"Saturday-morning cartoon" is a colloquial term for the original animated series and live-action programming that was typically scheduled on Saturday and Sunday mornings in the United States on the "Big Three" television networks.
[2][3][4] In the last years of the genre's existence, Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were primarily created and aired on major networks to meet "educational and informational" (E/I) requirements.
Minor television networks, in addition to the non-commercial PBS in some markets, continued to air animated programming on Saturday and Sunday while partially meeting those mandates.
[14] By the 1970s, these groups exercised enough influence, especially with the U.S. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that the television networks felt compelled to impose more stringent content rules for the animation houses.
By 1982, under President Ronald Reagan, the FCC had loosened programming and advertising regulations,[21] leading to the era of "half-hour toy commercials", starting with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and continuing with such series as The Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
[27][1][32] Attempting to pair the newscasts with the remaining cartoons was largely unsuccessful because the two program formats drew widely different audiences that did not lend themselves to leading in and out of each other, leading to viewership oddities (such as NBC's children's block having an average viewership age of over 40 years old);[35][36] by the late 2010s, all of the major American networks had shifted to live-action documentary programming, ostensibly targeted at teenagers to meet the educational mandates but less likely to cause a clash with the newscasts.
[39] The science fiction animated series Futurama also spoofed 1970s and 1980s Saturday-morning cartoons in the episode "Saturday Morning Fun Pit".