The Real Reason Why Saturday Morning Cartoons Disappeared

Kids today don't know the glorious experiences they're missing. Back in the day, Saturday morning was the best time of the week. You'd get up early, and you'd be happy about it. You'd pour yourself a huge bowl of sugar disguised as cereal (and never disguised as nutrition). Then you'd turn the TV on, and let it assault you with a barrage of cartoons until noon ... or whenever American Bandstand or Soul Train or golf came on. Then you'd go back to whatever children did before they had cell phones to stare at.

The '80s and '90s were a strange time to grow up, culturally speaking. Swaths of movies and TV shows came out that, at a glance, looked an awful lot like they were for kids. RoboCop, for example, doesn't just look like an action figure, he looks like someone melted a thousand other action figures to make a bigger action figure. So imagine the disappointment in the eyes of kids from that era when they found out the movie was rated R for disturbing things like violence, language, nudity, and Kurtwood Smith's forehead.

Most of the time, cartoon are light-hearted stories with lovable (and marketable) characters offering a moral lesson or feel-good adventure. Occasionally, however, the writers ramp up the emotion, offering poignant scenes that can make even the most hardened tough-guy weep.

While your memories of '90s TV might seem quaint and fluffy in comparison, don't be fooled. When the shows you're now so nostalgic about weren't busy wrapping up every episode in a neat little bow, they plunged you into all kinds of downers. Ready to relive some childhood nightmares?

When your favorite show gets the ax, the reason is usually pretty sterile — maybe the audience just wasn't that big or the show was too expensive to produce. Some shows, though, clearly deserved to be canceled. Some shows, in fact, are so awful that they deserve to be ritualistically canceled with fire or a toilet or some combination thereof. And some shows clearly should have been canceled years ago to save us all from the despair of the world's most painfully disappointing ending ever (cough cough Game of Thrones cough cough).