Cookie Jar TV

~ the obit ~

American networks stopped making Saturday morning cartoons long before they stopped airing them. By 2006 CBS had handed its entire children's block to an outside supplier, DIC Entertainment, which filled three hours a week from a library it already owned. What CBS provided was the airtime and the FCC obligation that came attached to it. What DIC provided was everything else.

The block premiered on 16 September 2006 under the name KOL Secret Slumber Party, after KOL, an AOL property aimed at children. A year later the sponsor changed and so did the name: KEWLopolis, from 15 September 2007, this time built around American Greetings characters, which is how Care Bears and Strawberry Shortcake ended up in the schedule. When Cookie Jar Entertainment bought DIC in 2008, the block was renamed a third time. Cookie Jar TV went on the air on 19 September 2009.

It ran four more years on a diet of Busytown Mysteries, The Doodlebops, Noonbory and the Super Seven, and reruns of Liberty's Kids. The final broadcast was 21 September 2013. CBS had already announced its replacement: a Litton Entertainment package of live-action teen programming called the CBS Dream Team, which took the slot on 28 September and is still there in one form or another.

Saturday morning as an American institution does not translate. Turkish kids of that era got their cartoons on weekday afternoons and through whatever the channels had licensed, with no weekly ritual attached and certainly no federal rule requiring three educational hours. I was 22 when this block launched and 29 when it ended, so the distance here is two kinds at once, and the second one is the sort that arrives on its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ named after whoever was paying ~

Three names in seven years, and not one of them belonged to a character, a show, or a network brand. KOL was an AOL subsite. American Greetings is a card company. Cookie Jar was a Montreal production house, itself the renamed remains of CINAR, which had collapsed in an accounting scandal earlier in the decade. Kids-WB and Fox Kids had been network brands that meant something to the audience watching them. This was a slot with a sponsor's name taped over it, replaced whenever the paperwork changed.

The ownership kept moving under it even after that. DHX Media agreed to buy Cookie Jar Entertainment for around 111 million dollars in August 2012 and closed the deal on 22 October, so the block spent its final season owned by a company whose name never appeared on it at all.

~ three hours of compliance ~

The whole structure existed because of the Children's Television Act and the FCC's E/I rule, which required broadcasters to carry three hours of educational and informational programming for children each week. Three hours was the requirement. Three hours is what CBS aired, no more, and affiliates routinely shifted individual programs around the schedule as makegoods to stay compliant.

That is why the block leaned so heavily on older library material with an educational label already attached to it. Liberty's Kids, an American Revolution cartoon that first aired on PBS in 2002, was doing compliance work on CBS a decade later. It did not need to draw an audience so much as it needed to satisfy a filing.

~ the last one in standard definition ~

By 2013 the block had one distinction left that nobody wanted: it was the final children's block on American television broadcast only in standard definition. Everything around it on the CBS schedule had been in HD for years. The cartoons filling Saturday morning were being pulled from tape libraries mastered in the nineties and early 2000s, and nobody was going to spend money remastering them for a slot that existed to satisfy a regulation.

Litton's replacement was shot in HD, cost less to produce than licensing an animation library, and satisfied the same three-hour rule with real teenagers instead of cartoons. CBS has not aired an animated Saturday morning block since.

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