In this project, I was apart of group 3, we were one of the handful covering American animation,  so to stand out on our own a bit more, we all quickly unanimously agreed to focus entirely onto the massively influential Cartoon Network and its many offshoots. We all found it a very interesting rabbit hole to delve into as Cartoon Network has a long and rich history, with a lot of big decisions being affected by the changing industry of animated Tv around them at the time and a lot of their decisions then also having large waves in that very same industry as they set their own unique identity as a breath of fresh air for western animation as a whole.

As a group, we all split off into our own rabbit holes of different offshoots and things in CN’s history to explore.

I myself chose to delve into CN’s broadcasting history on their main body network, looking at how CN shifted from simply broadcasting old cartoons that Ted Turner acquired, to making their own cartoons and acting as an open door for new artists to step into the animation scene and have their own big waves, and then up until CN’s more recent broadcasting and shows and their more modern style, its problems, and its hopeful future ahead of it.

Rebecca focused on the industry and business side to CN’s beginnings like, looking more into numbers, names, dates and exact details on why Cartoon Network was such a success from the beginning.

Lauren not only was the one who designed the lovely and colourful poster for the group, but also delved into CN’s most popular offshoot, “Adult Swim” and its huge impact on more adult orientated western animation.

and finally, Sam researched two of CN’s other offshoots/ blocks on their network, “Toonami” and “Boomerang”, what niches they were used for and aimed at.

With my own research into Cartoon Network, I, of course started at the most reliable first step, Wikipedia’s multiple pages on CN and its history. I used that to find and read up on more articles, interviews with CN presidents over the years and more. In fact, The article that stood the most out to me and i found important enough to bring up in the poster and presentation was an interview in late 2022 from “Variety” with the most recent and current president of CN, Michael Ouweleen, where he spoke of his view on CN’s history and how it has changed over the years, and what his goals are for its future, particularly in the goal to aim for more of a psychographic than a demographic, meaning that CN will hopefully go on to be less tightly targeted for younger demographics than it currently has found itself in recent years. This article can be found here : Cartoon Network Boss Details Warner Bros. Discovery Animation Strategy (variety.com)

After doing a good bit of reading up on CN’s history, I would also seek out videos about the topic as well, as I knew there would surely be some few long form videos out there somewhere going more in-depth into CN’s rich history, and there was. There were a handful of videos discussing CN, some of which were much shorter than the others, but the longest couple, and ones which I used much more thoroughly were a series of videos made by “That one Nerd” made over the course of a little over a year, from just at the end of 2022 and the most recent being uploaded at the start of 2024. Overall, it took just under 10 hours to get through the whole series of videos, and of course with that amount of time, these videos went into extreme detail about each step in CN’s history over the 32 years of its existence.

A playlist of these videos can be found here: The History of Cartoon Network Teaser – YouTube

I found these sources very useful in researching CN, especially the videos as they spent a lot of time setting up the background for each era of CN, including plenty of footage, anecdotes, synopsis of a few shows, and many more to really give a good sense of what Cartoon Network was really about over the years.

These videos fueled a lot of my ideas on what exactly to write and talk about with my portion of the poster, and I was most intrigued by CN’s process in carving its own identity, and how that identity may have changed over its history.

A good thing about our research as a group was how interconnected it all really is, each offshoot served a purpose and had its effects on each other. For example, Adult Swim gave way for a revival to Toonami because of an April fools joke, Adult Swim’s creation shifted CN’s focus to be more child orientated, Adult Swim’s controversies led to a new president of CN, Cartoon Network’s “What a Cartoon!” and “Cartoon Cartoon Fridays” segments led to the creation of boomerang as older shows had to go somewhere to make way for all the newer shows being released, and plenty more.

Cartoon Network proved to be an even better Network to research than we all had initially thought it would be and I now feel very confident in my knowledge of CN’s history. It was a very exciting and interesting journey to rediscover old media, some of which once meant the world to ourselves and a lot of other people all over the world, not just America.

However, one struggle I had throughout this process was just how much information I had gathered and how difficult it was to cut it down to be more digestible for the poster, It took maybe three or so attempts to make my notes short enough to fit the poster and not be an overwhelming amount of text, unlike how this reflective blog has turned out to be.

 

Reference list for research: