Kids' WB

» see kidswb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Saturday morning cartoons are an American institution that needs an American television schedule to exist at all. The whole arrangement depends on a network clearing four hours of a weekend morning for children and selling that block to cereal companies. Turkish television never worked like that. Cartoons turned up on weekday afternoons on TRT and later ran all day on Cartoon Network once cable arrived, so the ritual that Kids' WB was built around is one I have only ever met secondhand.

Kids' WB launched on 9 September 1995 as the children's block of the brand new WB network, and it spent its first years losing to Disney and Fox until it bought the right thing. Pokemon arrived in 1998, and by 1999 the block was reporting a record 40 percent share of the kids audience, a number that no longer exists in any medium. For about four years this was where American children found out what a Pikachu was.

Then the network underneath it vanished. The WB merged into The CW in 2006, the block moved across with it, and on 17 May 2008 it ended for good. The following week 4Kids put CW4Kids in the slot. A brand that had outlasted the network it was named after had simply run out of airtime.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

What happened next is the part worth writing down. Rather than retire the name, Warner Bros. moved it onto the web. Kidswb.com relaunched on 29 April 2008, weeks before the television block signed off, as an online-only destination carrying full episodes out of the catalog along with games. This was 2008, before most people had a word for streaming, and a major studio putting whole cartoons on a free website was still a mildly startling thing to do.

It worked for a while, in the sense that it existed and children used it. But an ad-supported Flash video site run by a studio is a business that YouTube was already winning, and Warner Bros. was competing against a version of its own library that other people had uploaded for nothing.

~ what it became ~

On 17 May 2015, seven years to the day after the television block ended, kidswb.com was pulled apart. The Kids' WB name came off entirely and the content went to character-specific sites, LooneyTunes.com and DCKids.com among them, grouped together as the WB Kids Sites. Nearly twenty years of a brand ended in a URL change.

The reasoning was that children in 2015 did not search for a channel, they searched for Scooby-Doo. That is probably true. It also meant Warner Bros. had voluntarily given away the one asset that made the block work in the first place, which was a single door with everything behind it.

~ the second death ~

The replacements did not hold either. Two of the three sites merged back together as WBKids GO! in July 2016, which is an admission that splitting had not helped. On 14 December 2023 WBKids GO! and DC Kids both went dark, their addresses redirecting to YouTube channels.

That is the real ending. Not a shutdown notice, just a studio conceding that the place to put cartoons for children is somebody else's platform. Kids' WB spent thirteen years owning a morning on television and seven more owning a domain, and it finished as a YouTube channel, which is to say as a folder on a service that never had to commission a single cartoon.

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