1986 comic book ad for NBC's Saturday morning schedule, featuring some well-known cartoons, and some less well-known ones.

Hey, I know this ad. It's in all D.C.'s post-Crisis relaunch issues.

1987 NBC Saturday Morning Cartoon Lineup

ALF crashes the lunchtime cartoon crowd at the NBC commissary in this ad for NBC’s Saturday morning cartoon lineup for the 1987 season. #cartoons #animation #SaturdayMorning #nostalgia

When I was a kid I read a lot of sword and sorcery fiction from the 1970s and 1980s, and there was an extremely specific recurring trope I encountered in those novels and literally nowhere else.

There'd be this villainous duo – typically servants of the principal villain – consisting of a scheming mastermind middle-aged father and his hyperviolent lunatic teenage daughter. The daughter would constantly fuck things up due to her erratic behaviour, and the father would put up with it because they were stuck in this intensely toxic codependent relationship that left the daughter with no meaningful social relationships apart from her father, and the father unable to refuse his daughter anything she wanted, no matter how unhinged.

I ran into this exact trope in at least half a dozen different novels by as many different authors, all in the same subgenre of fantasy literature, all clustered around the same period of time, and nowhere else. (To anticipate the inevitable request for recs, Sorcerer's Heir by Paula Volsky springs readily to mind; I'd have to drag my library out of storage to pin down the others I'm thinking of – it's been long enough that I'm not confident of my recollection of specific titles!) For over thirty years this remained the case, and I was prepared to chalk it up to simply being an artefact of its time.

So, with all this context in mind, imagine my surprise when I checked what was trending on Netflix around November of 2021.

You mean like the one where the villain kidnapped a pair of dreamy singers to perform for his daughter so she’d stop throwing tantrums and then the singers were in the news a couple weeks later ’cause they weren’t really singers?

So a sad day in history has happened today

Vortexx on the CW had its final broadcast today, and there are no cartoon lineups on ABC, CBS, NBC or FOX. This makes today the last day that Saturday Morning Cartoons run on broadcast TV. a Moment of silence for all our past days 

Jesus christ what has happened to the world?