Another One?

 If you're old like me, you can remember Saturday Morning Cartoons. This was network programming that was shoveled into the hours when most parents would be asleep and children would be allowed unfettered access to the three or four stations available on their TV dial. One of those children was me. The dawn of the weekend meant that I was up in my jammies, tuning in whatever was being served up on my limited menu of choices. 

I came of age in a time of Scooby Doo. Not just the warbling Great Dane and his stoner pal Shaggy, but the whole crop of Hanna Barbera stable: Josie and the Pussycats, Johnny Quest, Wacky Races. I could go on and on, but the reality was that at some point it didn't really matter what they tossed into the mix, once I was on a channel and another cartoon appeared directly after the one I had just finished watching over my bowl of Cocoa Puffs, I was there for another half-hour ride. 

It was CBS that figured out how to break me down still further: The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Hour delivered on all three elements of its title. By providing a showcase for Warner Brothers cartoons from the forties, fifties and sixties, programmers had a wealth of already tried and true content to put in front of their shorter viewers. For an hour. It was here that I began to appreciate just how the quality of animation had devolved over the years. Those repetitive sequences of Scooby and the gang slipping across endless loops of the same backgrounds contrasted mightily with the meticulous details found in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. My untrained eye became trained as I watched classics from the geniuses at Termite Terrace: Friz Freling, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Chuck Jones. Their  seven minute films were not originally intended for kids alone, but that's how I watched them. 

I consumed them. 

I became a cartoon snob. 

In college I made a pilgrimage to an art gallery in Denver to listen to my idol, Chuck Jones speak. I scraped together my meager savings to buy an autographed animation cel he had drawn. It was a reproduction, as I came to understand that sometime back in the late fifties Warner Brothers burned most of the original artwork to make room for a new publicity office. 

My son was lucky enough to watch Bugs and all his pals when he was young. Cartoon Network thought enough to give Chuck Jones a whole show. Every seven minutes, my son's face would light up as the title of the next cartoon flickered onto the screen, much to his delight. "Another one?" How could this be?

Well, as it turns out, it may not always be. The current license holder of most of these animated gems, HBO Max has chosen to let them drift away, holding onto the oldest of the bunch, but letting classics like Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera Doc?, and the all-time great Duck Amuck. This choice was made to "decrease content expenses." It makes me wonder if the Louvre might one day run out of wall space for the Mona Lisa. 

Happily, I own discs full of these cartoons. Scooby Doo? Not so much. Still, it chills me to think that there are generations who will grow up without appreciating the finer things. Like Cocoa Puffs. And Chuck Jones.