The heyday of Saturday-morning cartoons is long behind us. In the era of streaming television, where services like Netflix and Hulu have the means to surprise-drop whole seasons of animated shows and feature-length films on subscribers without warning and and where (nearly) all your favorite shows are accessible with the push of a button, popular animated television is no longer “appointment” television and instead is a matter of finding time to fit it in with the rest of one’s busy media schedule.
Here at Polygon, we love animation — especially the era of animation when one had to be in front of a television set at a particular time of the day on a particular day of the week in order to catch our favorite shows. We’ve put together a list of our favorite childhood cartoons and where you can watch them. For the sake of this list, a “Saturday-morning cartoon” is less a matter of whether it aired on the weekend or not, but rather a matter of a show that made any day it aired on feel like a Saturday for the duration of its run time.
Here are Polygon’s favorite Saturday-morning cartoons!
American Dragon: Jake Long made immediate waves in my San Gabriel Valley-based extracurricular group. Sure, he had dyed spiky hair (to indicate he was a cool Asian to white kids), and yeah, it was a mystical martial arts-styled show. But we loved him because Disney finally figured out that we loved Brenda Song, and decided it was time to branch out a little more. Like any good superhero show, Jake’s own arc is focused on his ability to hone his powers — practicing his ability to shape-shift into a dragon. —Nicole Clark
American Dragon: Jake Longis available to stream on Disney Plus.
If you were a PBS kid growing up in the ’90s or early
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