CW to drop Kids WB!; acquire 4Kids fare
 

At the end of this current season, the CW network will drop the Kids WB! block of programming and run a five-hour block of shows from 4Kids Entertainment (who continue to run a block for Fox's Saturday morning line-up). They cite a softening of the marketplace, government clampdown on advertising food products and the competition from Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney as reasons for the switch.

Kids WB! had dropped to no. 2 on Saturdays, behind ABC's teenybopper line-up of Disney Channel fare, since the WB network folded last year and melded with UPN to form the CW. Warner Bros. Animation said they would continue to produce stuff for cable, direct-to-video, broadband and wireless.

Well thats a bummer. I really like that block.

Oh well, looks like I'm going to stick to CN now once this block is gone.

What? Poisoning children with their "Japan doesn't exist" scheme on two channels isn't enough? ::)

In a way, wouldn't this mean that 4Kids is now competing against itself since it already has a Saturday morning block on another channel?

Technically yes. Consider, though, that Fox has more affiliates over-the-air than CW does (many CW affiliates are second-tier digital allocations on existing stations while CW in other areas is on cable only), while the 4Kids shows on Fox is not shown in four markets (Atlanta one of them).

This is another loss for animation fans, even if one didn't watch a lot of Kids WB!.

I really liked the Kids WB. It really felt like Saturday mornings from my youth when I watched it. I what what stings most is 4Kids taking over. The quality of many of their shows is pretty low. Definitely not what WD, CN, and Nick give us.

eh, there wasn't much on it, though. :-/


I was WAY better than anything "D!zn3y" could come up with ,though.

Anything on Disney that isn't for toddlers is for teenyboppers.

Of which, I am neither. :P