"Saturday-morning cartoon" is a colloquial term for the original animated series and live-action programming that was typically scheduled on Saturday and Sunday mornings in the United States on the "Big Three" television networks. The genre was a tradition from broadly the mid-1960s to mid-2010s. Over time, its popularity declined, due to changing cultural norms, increased competition from formats available at all times, and heavier media regulations. In the last years of the genre's existence, Saturday-morning and Sunday-morning cartoons were primarily created and aired on major networks to meet "educational and informational" (E/I) requirements. Minor television networks, in addition to the non-commercial PBS in some markets, continued to air animated programming on Saturday and Sunday while partially meeting those mandates.

In the United States, the generally accepted times for these and other children's programs to air on Saturday mornings were from 8:00 a.m. to approximately 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time Zone. Until the late 1970s, American networks also had a schedule of children's programming on Sunday mornings, though most programs at this time were repeats of Saturday-morning shows that were already out of production. In some markets, some shows were pre-empted in favour of syndicated or other types of local programming.

After the Paramount Decree broke up block booking practices, in the 1950s, animation production shifted from theatrical shorts to television animation. Jason Mittel analyzes the argues that by the end of the 1960s, this shift to television also unintentionally shifted popular understandings of animation. With the rise of the Saturday morning cartoon block, Mittel observes that animation transformed from "a mass-market genre with so-called 'kidult' appeal and became marginalized into the kid-only Saturday morning periphery."

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Saturday-morning time slot would feature a great deal of series appropriate for children, although most of these were reruns of animated series originally broadcast in prime time and adventure series made in the 1950s, as well as telecasts of older cartoons made for movie theaters. Later in the decade, the slot would be dominated by superhero and action cartoon series, influenced by the success of Space Ghost. These were heavily criticized by parents for their violence.

By 1972, most action programming had been removed from the Saturday-morning slot, following pressure from parents' lobbying groups such as the Action for Children's Television (ACT). These groups voiced concerns about the presentation of commercialism, violence, anti-social attitudes and stereotypes in Saturday-morning cartoons. By the 1970s, these groups exercised enough influence, especially with the U.S. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), that the television networks felt compelled to impose more stringent content rules for the animation houses. In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission was openly considering a ban on all advertising during television programming targeting preschoolers, and severe restrictions on other children's program advertising, both of which would have effectively killed off the format; the commission ultimately dropped the proposal.

The networks were encouraged to create educational spots that endeavored to use animation or live-action for enriching content, including the Schoolhouse Rock! series on ABC which became a fondly-remembered television classic, while CBS had the long-running children's oriented news series, In the News. In Canada concurrently, the National Film Board of Canada produced a roughly equivalent domestic series called Canada Vignettes, although they were intended to be aired throughout the usual broadcast day. With the 1970s came a wave of animated versions of popular live-action prime time series as well, mainly with the voices of the original casts, such as Star Trek: The Animated Series, as well as imitations of the highly successful Scooby-Doo combining teen characters and talking animals with supernatural mystery stories.

By 1982, under President Ronald Reagan, the FCC had loosened programming and advertising regulations, leading to the era of "half-hour toy commercials", starting with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and continuing with such series as The Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. These were heavily criticized by ACT, but were nevertheless successful. As well, several more lighthearted series appeared, popularized by Hanna-Barbera's The Smurfs and Jim Henson's Muppet Babies. These included series based on popular video games, such as Saturday Supercade.

Beginning in the late 1980s, networks commissioned new series based on legacy properties that would appeal to nostalgia and to a whole family audience, including ABC's reviving the Scooby-Doo franchise with A Pup Named Scooby-Doo and commissioning The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from The Walt Disney Company, both series being major successes. The move was largely driven by the adoption of the people meter, which ABC believed that younger children could not operate and which ABC blamed for the network's poor viewership with its younger-skewing lineup featuring the likes of The Little Clowns of Happytown. CBS likewise focused its content on established properties, bringing the comic strip Garfield (which had produced a number of successful specials already) to Saturday morning with what would become the long-running Garfield and Friends and pairing the show with live-action children's series hosted by fictional characters originally created for adult audiences, Pee-wee Herman (Pee-Wee's Playhouse) and Ernest P. Worrell (Hey Vern, It's Ernest!).