Cartoon Network was born to give a vast film vault somewhere to live
In 1992 Ted Turner owned a mountain of old animation, from MGM classics to the entire Hanna-Barbera catalogue, and nowhere to show it. His answer was the first cable channel devoted around the clock to a single genre, cartoons. Three decades on, its evenings belong to Adult Swim.
The channel grew out of a corporate shuffle. Turner Broadcasting bought MGM/UA in August 1986, sold the studio back that October, yet held on to much of the pre-1986 film and television archive. In 1991 Turner added Hanna-Barbera's library, and he asked Betty Cohen, a senior TNT executive, to design a home for it all. Cartoon Network launched on October 1, 1992 as a 24-hour animation channel, with Cohen as its first president.
Owning a working studio set it apart from rivals. Hanna-Barbera spun off Cartoon Network Studios in 1994, whose shorts showcase What a Cartoon! led to early hits such as Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls, sold under the Cartoon Cartoons banner. After Turner merged with Time Warner, the Warner Bros. cartoons came under the same roof. Much of the older library later migrated to Boomerang, which began as a weekend block and became a separate channel on April 1, 2000.
Classic shorts came with scissors. The network trimmed gunfire, drinking, smoking and ethnic caricature from vintage Warner cartoons, dropped the 1943 short Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs altogether, and in June 2001 pulled a dozen controversial Bugs Bunny films from its 49-hour June Bugs marathon, even though they had been slated for after midnight with historical introductions.
Its audience has shifted with the clock. Adult Swim, rated by Nielsen as though it were a separate channel, has crept steadily earlier, and in 2023 its start moved first to 7 p.m. and then to 5 p.m. after a jump in viewers aged 18 to 34. Cartoon Network now runs from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. for children aged roughly 6 to 12. Reach has fallen too: about 66 million American pay-TV homes in November 2023, against a peak of 100 million in 2011.
Source: Cartoon Network
