ABSTRACT
Animation has had a rather erratic presence on television. A mainstay of Saturday
morning children’s programming, small snippets of it appear regularly in commercials, credit
sequences, music videos, news and sports, but there have been long stretches when there were
no prime-time cartoon shows. After The Flintstones ended its original run in 1966 there wasn’t
another successful primetime cartoon show until 23 years later, when The Simpsons debuted.
Since 1989 there has been something of a Renaissance in television animation. Numerous
