Animation & Cartoons TV Shows

The success of film animation in the first third of the twentieth century inspired television programmers to tap into the genre later in the century as they developed new TV program forms. Like early film animation, early TV animation programming consisted mostly of short-form films aimed at children. In many cases, children's TV programs simply broadcast theatrical animated shorts, but after the mid-point of the century, animation produced specifically for television was common.

A drawback to the use of animation in a TV context, especially early in the medium's history, was the large amount of labor and time that was traditionally required to produce even an animated short. Theatrical shorts were usually produced over the course of several months, a turn-around time that was not generally feasible under the tighter deadlines required by TV programming. The solution to this problem was the development of animation styles that reduced the time and effort required to draw them; in these styles, large portions of drawings were reused from frame to frame, with only parts of the drawing that changed being redrawn for each successive frame. The resulting animation is typically considered to be of low quality, but many animated programs of the 1960s and 1970s used these time- and money-saving techniques.

By the 1980s, animated programs were a staple of children's TV programming, and many animated series were thinly veiled promotional platforms for toys and other products targeted at children. By the turn of the century, new directions in TV animation included the emergence of Japanese anime as a popular style even in the United States, the creation of cable networks devoted entirely to animation and the rising popularity of animated series aimed at adult audiences.