When I was a young, stupid child, I assumed that the person who owned Cartoon Network must be awesome. A Willy Wonka figure, preferably minus the child murder, rolling around the office on a skateboard giggling at new clips of Johnny Bravo.
Now, I’m an old, sad, creaky man, and I know that almost all of the media I love exists despite the will of executives. They’re not trying to create good content that provides us a moment of joy and respite in this world. They’re the miserly warden of the jail all my favorite characters are trapped in, trying to calculate the absolute minimum daily rations that the Powerpuff Girls can live on.
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David Zaslav, a man who would be best suited as the CEO of a gardening supply company that specializes in rakes you can step on, seems to have the Cartoon Network in his sights next. Cartoon Network Studios in Burbank has already been closed, and Warner Bros. Discovery has apparently been “disinvesting” in the network on top of that. They’ve already decided that Sesame Street isn’t worth making anymore, so worry is well warranted. Put a bullet in Big Bird’s head, and it sends a message. The man would evict the Animaniacs from the water tower and sue them for back rent. We’re in for a generation of children raised on Cocomelon and Call of Duty frag videos, which is probably great news for the military-industrial complex.
I suppose this is exactly the shark-minded ruthlessness that raises a CEO to great heights. The optics of taking children’s favorite shows out behind the shed is hard to sugar-coat, as if your son is going to shrug and say, “Profit margins, I understand.” To me, children’s programming is like the Medicaid of television. Yes, you might be losing money on it. Still, it’s something you don’t touch, so you can always point to it as a singular positive thing you’ve done. For tired parents, you may as well be cancelling a nationwide free after-school program.
What confuses me more is shutting it down altogether, when you have literal decades of cartoons in the vault, and you’re catering to a demographic that’s entirely fine with watching the same episode of something hundreds of times. Just load the hopper with Hanna-Barbera, and let it dole out animated shorts into eternity instead of making a child cry when their favorite button on the Roku stops working. What’s next — cutting off Hayao Miyazaki’s right hand and displaying it in your office?
I’m just saying, it would be nice if an entertainment executive’s job was to produce entertainment, not delete it.
Content shared from www.cracked.com.