Children's television

From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.

Contents 1 Children's Television Defined 2 History of Children's Televison 2.1 The Early Days 2.2 The Long Strange Acid Trip 2.3 The Golden Age 2.4 The Move to Cable 3 Children's Television Today

Children's Television Defined

Children's television is officially defined as programs which are rated as being suitable for young children. Unofficially, it is defined as television shows whose advertisements are aimed at people too young to drive to the store and buy the products advertised.

History of Children's Televison

The Early Days

The earliest programming aimed at children consisted of programs where a host (usually a randomly selected employee from the local temp agency) would dress like an idiot and introduce a badly edited "classic" cartoon while being hit by a pie. While children's shows would not continue along this track, these early shows are considered the forerunners of today's sports and weather programs.

The first successful program aimed at children was the "Indian Head Show" which ran on the DuMont Network during the 1950s. This program, which ran early in the morning and late at night, was extremely popular with the children of that era, who would dress up like Indians Native Americans and watch the screen for hours. While the show was popular back then, today it is considered extremely racist and offensive, as well as too boring for modern audiences to watch.

The Long Strange Acid Trip

A sure sign that times were changing was the introduction of the "Rainbow Show" on then-struggling ABC. While most critics saw the show as a blatant imitation of the "Indian Head Show", the children of the 1960's loved the show. The increased viewership vaulted ABC to the top of the Nielsen ratings in the critical 2-6 AM time slot.

The popularity of the show would not last, however, as television writers such as Sid and Marty Krofft began pumping out shows that could only have been produced under the influence of substances such as VJ-1. Programming such as Sid and Marty Krofft's Bong-O-Lantern began to warp the minds of young Americans during this time. Thousands of them moved to the streets of San Francisco and other strange places in an attempt to find peace, harmony, and other stuff.

The spirit of the new era even found its way to unlikely places such as the studios of PBS, which began producing shows like Sesame Street, the Electric Company and lots of other touchy-feely shows with plenty of Very Special Episodes thrown in.

Eventually, the threat that these programs posed to the nation's youth became obvious to members of the Republican Party. Realizing that tripped-out youngsters would not vote for Republicans when (and if) they grew up, they demanded that television networks tone down the most blatant of the programs. Except for the Kroffts, most producers complied with the demand.

The Golden Age

During the 1970's, children's programming began to focus on Saturday morning as a time to reach the nation's youth. In fact, the 1970's are known as the Golden Age of Children's Television because of all the money that cereal makers and toy manufacturers made. While this time is usually remembered fondly, there were some problems as well. Badly affected by abuse of VJ-1 and other drugs during the 1960's, children's show writers began offering up some of the most improbable plots in the history of television. Even long-established characters such as the members of the Justice League Unlimited and Moon Knight began to suffer at the hands of hacks in withdrawl.

The Move to Cable

Frustated at the idiotic plots they were forced to wring out week after week, the few remaining sane and sober writers moved their shows to cable television during the 1980s. Networks such as Nickelodeon reaped the rewards, showing quality children's programming for years to come. As time passed, these programs ended up on smaller and less influential channels, further and further up the dial.

Children's Television Today

As more and more children quit watching television to join Internet sites such as MySpace.com, children's programming is becoming less and less important to actual children. Most current viewers are either adults trying to recapture their youth, or protesters looking for anything offensive that might "harm their children". As a result, children's programming gets more boring every year.