A History of Kids' TV - Grandparents.com

Loved Fred Flintstone but thumb your nose at SpongeBob? A look at the evolution of children's TV finds that American Idol is sometimes pretty much like The Mickey Mouse Club

When Linda Cibotti was a kid in 1950s Quincy, Mass., she loved the newfangled entertainment of kids-only TV. The boxy living-room appliance with all the dials and space-age antennas was quickly becoming an everyday fixture in American homes. I Love Lucy and Lassie were burning up the airwaves, and children like Cibotti were becoming the first generation to grow up with the small screen. Like most children, she had her favorite characters.

"On Howdy Doody," she remembers, "I loved Clarabell the Clown and the princess named Summerfall Winterspring." She was such a devoted fan of the antic slapstick showcase The Pinky Lee Show that she can still remember the lyrics to the opening jingle, "Yoo hoo, it's me, my name is Pinky Lee." But Cibotti's favorite program was The Big Brother Bob Emery Show, a local Massachusetts kids' show that ran from 1947 to 1968, in which Emery introduced funny skits, cartoons, and clowns. A charter member of Emery's Small Fry Club, she watched the show religiously, even in the middle of school days.

"When I was in grammar school, we all went home for lunch," Cibotti says. "My mother would make me a sandwich and I'd eat it while I watched Big Brother Bob Emery every single day."

Since then, children's TV has undergone several incarnations and Cibotti has become a grandmother. Her grandchildren are beginning to pick favorite shows, just as she did. But they're now selecting from an enormous array of options on cable, the internet, and DVD that's so vast it can be baffling. "Compared to what we watched, it's just incredible how much is out there now," she says. "Of course, I remember Sesame Street from raising my own kids, but [there are] so many new shows. You worry about what your grandkids are exposed to, but I think it's unbelievable to have so many choices."

The TV landscape has shifted dramatically for children since 1951 when networks programmed 27 hours of kids' shows a week. Fueled by the baby boom, children's television quickly began to expand. "Programming for kids started out like the rest of TV: aping the previous medium, the movies," says Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly editor-at-large and author of the television history Kissing Bill O'Reilly, Roasting Miss Piggy (St. Martin's Press, 2005). "Lots of cartoons that had previously been shown in theaters — Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies — became the core of kiddie shows hosted mostly on local stations by puppets, cowboys, clowns, and circus ringmasters."

TV Through the Years

The 1950s era of kids TV wasn't really so different from vaudeville or a Saturday movie matinee, or the top-rated adult shows like Texaco Star Theater or Your Show of Shows: a collection of short comic skits, either animated or live-action, hosted by a goofy character. Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo soon became national stars, while guys like Boston's Bob Emery or in Alabama, Birmingham's Cousin Cliff (Holman) became local celebrities. In 1951, the kid-friendly western The Lone Ranger netted more than 5 million viewers, when roughly 15 million people even had TV sets. Meanwhile, the overall market boomed, as U.S. residents went from owning 15 million sets in 1950 to 47 million by 1960. This era fueled an explosion of children's programming. By the mid-1950s, networks had instituted kids-only Saturday morning programming; By the late 1960s, most of the hour-long shows had settled into once-a-week, 30-minute formats.

Soon, kids were glued to the tube on Saturday mornings, when networks couldn't get enough cheap, quickly-made, and syndicated cartoons like Hanna-Barbera's Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear. Soon syndication killed off most local shows and ushered in the age of national programming. By the mid-1960s, children's entertainment had gone so mainstream that shows like The Flintstones (the first prime-time animated series) and Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color were blockbusters, ranked among the most-watched shows on-air. And by the late 1960s, TV honchos were slowly figuring out how to embrace its educational potential, leading to the premiere of Sesame Street, with a once-orange Oscar the Grouch, in 1969.

In the 1970s and 1980s, children's TV continued to boom and expand, digesting the impact of Asian anime, selling He-Man toys, and gradually becoming more fast-paced and sophisticated in presentation, style, and tone.

"As the 1970s began, TV families evolved to reflect what has happening in society," says Christopher Claro, TV historian and coauthor of Comedy Central: The Essential Guide to Comedy (Berkeley Trade, 1997). Live-action primetime shows made home life seem goofily hip in the disco era — dressing up traditional family values in trendy polyester and far-out hairdos. "From the blended family of The Brady Bunch, to The Partridge Family and their widowed mother, more families were less typical," he explains.

In the Reagan-era, family-values 1980s, hip families faded and earnest-family sitcoms made a comeback, with The Cosby Show finally breaking through TV's color barrier to become a colossal hit. But Cosby wasn't alone. Other sunny, life-lessons shows also began to chip away at TV's traditional white nuclear family, beginning to reflect the transformations taking place in the country, from simply acknowledging working mothers (Family Ties) and motherless children (Full House), to grappling with a whole range of women's issues on The Facts of Life, and the concept of cohabitation-with-kids on Who's the Boss?

In the 1990s and 2000s, says Tucker, "self-consciousness set in, and you get meta-kids-TV that was meant to appeal to nostalgic adults as much as kids — from Pee-wee's Playhouse to SpongeBob SquarePants. You also got a new round of cheaply made live-action shows for preteens, like Saved by the Bell." And then cable TV multiplied every child's options, with a seemingly endless menu of reruns and new shows — and whole networks like Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network, and the Disney Channel emerged, all specifically created for children.

Today, if a 7-year-old kid from 1958 were rocketed 50 years into the future to watch cable TV, the remote and the DVR would flummox him, and then he would begin to notice differences in the shows themselves. "The pace would be the most different," explains Tucker. "Today's shows move fast. baby-boomer shows were more leisurely, unironic, and sincere — dull when they were bad, sweet when they were good." But, he says, that 7-year-old would recognize a few things, too: "The smart-alecky tone of cartoons, the use of familiar actors' voices, and the reinvention of old characters in current shows like DuckTales or Goof Troop." And is American Idol really so different in concept from The Mickey Mouse Club's "Talent Roundup" or Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts? And isn't Miley Cyrus — and Hannah Montana, her unprecedented ratings juggernaut on The Disney Channel — just the next Shirley Temple?

“If a 7-year-old kid from 1958 were rocketed 50 years into the future to watch cable TV, the remote and the DVR would flummox him.”

Now, critics often complain — and family members often worry — about the coarsening of American television or the commercialization of kids' entertainment, but these issues have been around since the beginning. The first panel on violence and children's television was convened in 1952. And though critics often complain that many children's shows seem to exist only to sell toys, that's always been the case. "I remember sending in cereal box tops as instructed by the stars of my favorite Saturday morning TV shows to get toys, membership cards, dolls, and six-shooters." He sees little difference between the merchandising of Dora the Explorer and that of The Lone Ranger. "Thus it was and forever shall be, but now [it's] with videogames and sexier dolls."

The biggest hits of prime-time network TV today have become sexier and more adult (Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy), unlike some of the top-rated prime-time shows of the 1950s and 1960s (I Love Lucy and The Andy Griffith Show). Also, families are less likely to watch the same programs together. Plus, many of today's top children's shows — like SpongeBob SquarePants or the Animaniacs or Kim Possible — are often less sincere and more stylish or even absurdist than shows of previous generations.

Consequently, many parents have taken refuge in the older reruns of channels like TV Land. "Nostalgia channels offer conservative families a haven from the snarkiness of modern kiddie entertainment," says Tucker. Nonetheless, he worries that such networks stock cheap Hannah Barbera cartoons like Scooby Doo, instead of the superior classics of Bugs, Daffy, and Goofy.

If anything, the history of children's TV has one common thread: the domination of simple slapstick comedy, from Howdy Doody to SpongeBob. But, thanks in part to the 1990 Children's Television Act, greater parental involvement, and the extraordinary leadership of Sesame Street (still on-air and expanding internationally, after nearly 40 years), children's programming has become dramatically more educational. The offensive racist stereotypes of old Disney cartoons would never make it to air these days, while channels are now peppered with educational content, from the kid-friendly documentaries on Discovery Kids to the light language lessons of Dora the Explorer.

"I was watching this cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-Lan with my 3-year-old granddaughter Hannah, and they were introducing phrases in Chinese," says Cibotti, laughing. "I never learned Chinese from Howdy Doody!" Further still, her grandchildren don't have to wake up early on Saturdays, because grandma records episodes of Dora on her TiVo. "We had nothing like that when I was a kid."

Like many grandparents, Cibotti is aware that she has to be careful about what her grandchildren watch, but she's also excited to explore so many new options. "It's unbelievable, the number of things," she says. "And it's good for me too! I'm learning Spanish with my granddaughter. She's just three, but I pronounce the words with her when we're watching Dora — and she laughs at me. She already knows enough to correct my Spanish!"