Why Are The Fox Kids Cartoons We Were Obsessed With As Kids Never Rerun Anymore?

Spider-Man The Animated Series, What’s With Andy?, Wunschpunsch, The Kids From Room 402, Pirate Jack… We have bad news for the people who remember these.

Imagine a Saturday morning. You woke up at the crack of dawn, you have a bowl of cereal in your hand, and the TV is right in front of you. Fox Kids is on. There is no chance you are watching anything else.

Where is that feeling now?

The cartoons are nowhere to be found. No reruns, no DVDs, no streaming platform. They are not being shown anywhere even for the sake of nostalgia. You are not the only one asking this question, and the answer is darker than you think.

Who Owns Fox Kids Now?

A brief history: Fox Kids changed hands over time and became Jetix. Jetix was a Disney brand. Today, most of that structure sits under the Disney XD umbrella and is effectively gathering dust inside Disney’s archive.

A few years ago, a group of fans who were angry about this started a petition on Change.org asking for shows like The Kids From Room 402 and Tutenstein to be rerun. Since Disney was not expected to listen to these demands, channels like Planet Çocuk and Kidz TV were also contacted.

The result? Only Kidz TV responded, but the answer they had was not exactly hopeful. The channel, which had previously aired Sailor Moon and Code Lyoko after intense viewer demand, made the following statement on its official Facebook page about the Fox Kids series: “The license rights have expired.”

So there is demand, there is an archive, but there is no broadcast.

Why Is Disney Letting This Archive Rot?

In recent years, Disney has absorbed massive brands such as LucasArts, Saban Entertainment, Fox Kids, and Marvel, becoming the undisputed monopoly of the media world. But there is an interesting pattern in many of these acquisitions: There is almost no respect for the history or institutional culture of the brand being bought.

This picture is actually part of one of the clearest trends of the 21st century: A handful of giant companies taking control of both content and access to that content. We do not only see this in the entertainment industry, but also in politics and public opinion shaping. For a disturbing example related to this subject, see The Full Ugliness Of The Cambridge Analytica Scandal >>

The Fox Kids archive is now in Disney’s hands, but it is neither being broadcast nor made available through DVD or digital platforms. While Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network occasionally bring their old productions back into the conversation, Disney’s channels have almost nothing from before 2010.

One explanation could be this: Those cartoons do not carry the same “brand identity” as Disney’s own productions. But there is also a more direct explanation: Even a single episode of the shows inherited from Fox Kids is far better than dozens of episodes of the content Disney produces today. And that does not serve Disney’s own interests.

But this problem is not unique to Disney. There is a much wider picture here, where giant companies decide which content lives and which content disappears through algorithms and data. If you are curious about that, see Big Data And AI May Be Quietly Killing Creativity >>

But Is Disney The Only One To Blame?

It would not be right to treat Fox or Cartoon Network as completely innocent either. These channels have had their own controversial content choices. But these brands never tried, at Disney’s scale, to systematically erase the history and value of the companies they acquired and replace them with their own policies.

Disney does this. And that is why Spider-Man The Animated Series is not being shown anywhere today. What’s With Andy? is gone. Pirate Jack is gone. Wunschpunsch is gone.

Maybe the saddest part about these cartoons not returning is this: We know exactly how good those shows were because we grew up with them. But today’s children do not know that. They have no reference point for comparison.

And most likely, that is exactly what is wanted.