Children's programming

Children's television series are television programs designed for and marketed to children, normally broadcast programming scheduled for broadcast during the morning and afternoon when children are awake. They can sometimes run during the early evening, allowing younger children to watch them after school. The purpose of the shows is mainly to entertain and sometimes to educate.

Children's television is nearly as old as television itself, with early examples including shows such as Play School, Captain Tugg, The Magic Roundabout, Howdy Doody, Ivor the Engine, Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Flower Pot Men, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. In the United States, early children's television was often a marketing branch of a larger corporate product, such as Disney, and it rarely contained any educational elements (for instance, The Magic Clown, a popular early children's program, was primarily an advertisement for Bonomo's Turkish taffy product). This practice continued, albeit in a much toned-down manner, through the 1980s in the United States, when the Federal Communications Commission prohibited tie-in advertising on broadcast television (it does not apply to cable, which is out of the reach of the FCC's content regulations). Though there is some debate on the intended audience, later non-educational children's television programs included the science fiction programmes of Irwin Allen (most notably Lost in Space), the fantasy series of Sid and Marty Krofft, the extensive cartoon empire of Hanna-Barbera and the numerous sitcoms that aired as part of TGIF in the 1990s, many of these programs fit a broader description of family-friendly television, targeting a broad demographic that includes adults without excluding children.

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