Animation: The Window, 1989–1998

Listen: Deep dive conversation

https://meridian-archive.com/feed.xml

Open in your app, or paste the link above into any other:

Apple Podcasts Overcast Pocket Casts Castro Podcast Addict RSS

A Half Hour on a Weeknight

By 1989 the Federal Communications Commission had spent most of a decade managing, without banning, a formal category of children’s programming it named in its own rulemaking papers, no quotation marks required: the program-length commercial, the agency’s term for a Saturday-morning cartoon whose entire dramatic content existed to move a toy line off the shelf.¹ The complaint reaching Congress about the practice was entered as findings of fact, not outrage: a cartoon built to move product was a documented programming category, not a scandal.¹ The category survived Congress’s own attempt to legislate around it: the Children’s Television Act, once it finally passed in October 1990, left the FCC’s initial rulemaking untouched on this point, and toy-tied cartoons kept airing on the schedule the agency was charged with policing.

How the FCC Regulated the Program-Length Commercial

Into that same schedule, on December 17, 1989, Fox broadcast a half-hour of animation built for an audience that was supposed to have outgrown the format: “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” in which Homer Simpson hides an empty Christmas bonus from his family rather than admit the plant has cut it, ran in prime time and was reviewed two days ahead of air by Daily Variety’s Tony Scott, who called it “colorful, wry and often funny.”² The show had spent two years as ninety-second bumpers stitched between sketches on The Tracey Ullman Show before Fox, a fourth network barely out of its infancy, gambled a full order on it.³ The hour carried none of Saturday morning’s usual signal that what followed was for children, and none of the toy-commercial category’s either. A network could now sell advertising against animation at eight o’clock, which meant the format’s ceiling had never actually been the children’s demographic — only the slot.

The writing staff that produced the show drew early and heavily on a specific college humor magazine’s alumni network; what the slot proved had nothing to do with any one writer’s résumé. Cable proved a second version of the same argument within two years, on the opposite side of the schedule. On August 11, 1991, Nickelodeon ran three new half-hours back to back — Doug, Rugrats, and The Ren & Stimpy Show — inside a single ninety-minute block it branded Nicktoons, as though the category itself were the network’s invention rather than merely its label.⁴ Batman: The Animated Series followed on Fox’s afternoon Fox Kids block a year later, in September 1992, restrained and Art Deco-lit, willing to let a villain’s origin play as tragedy rather than gag.⁵ None of these shows asked permission of the audience The Simpsons had found. They answered to a different one, on a schedule nobody had cleared for it in advance. The same years produced a far larger volume of ordinary Saturday-morning product alongside them — Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Street Sharks — that no one, then or since, filed under the same heading.

Two Lines Out of CalArts

The talent pool behind the decade’s animation did not run through a single pipeline, though one pipeline liked to claim the whole decade. The California Institute of the Arts had opened a Character Animation Program in 1975 under two Disney veterans, Jack Hannah and T. Hee; its first students — among them John Lasseter, Tim Burton, Brad Bird, John Musker, Henry Selick, and Jerry Rees — were taught in turn by three of Walt Disney’s own “Nine Old Men,” Eric Larson, Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston.⁶ That cohort went on to run or define most of American theatrical animation within fifteen years. By the time The Little Mermaid opened in November 1989, the studio’s own “Renaissance” was visibly that program’s late output: Musker co-directed Mermaid and, in 1992, Aladdin; Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise directed Beauty and the Beast in 1991, with Brenda Chapman and Chris Sanders on its story team; Rob Minkoff co-directed The Lion King in 1994; Glen Keane animated Ariel, the Beast, and Aladdin himself.⁶ Four pictures in five years, from the same school, restored a medium the studios had been treating as a dying craft since the 1970s.

Television animation’s own talent pool took a different route. In 1987, the veteran animator Ralph Bakshi relaunched Mighty Mouse for CBS Saturday mornings, and, wanting artists who could draw with real expression rather than fill in a model sheet, sent the writer Tom Minton and a young CalArts-trained artist named John Kricfalusi to recruit straight out of that year’s graduating class.⁷ Most of what CalArts produced went to feature studios, not to television; the Mighty Mouse crew was the exception, and its two most prominent alumni turned out, over the next five years, to matter more to the decade’s television animation than the Disney pipeline did. Kricfalusi left the show to create The Ren & Stimpy Show for Nickelodeon in 1991. Timm, who had done layout work on the same Mighty Mouse revival, went by way of DIC Entertainment and Warner Bros.’ Tiny Toon Adventures before co-creating Batman: The Animated Series for Warner Bros. the following year.⁸ Two of the decade’s most acclaimed animated series, made for two competing networks, had started on the same short-lived CBS cartoon four and five years earlier.

Two Firings

Ambition did not protect either show’s creator from the businesses funding it. Kricfalusi’s contract with Nickelodeon ended on September 25, 1992, after a run of missed deadlines and standing conflict with the network’s Standards and Practices office; a Nickelodeon executive told the trade press only that new episodes were not arriving and the network needed them on the air.⁹ The network’s own business ran on toy-licensable, merchandisable properties, and Kricfalusi’s vision had been built, deliberately, to resist that shape. Production moved in-house, to Nickelodeon’s newly formed Games Animation unit, where the director Bob Camp took over and the voice actor Billy West, who had already voiced Stimpy, added Ren to his own performance. The Boston Phoenix critic Ted Drozdowski judged what followed a falling-off from the standard Kricfalusi had set — “the bloom faded,” in his phrase.¹⁰

Greg Weisman’s run on Gargoyles followed the same shape on a slower clock. The show’s first two seasons aired in syndication through 1996 to real critical notice; its third, retitled The Goliath Chronicles, moved to ABC’s Saturday-morning schedule that fall — the same year Disney, having closed its nineteen-billion-dollar acquisition of Capital Cities/ABC that February, needed programming for a network block it now owned outright rather than merely licensed into.¹¹ Weisman wrote and story-edited a single episode of the new season before being replaced; the story editor brought in to run the rest, Eric Lewald, was at the same time running X-Men: The Animated Series for the same corporate family.¹² The season that resulted carried the show’s name and little of what its first two years had earned.

The Rule That Arrived Late

Congress passed a regulatory answer to the same anxieties in 1990, and the presidency it reached recorded an objection on the way to letting it become law anyway. The Children’s Television Act — capping commercial time during children’s programming at 10.5 minutes an hour on weekends and 12 on weekdays, and requiring stations to air educational and informational programming as a condition of license renewal — took effect as Public Law 101-437 on October 17, 1990.¹³ President Bush withheld his signature, writing that he “wholeheartedly support[ed] these goals” but objected to Congress regulating program content at all; the bill became law regardless, ten days after reaching his desk. The act’s actual teeth arrived six years later than its passage: the FCC did not adopt its so-called three-hour rule, setting a minimum weekly quota of qualifying programming, until August 1996, with compliance required beginning September 1, 1997.¹⁴ The concern behind the act in the first place — that children’s programming had become, as one law journal later put it, little more than a toy manufacturer’s catalog transposed onto video — went largely unanswered by the FCC’s own initial rulemaking, which is a share of why the toy-tied genre survived the act’s first six years essentially intact.¹ Action for Children’s Television’s founder, Peggy Charren, endorsed the 1990 act at the time without claiming it had won her a decade-long campaign outright.¹⁵ The toy-tied Saturday-morning cartoons the act was popularly credited with killing were, by 1996, already being crowded off the schedule by Nickelodeon and by Cartoon Network, which had launched in 1992 — neither of which needed a federal mandate to prefer a show it owned to one it merely rented a slot for.

The one prize the era collected arrived attached to a number the trade press kept repeating wrong. Batman: The Animated Series is still often credited with three Emmy Awards; the total was four, including the 1993 Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program, awarded for the two-part “Robin’s Reckoning,” broadcast February 7 and 14, 1993, and written by Randy Rogel.¹⁶

The Window, Show by Show

Every date below not already cited above is independently confirmed against network or studio records.⁵

Show	Premiere	Network
The Simpsons	December 17, 1989	Fox
Doug / Rugrats / The Ren & Stimpy Show	August 11, 1991	Nickelodeon
Batman: The Animated Series	September 5, 1992	Fox Kids
X-Men: The Animated Series	October 31, 1992	Fox Kids
Beavis and Butt-Head	March 8, 1993	MTV
Animaniacs	September 13, 1993	Fox Kids
Gargoyles	October 24, 1994	Syndication

The Pivot

The window closed from two directions at once, and neither waited for the other. Toy Story premiered at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theatre on November 19, 1995, opened nationwide three days later, and finished its run with $363 million in worldwide box office — the first feature made entirely inside a computer, and immediately the most commercially persuasive argument American animation had produced in a decade.¹⁷ It was directed by John Lasseter, a member of CalArts’ original 1975 cohort, and co-written by Andrew Stanton, one of the artists Bakshi and Kricfalusi had pulled out of that same school’s graduating class eight years earlier for a Saturday-morning revival of Mighty Mouse.¹⁷ The two lines the window had run on — the feature pipeline and the television pipeline — closed on the same film, from opposite ends of the same recruiting class. Every studio with a television animation division now had a reason to move its most ambitious people toward features instead. By 1998 the schedule had already absorbed the consequence: The Ren & Stimpy Show left the air in 1996; Animaniacs ended its run in 1998; Batman: The Animated Series had been retitled The New Batman Adventures and shifted to Kids’ WB the year before, its palette brightened and its budget trimmed to survive the move.¹⁸ Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, which by then owned outright what they had once merely scheduled, had less use for the syndication economics that had made the first wave possible, and stopped needing them.

What replaced the window was not silence. South Park premiered on Comedy Central in August 1997 and King of the Hill on Fox that same year — the second co-created by a Harvard Lampoon alumnus — followed in 1999 by SpongeBob SquarePants, Family Guy, and Futurama.¹⁹ The audience the first window had trained without entirely meaning to, watching a Saturday-morning slot capable of holding Kricfalusi’s anarchy and Timm’s restraint in the same season, aged into the audience the second window was built for. Cartoon Network gave that audience a formal slot of its own on September 2, 2001, launching a late-evening block under the name Adult Swim.²⁰ The medium had not shrunk. It had gone looking for the people who grew up watching it, and found them nine years later, awake later at night.

Thesis

None of this had been planned as a story with a beginning and an end. A studio recruiting animators for a Saturday-morning revival in 1987, a cable network branding three new half-hours as a single event in 1991, a Congress regulating advertising minutes it left unenforced for six years, a computer-animated feature that redirected a decade of television artistry’s most ambitious talent toward the multiplex almost overnight — none of these decisions were coordinated, and no one who made any single one of them was thinking about the others. What they produced anyway, for roughly a decade, was a stretch in which the most formally ambitious writing and drawing on American television could show up on a Saturday morning wearing a mouse’s ears or a mask, made by people the industry itself had not yet decided how seriously to take. The industry decided, eventually, and the decision looked, from outside, like a shrug. It was a transfer instead — of talent, of money, of an audience old enough now to stay up for it — and the medium that inherited all three kept going.

At the Magazine

The Back, in December 1989, would have logged Fox’s prime-time gamble on an animated sitcom as a paragraph of ratings math, not a review of what the show attempted — the room never settling whether the cartoon’s audience was the magazine’s own, and the sidestep would have taken the shape of a business note instead of a verdict. A cable network’s ninety-minute event two years later, three new half-hour cartoons branded a single block, would not have survived even that compromise; the close calendar would have had no space left once the issue filled, and the story would have gone nowhere at all.

A pitch to review Batman: The Animated Series on its own visual and narrative terms would have reached the review meeting more than once that same year and would have ended in the room on a single, repeated objection: a program made for children, however carefully drawn, would have read as ground the trade press already held, not a story worth chasing into someone else’s beat. A contract dispute ending John Kricfalusi’s run on The Ren & Stimpy Show that September would have arrived at the masthead as nothing more than a cable personnel item, with no in-house beat positioned to have received it before the trades already had. The Children’s Television Act’s passage in October 1990 would have been the year’s one item to clear every objection in the room and land, whole, in The Front. The Front, six years later, would have absorbed only half of a similar story: the retooling of Gargoyles into The Goliath Chronicles under a media conglomerate’s newly closed ownership would have reached the business desk as a paragraph on the Disney–Capital Cities merger, the connection to the cartoon it had reshaped simply overlooked by whichever editor was tracking the deal — an oversight, not a refusal.

An articles editor covering the animation industry’s economics would have claimed Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature, for The Back within its opening weeks, the argument The Front would have made about consolidation now applied to a single film’s box office. A cable network’s late-evening block for grown viewers of old Saturday-morning cartoons, launched nine years later, would not have reached that argument at all — the close that might have carried it fell nine days after the September attacks, when no one upstairs was reading television listings.