Saturday morning preview specials were aired on television annually to present previews of each network's fall lineup of Saturday-morning cartoon children's programming. Similar to the model for their new prime time counterpart shows, television networks in the United States and Canada would film a preview special for the fall season. These would often air as part of the regular network schedule or be made available to their affiliates for airing at any time, especially to fill timeslots that contained programming canceled months before.

The Saturday morning previews were generally aired on the network in prime-time, usually the Friday night before the new schedule began. Specials were staggered between differing time slots and days in order to allow each network's show to stand out.

The preview specials are usually hosted by stars of one or more of the network's popular series and feature an array of special guests, with the continuity between each program preview being fictionalized with a small plot or theme to keep viewers interested. The previews were for new and returning series, with each preview featuring the show's opening credits and a scene from that program. They also unveiled a network's new imaging for Saturday morning programming.

The specials often included previews for prime-time programming as well. According to Mark Evanier, who wrote several Saturday morning preview specials, this was because the network's prime-time department had to clear the time slot for the special, and convincing them to do so was difficult without agreeing to promote one of their shows in the special.

Hanna-Barbera Productions created a half-hour syndicated film called "Here Comes a Star" (1964) with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera playing themselves promoting its newest series, The Magilla Gorilla Show. The program, hosted by You Bet Your Life announcer George Fenneman, offered an inside look at the animation studio and a peek at the upcoming feature, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. The first network preview special was The World of Secret Squirrel and Atom Ant (1965), a 60-minute special airing on NBC in primetime to celebrate Hanna-Barbera's first animated series made for Saturday morning television.

CBS, which had only irregularly carried preview specials, aired its last in 1985. The other two major networks continued near-annually. NBC's last was in 1991, as by 1992, the network had abandoned cartoons in favor of its teen sitcom block TNBC. ABC continued an annual Saturday preview special as part of its TGIF block through the 1990s, finally ending the practice in 1999, TGIF's last year in its original form.

4Kids Entertainment aired preview specials sporadically for its two blocks, FoxBox and The CW4Kids. Neither Fox Kids nor Kids' WB continued the practice as an annual tradition, though both had aired one-off preview specials in the 1990s.

For a number of Fox stations that affiliated or became owned by the network in the mid-1990s mainly because of the NFL on Fox, the preview specials were the only time those stations carried any mention of Fox Kids or 4Kids at all because of their preference for weekday and weekend local news, as the blocks actually aired on alternate stations in their markets owned by other parties (and as part of the Fox primetime schedule, those Fox stations could not refuse or offer the preview special to an alternate station), and neither the Fox station or children's block carrying stations promoted the arrangement with advertising during preview specials (unless they were co-owned stations). This often left the Fox station in the awkward position of promoting shows they did not carry or had any interest in, and the other station having no ability to use the preview special for their own promotional purposes.