>>112387875Though I missed out on the first few years because our cable provider didn't even get Cartoon Network until 1996, I would disagree.
One, the idea of doing a 24/7 tv channel in and of itself was still a very new thing at the time, much less one for cartoons.
Two, it basically consolidated a lot of the big MGM, Warner, Hanna-Barbera, etc. properties all in one place.
You had contemporary cartoons that previously were only available to the viewer once a week on Saturday mornings now airing daily (in an era where they were slowly being phased out by broadcast networks). You had an archive of these sorts of Saturday morning cartoons from decades past also in rotation. There were also the perennial classics: Tom and Jerry, the '69 Scooby Doo, The Flintstones.
Hell, with the latter, there was a whole promo campaign about rebroadcasting the first season of The Flintstones during primetime hours, which apparently had been excluded from syndication packages for decades.
That's what Cartoon Network was really good at, curating their archive of existing material and making reruns exciting, repackaging reruns of older shorts but with a more interesting presentation that appealed to nostalgic adult audiences, but continued to keep these entities alive for a new generation of viewers.
Stuff like Toonheads and Late Night Black and White, as well as the Tex Avery and Bob Clampett shows, highlighted the formative animations of the golden age and the people who made them possible. The Moxy Show, which existed to rerun stuff from the Turner library, had the whole gimmick of him being the janitor at Cartoon Network and idolizing all the cartoon greats he had to clean up after. Same deal with Cartoon Planet. Space Ghost took it a step further and used old HB animation cells to create surreal, modernist comedy (which the original William Street shows would later do). Hell, repackaging reruns was an integral part of later blocks like Toonami and Adult Swim, too.
