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My little cousin had no idea what a Saturday morning cartoon block was
I was at my sister's place last weekend and her kid, who's 8, was just scrolling through a streaming service. I asked him what he was watching and he said 'just stuff.' I told him about how when I was his age, you had to be up by 7 AM on a Saturday to catch the start of the Fox Kids lineup, and you'd just plant yourself there for hours. He looked at me like I was speaking another language. The whole idea of a specific time slot for cartoons, with commercials and bumpers and everything, was totally foreign to him. It made me realize the before-and-after difference is the whole structure of how we watch TV. We went from a shared, scheduled event to an on-demand library. I miss the feeling of everyone at school talking about the same new episode of 'Power Rangers' or 'Animaniacs' that aired that morning. Does anyone else feel like something was lost when we gained the ability to watch anything anytime?
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abbyk102mo ago
Ugh totally! Like @dylanbarnes said, the hype was real. Now it's all just quiet clicking alone.
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dylanbarnes2mo ago
Yeah, the convenience is great but we lost that shared cultural moment. It was a special kind of hype.
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