The End of Cartoon Network

[furtech]

The end of an era...it's a shame that this will happen with little fanfare or notice. The new head of Cartoon Network has dismantled the animation department in Burbank and will now "outsource" animation to Canada (ie, work-for-hire job-shops). The directors and creators responsible for such unique and wonderful shows like Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and Chowder are gone.

Rob Sorcher, the new head honcho of CN wants to focus on live-action programming, as characterized by the spate of reality shows (basically rip-offs of adult reality shows) the channel is now airing (ghost hunters, quiz shows, survivor-type shows). The animation department has essentially been dissolved.

The reason for this? Cartoon Network is making a healthy profit, but not as healthy as Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel. Bottom-line stuff. Sorcher believes that live-action original programming during primetime is the answer. Talk is that they might even drop "Cartoon" from the network's name-- thus potentially taking "SyFy Channel" off the hook for "Most Stupid Name Change in Marketing History".

Cartoon Network was a place with few peers: the creative freedom there was legendary. The shows ranged from edgy (Death as a comedic foil?) to base and idiotic ("Ed, Edd and Eddie") and worlds in-between. Directors would post their story-boards in the commons areas, inviting feedback from fellow artists and anyone who cared to comment. The kind of openly creative openness last seen in art school. There was a family-atmosphere, where fun-projects included a "high-school yearbook" created one year about the staff at Cartoon Network.

No more. Gone. Poof.

Here's the Los Angeles Times article that spells it out

Thanks for the heads-up, Wayne

Comments

[vulpesrex.livejournal.com]

I think that CN can not be regarded like any ordinary broadcast network, or even like any other cable network; it has pretty much been one of the freebies included in basic cable and basic satellite TV programming, a given, just as evening network news has always been sort of a freebie, and which (until the last 20 years) wasn't really expected to make a profit, it just enhanced the overall "package". Or at least, that is how the tiypical consumer/audience member will see it.

The fact that it IS a separate entity, or rather a proprietary subsidiary of yet another subsidiary, ultimately a part of the Time/Warner stable, and very much IS expected to contribute to the bottom line, is why forces above and outside the Cartoon Network envelope get to make major cultural changes to what they believe is their asset, the company, with its' name and reputation and finances.

...and as always, they sem too short-sighted to realize that their TRUE chief asset is their audience, all those eyes watching what they put over the wire. That audience is what earns them their money - they don't sell time to advertisers, they sell an AUDIENCE, one which is constantly changing as toddlers become kids, kids become adolescents, adolescents become adults; and that ausdience has a good memory - it remembers cartoons it saw the year before, recognises reruns, has favorites, develops and cultivates tastes for things like anime, which it can't see anywhere else.

That audience can see sports everywhere else, and the same for "reality programming".

...But that's Show Biz. These two schmucks will destroy CN, find that the audience has left, and then say "it couldn't be saved - we tried, but it just wasn't meant to be", and walk away after they have found a way to deflect blame and keep some of their wunderkind lustre, leaving a dead asset in their wake.

[furtech.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's pretty much the typical Hollywood scenerio. Similar to most marketing snafu, like Coke when they said, "Hey, we have 70% of the soft drink market...but hey! Pepsi has 30%!," which led to the whole "New Coke" idiocy (nice recovery, though-- Coke Classic was genius).