What is the future of primetime animation?
As the toon boom of the late 90’s rose and fell, it seemed that primetime animation was almost nearly doomed. But recently, animation for adults has been on the rise. But this time around, the revival of primetime animation is occuring on cable rather than on the Big Three networks and FOX. Cartoon Network started its own primetime animation block, called Adult Swim, that first aired September 9, 2002 (Larson, 2002). Adult Swim airs shows that it syndicated from FOX (Futurama and Family Guy, to be precise), Japanese anime that is considered inappropriate for small children, as well as shows that it produces exclusively for its own animation block. In fact, Adult Swim has lately been beating late night shows network shows such as Leno and Letterman in the ratings (Carr, 2003). If that’s not proof of the sheer popularity of animation for adults, than I don’t know what is. In fact, now even TNN (now called SpikeTV) has created its own primetime animation block. In addition, other animated
