Saturday, January 03, 2009
fox cancels saturday morning cartoons !
well, not quite yet. i was thinking that network broadcast tv was going to eventually disappear after the move to digital 2009.02.17, since there will be less and less concentration on just a few channels, a la cable. they would end up being some watered down general purpose stations that would lack attraction compared to all the special purpose programming on the cable and "new" digital channels. so, what money was left for creating big national productions will largely dry up, followed by the networks themselves - at least in the largely monolithic channel sense they exist at the moment. they may yet fracture into providers like the cable companies, with offerings of more and more specialized channels. but old form tv will shortly be gone.
i've been pretty sick of the info bars running across the screen in increasingly annoying ways over the last year or so ("dtv is coming! dtv is coming!") - only on the analog broadcasts, mind you. seemed to me that it would be a close thing even getting to february 17th in the first place; they all seem ready to pull the plug now.
which brings me to what prompted this post in the first place:
i get up this morning, figuring i'll get to see a couple of my saturday morning cartoons that i missed while out of town for the holidays - and pffft! wtf ?! nothing's on ! four hours of infomercial on fox ! a bit of searching brings up:
...and lots of other discussion out there.
some years ago i lost a lot of favorite shows that were spun off from what was then the local wb channel to cw, and now it looks like cartoons are going the same way.
i remember the saturday morning decisions we had to make as kids, all those competing and brand new cartoons on all major networks every season. well, no longer a worry. hasn't been one for quite some time.
feb. 17 my ass - tv began its long slow fade into gray a long time ago. some may even claim it was that way from the start.
as for the rest of "entertainment" - movies and music are headed down the same road, in slightly different lanes. seems to have been a 20th century phenomena. big sports has been an up & down thing over the years, but they may yet hold their own, being tied to real time/space venues.
not doing much clear thinking this morning - and that was the point - i wanted to sit down & watch some mindless fun!
blah.
sadly, that was one of the few breaks in the pointless "routine" of my monotonous life. *sigh* - well, i was going to have to give it up soon anyway.