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

Word now has it that at least two shows currently on Kids WB--The Batman and Legion Of Superheroes--could be retained next fall, depending on 4Kids' whims. This midseason, Kids WB will debut The Spectacular Spiderman and The World Of Quest.

What's gonna happen to the Spider-Man show?
Will it still be on WB or will it move to CN?

Dinsey sucks expect for Pixar & POTC.

I can't remember the last time I watched Kids WB, but I remember when it had awesome shows like Freakazoid and Earthworm Jim. :(

Also I'm not a huge fan of practically anything 4Kids works on. They massacred One Piece(from what I'm told) and I remember they refused to play quite a few episodes of Pokemon back in the day.

I'm not a big fan of 4Kids myself. I've read that they ruined the American version of Sonic X not only because they axed the established voice actors from the previous games (they wouldn't use the previous voice of Sonic because he wasn't from New York although he was willing to move anyway), they refused to research the history of the franchise as well!

Still... I think they did a nice job with the Pokemon series.:)