This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is our American stories.

And up next, Mark McCrae from the Bronx, New York, was a programmer at Cartoon Network.

He also was a part of a team that helped launch another Cartoon Network channel, Boomerang.

He's now a programmer for another Cartoon Network channel, Adult Swim.

Mark McQuay is the author of The Best Saturdays of Our Lives.

Here he is to tell the story

of Saturday morning cartoons and answer the all-important question. What happened to them?

Doobie-do-be-do. Where are you? Now, I know that many of us have memories of waking up on Saturday morning and with a bowl of cereal and, you know, watching our favorite cartoons.

Saturday morning have been around for a long time, you know, really at the beginning of the television age.

And the first official Saturday morning cartoon dates all the way back to December 10th, 1955,

with the Mighty Mouse Playhouse.

Hi, boys and girls, here we go,

rocketing into a fun-filled, exciting cartoon show.

So these were theatrical short featuring Mighty Mouse.

CBS had bought the library and repackaged all of these old Mighty Mouse cartoons

into a Saturday morning show.

But again, it was 1955 and it wasn't a lot of strategy.

And the trend would continue through the 1960s.

You had a lot of primetime cartoons like the Flintstones.

Well, Ma!

And Top Cat and Alvin and the Chimp Monks.

...