In 2024, there are an awful lot of us who don’t bother with live TV anymore. With the exception of sporting events (and increasingly even those) virtually every new show you could want to watch is available on at least one of the major streaming services, so the days of making sure that you’re home at 8 o’clock on Thursday so you don’t miss the new episode of Friends are long over. In my house, though, there is at least one exception to that rule: Saturday night. On Saturday night, unless there’s some pressing reason for us to be out of the house (or to watch a competing sporting event) the Petit TV is tuned to New Orleans’s WDSU Channel 6.2, the local MeTV affiliate, for the greatest TV event of the week: Svengoolie. Svengoolie is the last of the great horror hosts, the heir to the empires of Elvira, Chilly Billy Cardille, Vampira, and New Orleans’s own Morgus the Magnificent. Every Saturday Sven serves up a classic horror or sci-fi movie replete with his own brand of comedy and information, cracking jokes and telling us about the history of the film in a single breath. 

And it is because I watch Sven every time that it’s humanly possible that I knew about the announcement of another new network that hopes to lure viewers away from their streaming services and back to the antenna: MeTV Toons. Whereas the prime MeTV network serves up seven days of reruns of classic TV comedies, dramas, westerns, and the like, MeTV Toons – launching this Tuesday, June 25 – promises to do the same thing with classic animation. At launch, the network will provide a home to such luminaries as Looney Tunes, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Popeye and Pals, and even later shows from the 80s and 90s like The Smurfs, The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, Captain Planet, and many, many more. 

The response was shockingly positive. The network hasn’t even launched yet and there are already at least two Facebook fan groups dedicated to the station, one of which is approaching 5,000 members and the other topping 17,000 as of this writing. There’s a neat little community appearing here, and once you filter out the 14,000 members who have joined to ask if the network will be available in their area because they don’t know what Google is, there’s a lot of conversation ABOUT classic cartoons, the ones that will be on the network at launch, and what other pieces of animation history fans hope to see make an appearance in the future.

Of course, not everyone in the group is positive. That’s nearly impossible. Of all the different Facebook groups I’m a part of, there are only two that I’ve never known to have any sort of toxic presence: the Bandit group for Bluey fans sharing their journey through fatherhood I wrote about a few weeks ago, and fans of the Movie Crypt podcast, proving once again that horror movie fans are some of the kindest and most loving people you could ever meet in the real world. Some of the toxic comments in the MeTV Toons groups are complaining about the lineup, because the fact that they spend a half-hour a week showing Police Academy: The Animated Series is evidently a cardinal sin amongst a certain sect of the populace. Others are complaining because the network is not available in their area – which is a complaint I sympathize with, as for a while it didn’t look like we would get it in New Orleans at launch. I was flailing around the internet like a Dickensian waif until it was announced that it will be on Channel 41.6, which filled me with childlike glee. But even when I thought we weren’t gonna get it, I was smart enough to know that nobody in the Facebook group had any control over that and acting like everybody there broke into my house and crapped in my Cheerios wasn’t going to solve anything. 

But the complaint that really got my attention was the one guy who asked why, in this age where “everything is available streaming,” anybody would care about launching a new pre-programed broadcast network. I’m going to address the two major flaws in his logic, starting with the more obvious and then moving on to the one that has more personal meaning to me. 

First of all, let’s talk about the notion that “everything is available streaming.” The fact is, friends, that’s simply not true. As much as we might like it to be the case, there are large swaths of our television and cinematic history that are not legally available on any streaming service, or even for purchase digitally or physically. Sometimes it’s a rights issue. The original Muppet Babies cartoon from the 80s, for example, cannot legally be found anywhere, and likely never will, because that cartoon made extensive use of movie and TV clips from a half-century of Hollywood output. At the time, there was no thought behind it except for obtaining the rights for broadcast. Nobody was considering the afterlife of these shows. Now, in order to sell or stream an episode of Muppet Babies, the Walt Disney Entertainment Conglomatorium and Tiki Lounge would have to track down the rights holders of each and every movie or television clip ever used on the show to obtain permission to use it again, and in perpetuity. Disney clearly doesn’t think the effort it would take to do such a thing would be worth the likely return on their investment, and as much as I hate to say it, I think they’re probably right.

But Muppet Babies wouldn’t be on MeTV Toons anyway, since Disney has their own deal. What about the shows that will? Well, a quick glance shows that the Police Academy series isn’t available to stream anywhere. Captain Planet is available to PURCHASE from sites like Amazon or AppleTV, but not as part of any streaming subscription. And although there are limited (and often out-of-print) DVDs available for the likes of Underdog, Beetlejuice, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, if you’re hoping to stream them on Netflix or any similar service, I’m afraid it’s a non-starter. And even for things that ARE available to stream – well, as we’ve seen in the last year, something that’s on Paramount+ today is not guaranteed to be there tomorrow. 

I’m not going to go through the entire MeTV Toons schedule, but you get the point. There are a LOT of things that aren’t available to stream, whether it’s because of rights or because the copyright owner doesn’t think it would be worth the expense to put it out there or for any of a thousand other reasons. A network like MeTV Toons will likely shift their lineup often, especially for shorter-run series (for example, Wacky Races is on the schedule, and that series ran for only 17 episodes), so this will be a chance to give a bit of life to lots of cartoons that otherwise have been forgotten. People love to be dismissive of animation because, historically, Americans have viewed it as something that’s “just for children.” The number of adults eager for MeTV Toons would seem to disagree – and even if it DIDN’T, so what? The Hobbit was written for children. So was The Wizard of Oz. The sublime Paddington movies were made for kids. That doesn’t make a creative endeavor invalid, or mean that it isn’t something worth preservation.

So let’s move on to the second assumption of this question: why a pre-programed broadcast network? Who cares? Why not put all of these shows on a streaming service? Hell, you could even make it an ad-supported service like Tubi, which reported viewer numbers recently in excess of a lot of the premiere, paid streamers like Disney+. That seems doable, doesn’t it?

Well, yeah, kinda. And were such a service to exist, I would be first in line to sign up for it. But don’t discount the allure of a pre-programmed schedule. Apps like PlutoTV and RokuTV have built up a huge following by streaming pre-programmed channels of entertainment, supported by advertising, for free. I’ve written before about how much I love PlutoTV so I won’t get in too deep, but the fact that I can just say, “I wanna watch Star Trek” without having a specific episode in mind, then have TWO PlutoTV channels to sate my hunger…well that’s damned appealing. 

Pre-programmed TV is easy. Not mindless, mind you, but EASY. We live in a world where SOMETHING is demanding our judgment at every single moment of the day. It starts with something simple, like ordering coffee. But what kind of coffee do you want? What size? Hot or iced? Want a shot of flavoring in that? How about a shot of espresso? Whipped cream? Cherry on top? Paper straw that’s good for the environment but useless for drinking or plastic straw that actually functions as advertised but that will cause the barista to assume you murder turtles in your sleep? What name do you want on the cup? Any snacks? Okay, great, that completes your order, sir. Cash, card, or blood donation? Great. Want to leave a tip?

If we have taken something as simple as buying a cup of coffee and turned it into a process that requires a dozen decisions before the angry barista wearing a “Justice for Donatello” button gives you your order, what happens with something IMPORTANT, like buying a car or choosing a job? I’m a teacher, and there are studies that indicate the average teacher has to make 1,500 individual decisions over the course of an average day. Numerically, this is a higher number than most DOCTORS. (Although admittedly, the decisions doctors have to make are usually more intense than whether or not I’m going to let Jimmy go to the bathroom when I don’t believe he really has to go.) I cite this number any time my wife doesn’t understand why I’m begging HER to pick what we have for dinner, for God’s sake, I don’t care WHAT it is I just DON’T WANT TO DECIDE.

Ahem. Love you, baby.

The point is, apps like PlutoTV offer something that a typical streaming service does not: easy entertainment. If I don’t know exactly what I want to watch, I can spend hours scrolling through the choices on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Max, Shudder, the Criterion Channel, ESPN+, Screambox, BET+, Prime Video, Shout Factory, Freevee, AMC+, Disney-Minus, Nick at Night Terrors, and Cap’n Willie’s Streaming Emporium-o-rama before finally giving up and putting on a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. Streaming is GREAT if you already KNOW what you want to watch, but sometimes all you really want is to stop thinking and get in some comfort viewing. PlutoTV and RokuTV are built on this premise. It’s worked so well, in fact, that bigger streamers like Shudder, Prime Video, and Freevee have all added “channels” to their streaming model, and rumor has it that Disney+ is considering the same thing. Sure, it’s kind of weird that we abandoned cable for streaming only for us to want to turn streaming back into cable, but sometimes you’ve got to let something go before you realize how much it means to you.

The point is, MeTV Toons is another outlet for this kind of entertainment, and it’s promising us something that none of the other sources have offered, and by that I am of course referring to Peter Potamus.

But there are plenty of other things on that network that I would LOVE to see show up in rotation. KNOV 41.6 starts airing on Tuesday, I intend to park my TV on that channel and leave it there.

At least until Saturday night rolls around, anyway. Ain’t nothing gonna take me away from Svengoolie. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He is hoping against hope that MeTV Toons will find a way to show The Racoons, because he has to find out if that show is as weird as he remembers or if he just had a fever dream that lasted for much of his childhood.