Cartoon Network’s Website Was Deleted. That Should Scare You All.
Reading Time: 5 minutesWarner Bros. Discovery is deleting some of our most beloved movies and TV shows—and some may be gone forever., David Zaslav: The Warner Bros. Discovery CEO’s crimes against culture have gone too far.
The most remarkable feat that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president David Zaslav has accomplished this decade may be his rapid transformation from relatively little-known network executive to name-brand villain of the culture. For this, he can thank such disastrous high-profile decisions as stonewalling the striking writers and actors, crudely stereotyping his properties’ audiences, and tanking much-hyped movies that were all but ready for release—all of which reflected poorly and played out rather publicly.
Lest you be inclined to defend all this as just a hard-nosed boss making tough-but-fair decisions, consider that Zaslav continues to be very, very bad at making money and managing a media conglomerate—just ask the investors who depressed WBD’s stock value to a near-all-time-low valuation of $6.62 per share on Monday. Or look to the company’s loss of its long-held NBA broadcast rights to Amazon, the $9 billion write-down of its other TV assets, and its nonstop waves of steep layoffs. Or even its wildly unpopular move to shutter Cartoon Network’s iconic 26-year-old website, scrubbing an almost historical archive of clips, show episodes, and digital games in order to direct young viewers to sign up for the clunky streaming platform known these days as ‘Max.’
Nuking a kids’ network’s digital presence is hardly a sin on par with, say, killing Cartoon Network altogether, as was rumored to have occurred last month. Even though Zaslav didn’t go that far, it wasn’t unreasonable for so many to assume he had. Since April 2022, when he finalized the megamerger that fused his Discovery Communications juggernaut with WarnerMedia, Zaslav has repeatedly invited mass criticism for actively degrading and torching so many of the treasured creations that made his media empire such a highly valued asset.
First came the sudden cancellations of already-completed films like Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme, then the secretive removal of dozens of HBO originals (e.g., Westworld, An American Pickle) from the HBO Max streaming service—which subsequently received an unholy intrusion of selected titles from Discovery+, the streamer that shuttered just so that HBO Max could just become Max.
Max kept shedding beloved entries from its historic catalog, including large chunks of Sesame Street and Looney Tunes. This continued into 2023 with the erasure of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim classics such as Dexter’s Laboratory and Space Ghost Coast to Coast, along other Max Originals like Game Theory With Bomani Jones, which was soon removed altogether. Later that same year, Zaslav’s mismanagement of the treasured Turner Classic Movies channel spurred Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson to basically stage an intervention.
In fairness, many (though not all) Max Originals are either available on other services, on physical media, or via video on demand. Some other shows from WBD have been licensed to Netflix. Still, in light of CartoonNetwork.com’s demise, it’s worth keeping in mind something key about David Zaslav, who hasn’t made an effective turnaround in valuation or revenue after two straight years of nonstop cuts across all his properties, extending into last month’s CNN layoffs.
It’s worth taking stock of how many of your favorite shows, networks, catalogs, and films belong to Warner Bros. Discovery, because it weighs a ton. In addition to every entertainment behemoth already mentioned, the company once known as WarnerMedia brought TNT, the CW, and DC Comics to the WBD marriage. In turn, Discovery imported its namesake channel, Animal Planet, TLC, Food Network, HGTV, GolfTV, and the Oprah Winfrey Network, among many other names.
Unless you grew up without any electronic screens, you’ve likely seen at least a couple of shows and flicks from any or all of those brands. You probably have a meaningful attachment to those works and thus a vested interest in making sure they remain available so you can share those experiences with your friends and loved ones. If you’re of the nerdier variety, you view all this media as an invaluable resource of important cultural markers. Where would cinema and TV of all kinds—comic, prestige, edutainment, reality, talk, news—be without these rich treasures, and how much would our collective consciousness have suffered in their absence?
Zaslav should understand this better than anyone. He’s had a front-row seat to shifts in media consumption since the fall of communism. He also ushered some of those major changes into being through his role in helping to launch CNBC and MSNBC. He should know the importance of preservation better than anyone, having gauged early on how rapidly physical media was subsuming into pixelated microscreens, and how urgent it was to ensure his brands retain their recognition, familiarity, and quality in the midst of that transition. What better exhibition of that than a rich, thorough catalog made readily available to consumers via a streaming platform?
But this man, to put it gently, couldn’t give a flying fuck. Because, much like Paramount’s decimation of the online MTV and Comedy Central archives, Zaslav’s own butchering of the Cartoon Network website is a cheap ploy engineered to force viewers into signing up for his own increasingly enshittified streamer—and at a time when the internet as we’ve broadly recognized it is rapidly crumbling.
In recent years, we’ve seen once inescapable media disappear from the internet at a frightening rate, whether it’s general-interest blogs and websites closing down (or worse, turning into A.I. slop factories), popular old browser games losing their adaptability and functionality, pre-Spotify music streamers tanking their servers, social networks collapsing into the void along with all their memories, hyperlinks degrading in functionality, or copyright-flexible artworks from an older internet age getting hit with suits by rights-holders and then being pulled from distribution.
The Internet Archive can only do so much to preserve all of this, especially when the nonprofit is already staving off endless, expensive lawsuits (and making steep cuts to its own selections while at it). The great irony is that modern life and culture’s hapless dependence on a functional internet—CrowdStrike, anyone?—makes it imperative that vast troves of history be copied in some form onto cyberspace; otherwise, it might as well not exist. This goes for a classic movie missing from any digital service or a publication of yore finding a new life and preservation online.
To seal off great works of art behind increasingly paywalled, pricey, and ad-choked streamers is to rob an already overwhelmed public of any actual choice in creative exploration. It’s further maddening when you never know that a given show, movie, or special will even remain on that service. If it does indeed go away, you may not even be able to find it through a physical copy or via some weird black market of cast-offs. No wonder the production company behind Adult Swim’s The Venture Bros. is currently offering a DVD sale of the complete series while the show itself remains in limbo between its recent Max removal and its upcoming Netflix entrance.
This is no way to treat some of our greatest cultural legacies—but it’s inevitably the result when we trust them with the David Zaslavs of the world. We should look at streaming-service erasure as an issue on par with that of greater internet fragmentation and the worsening digital amnesia that results.
It’s only going to get worse, especially as creators rightfully concerned about A.I. apps training on their hard work elect to take their stuff off the digital commons to protect their artistic contributions from cannibalization by the power-hungry networks attempting to supplant them. The data centers lose their higher-quality building blocks, but keep churning along in order to make something more artificial and just plain terrible. David Zaslav will stand by, burning more cash and trashing more titles, only to keep failing, and making our culture—as well as our history—all the poorer for it.
Ref: slate
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