completely inaccessible to me unless I was at my grandparent's house. Even then, I was the oldest of ten cousins, and whenever we were in town, it meant that everyone would visit for a day or two, so it was either a holiday with other plans, or us trucking the five hours to see them was the occassion. This isn't meant to complain about those visits; I loved seeing everyone and I fondly remmember our time together. It's just meant to add context to how utterly cartoon-less I was unless it was airing on PBS Kids.

Saturday mornings changed that.

While we didn't have cable, we did have access to whatever channels were broadcasting for free in our area, and that included Channel 54, where they were showing the Kids' WB network block on Saturdays from 07:00 - 12:00 local time. For 5 glorious hours, I'd be glued to my seat watching all the shows that I was missing while eating cereal and / or snacks. I'd be watching Teen Titans, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, The Powerpuff Girls, Codename: Kids Next Door, and Animaniacs. I'd also watch shows that the other kids weren't necessarily raving about: Magi-Nation, Loonatics Unleashed, Legion of Super Heroes, Jackie Chan Adventures, The Spectacular Spider-Man, World of Quest, Mucha Lucha, Monster Allergy, and, of course, Xiaolin Showdown.

For me and my little brother, it was the best way to spend a lazy Saturday. We'd catch up on all the shows that we loved, talk about our favorite parts, then move on with our day, likely to play video games either together or on our own. There's a sort of nostalgia to having a dedicated time for cartoons, leaving for snacks and bathroom breaks when the commercials were on, rushing back when your sibling yells "IT'S ON!", and trying to keep up with a million plots at once, yet only having one chance per week to catch up. Some shows were episodic; it didn't matter what order you watched them, but a lot of the ones I listed above were serialized. If you missed one, you could be missing out on important plot points that would come up later.

I think that streaming services (and the internet writ large) has really affected how showrunners write serialized cartoons. Things that I thought were huge plot points when I was a kid were really just small beats in an otherwise episodic story. Sure, you'd have to remember that they happened next week, but most plot points were wrapped up within three episodes or so. Even Avatar, one of the most well-regarded serialized shows from that point in time, has a lot of filler episodes and has "Previously On" segments to highlight the details that you need to remember for the plot to make sense. Those aren't bad things; they're just elements that are reduced or not used in newer shows.

The best examples I can come up with off the top of my head are Steven Universe and She-Ra: Princess of Power. While Steven Universe aired on Cartoon Network, the more widespread access to the internet and reshowings of old episodes allows for a more emotionally charged story, as people are able to marathon the series whenever they want. There will be callbacks to previous episodes more frequently, and there's no "Previously On" section to take up space in the episode. Similarly, She-Ra is a Netflix exclusive, so the easily-rewatchable nature is taken advantage of. Smaller details and more nuance are able to be used more frequently.

Again, this isn't to say that one way or the other is better; they're tools being used for the environment that they were developed in. I feel fairly confident in saying that if I only had one chance to catch up with She-Ra once a week, I'd likely miss out on something at some point, and from there, I'd feel lost and less likely to come back to it. I know that I felt that way about Yu-Gi-Oh, which mostly revolves around Duel Monster games, so if an episode ends in the middle of one (which they often do), then you'd have to remember the board state from last week to have any emotional attachment to the situation happening this time.

Meanwhile, serial shows that aired without streaming being a readily-available option often have redundancies that help with memory, but can bog down the main action in a marathon. The "Previously On" segments are an example, but another example is characters often not taking lessons learned from one episode into the next one. While Avatar's Zuko is has a pretty drastic change throughout the series, I would argue that Katara and Aang are pretty much the same from the start of the series to the end. Having distinct, consistent characterization from start to finish unless there is one episode that drastically rewrites the character is a way to prevent audiences from getting lost.

All of this to say that, while I would definitely take streaming over only being able to watch shows once a week, I miss some aspects of Saturday morning cartoons. I miss the random assortment of shows that would come on. I miss having a structured time dedicated to shows that I don't get to see often. I know that these can be replicated, but there's something strange about having such an important part of my life suddenly no longer be a thing. There's a lot of things like that; it's part of growing up. It's great days to be a kid with cartoons on demand, but I'll always have a twinge of nostalgia for how I experienced them.