RBC Kids

Fox Kids is a TV Block on Fox

History
According to James B. Stewart's book DisneyWar, Fox Kids' history is intertwined with that of the syndicated children's program block The Disney Afternoon. DuckTales, the series which served as the launching pad for The Disney Afternoon, premiered in syndication in September 1987, airing on Fox's owned-and-operated stations as well as various Fox affiliates in many markets. This may have been due to the fact that The Walt Disney Company's chief operating officer at the time, Michael Eisner, and his then-Fox counterpart, Barry Diller, had worked together at ABC and at Paramount Pictures.

In 1988, Disney purchased independent television station KHJ-TV in Los Angeles, later changing its call letters to KCAL-TV. The station's new owners wanted DuckTales to be shown on KCAL, effectively taking the local television rights to the animated series away from Fox-owned KTTV. Furious at the breach of contract, Diller pulled DuckTales from all of Fox's other owned-and-operated stations in the fall of 1989. Diller also encouraged the network's affiliates to do the same, though most did not initially. As Disney went forward in developing The Disney Afternoon, Fox (whose schedule at the time was limited to prime time programming on Saturday and Sunday nights) began the process of launching its own children's programming lineup.

Fox Kids was launched on September 8, 1990, as the Fox Children's Network, a joint venture between the Fox Broadcasting Company and its affiliates. Originally headed by division president Margaret Loesch, its programming originally aired for 30 minutes per day on Monday through Fridays, and for 3 hours on Saturday mornings. In September 1991, the block was rebranded as the Fox Kids Network, with its programming expanding to 90 minutes on weekdays and 4 hours on Saturday mornings. The weekday editions of the block grew to 2½ hours the following year. Every November, from 1992 to 1998, Fox Kids aired "The Fox Kids T.V. Takeover," a special programming block on Thanksgiving Day that led into the network's NFL coverage during the final 4 years of its run.

By 1993, Fox Kids increased its schedule to 3 hours on Monday through Fridays, airing usually from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. local time (making Fox the first network to air programming in the 4:00 p.m. hour since 1986), and 4 hours on Saturdays from 8:00 a.m. to noon Eastern and Pacific Time (7:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Central and Mountain). Many stations split the weekday lineup programming into a one-hour block in the morning and a two-hour block in the afternoon (though this varied slightly in some markets), when network programs intertwined with syndicated children's lineups. Other stations aired all three hours combined in the afternoon due to their carriage of local morning newscasts; stations that aired such programming in this case had dropped children's programs acquired via the syndication market, moving them to other "independent" stations. Very few Fox stations aired all three hours of the weekday block in the morning.

When Fox Kids launched, virtually all of Fox's owned-and-operated stations and affiliates carried the block, with few (if any) declining to carry it. The first Fox station to drop the block was Miami affiliate WSVN, the network's first station to maintain a news-intensive format, in 1993 (the station had been a Fox affiliate since January 1989 as a result of NBC purchasing and moving its programming to longtime CBS affiliate WTVJ in a three-station ownership and affiliation swap in the Miami market).

The following year, in May 1994, Fox signed a multi-station affiliation agreement with New World Communications to switch that company's CBS, ABC and (in only one case) NBC affiliates to the network between September 1994, and July 1995 in order to improve its affiliate coverage in certain markets after the National Football League (NFL) awarded the network the contract to the National Football Conference television package. Also in the mean time,Fox Kids came to Eurowood,Europe and Australia. Many of the stations owned by New World (which later merged with Fox's then-parent company News Corporation in July 1996) declined to carry the block in order to air syndicated programs aimed at older audiences or local newscasts. In certain cities with an independent station, or beginning with the launches of those networks in January 1995, affiliates of UPN and The WB, Fox contracted the Fox Kids block to air on one of these stations if a Fox owned-and-operated station or affiliate chose not to carry it. In some cases, Fox Kids would be carried on the same station as one of its two competing children's blocks, The WB's Kids' WB and UPN's UPN Kids block (the latter of which was replaced in 1999 by Disney's One Too).

Between 1995 and early 1996, Fox acquired three former ABC-affiliated stations (WHBQ-TV/Memphis, KTVI/St. Louis and WGHP/High Point). Meanwhile, SF Broadcasting (a joint venture between Savoy Pictures and Fox) acquired three former NBC affiliates and one ABC affiliate during the summer of 1994 (which were later sold to Emmis Communications in 1996). Those stations all aired early evening local newscasts, but wanted to continue to run general entertainment syndicated programming to lead into their news programs instead of cartoons; these stations opted to run Fox Kids one hour early, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.

Much of the Fox Kids lineup's early programming was produced by Warner Bros. Animation. Two of Fox Kids' most popular programs, Animaniacs (following a heated dispute with Fox after it ceded the program's timeslot to carry Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which became one of the block's highest-rated programs when it debuted in 1993) and Batman: The Animated Series, moved to The WB when that network launched in January 1995. Both Animaniacs and Batman served as the linchpin of The WB's new children's block, Kids' WB, when it launched in September of that year (Tiny Toon Adventures, another early Fox Kids program that Warner Bros. produced and also aired on Kids' WB in reruns, had already ended its run).

In 1996, Saban Entertainment acquired a 50% ownership interest in Fox Kids, to form Fox Kids Worldwide Inc., later renamed Fox Family Worldwide. Some of Fox Kids' programming also aired on Fox Family Channel (later known as ABC Family, and now Freeform), after News Corporation and Saban acquired the network from International Family Entertainment in 1997.

In 1998, Fox bought out its affiliates' interest in Fox Kids as part of a deal to help pay for the network's expensive NFL package. The Fox Kids weekday block was reduced to two hours, and in an effort to help its affiliates comply with the recently implemented educational programming mandates defined by the Children's Television Act, reruns of former PBS series The Magic School Bus were added to the lineup. In 2000, affiliates were given the option of pushing the block up one hour to air from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. rather than 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. In the six or so markets where a Fox affiliate carried Fox Kids and carried an early evening newscast at 5:00 p.m. (such as St. Louis and New Orleans), the station was already running the block an hour early by 1996. Some affiliates (such as WLUK-TV) would even tape delay the block to air between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., one of the lowest-rated time periods on U.S. television (and when virtually all children 5 years of age and older are at school). A few only aired The Magic School Bus in this sort of graveyard slot as an act of malicious compliance with the Children's Television Act (the Federal Communications Commission requires programs meeting the educational needs of children to air between 7:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m., although few carry such programs in evening or weekday late morning/afternoon timeslots).

By 2001, members of the Fox affiliate board had felt they were on much more even footing with the "Big Three" networks and wanted to take back the time allocated to the Fox Kids programming blocks to air their own programming. Saturday mornings, long the only province of children's programming, had become a liability as the other networks started to extend their weekday morning news programs to weekends, and some of the local Fox stations wanted to start Saturday morning newscasts, owing to the cultural change of Saturday becoming the theoretical "sixth weekday".

Fox Kids, which had been the top-rated children's program block among the major networks since at least 1992, had been overtaken in the ratings by Kids' WB two years prior with the stronger animation block backed by Warner Bros. that included shows such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. ABC and UPN aired mostly comedy-based cartoons at this time, with the exception of live-action teen-oriented sitcoms Lizzie McGuire and Even Stevens (both originated on Disney Channel as part of what would be a gradual takeover of ABC's Saturday morning lineup by the cable channel's programming), while CBS aired preschool programming from Nick Jr., and NBC was airing teen-oriented sitcoms (later to be replaced the following year by E/I-compliant programming sourced from Discovery Kids), splintering the audience. The added factor of Nickelodeon's aggressive schedule that outrated all of the broadcast networks among children on Saturday mornings[16] left Fox Kids behind, and the programmers could find no way to catch up and stand out in this crowded field. Fox Family, despite good reviews, had a 35% audience decline, which turned out to be the reason why Fox Kids Worldwide and Fox Family Worldwide (along with Saban Entertainment) were both sold to The Walt Disney Company in 2001.

After Fox Family Worldwide was sold to The Walt Disney Company in July 2001, Fox Kids was placed under the oversight of Fox Television Entertainment and moved its programming operations to Fox's headquarters on the 20th Century Fox studio lot,at which time Fox discontinued the daytime children's programming, giving the time back to its affiliates rather than retaining the slot to run daytime programs aimed at adult viewers as NBC, ABC and CBS had long done. Fox put its children's programming block up for bidding, and 4Kids Entertainment, the producers of the English dub of Pokémon, purchased the remaining four-hour Saturday time period. Fox Kids maintained a Saturday morning-only schedule until September 7, 2002, a week before it gave the time to 4Kids Entertainment.

Fox Kids was replaced by the 4Kids Entertainment-produced FoxBox on September 14, 2002. FoxBox ran from that day on (that block was subsequently renamed to 4Kids TV three years later on 22 January 2005) until it ended on December 27, 2008, thus not only marking Fox's complete withdrawal from children's programming but also making way for a 3-hour paid programming block called Weekend Marketplace. It wasn't until 2014 that Fox would reverse course and return to children's programming with the launch of a E/I programming block called Xploration Station, which is produced by Steve Rotfeld Productions.

Then in 2016,Due to the success of all of the Classic networks,Fox announced that Fox Kids would come back as a stand alone channel. It will play shows of Fox Kids,Saban and 4Kids history.