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Since everyone else is talking about their favorite T.V. channels and shows from the past, I figured why not talk about mine. This may be a little more obscure than the other articles as the older audience may not know much about Fox Family, but I figured why not. Anyway, I used Wikipedia and IMDB to fill in some of the gaps that my feeble memory couldn't help me with.

Back in August of 1998 I was just about ready to start another year of Elementary school. My mood was like any normal student who was just finishing their summer. I was simply wondering where exactly all those weeks went. Well as I was wondering something caught my attention, it was an advertisement for the Family Channel. It was no longer the Family Channel anymore, but was now the Fox Family Channel. As later promos stated, Fox had married the Family Channel.

Prior to this, the Family Channel had a somewhat interesting history. If you lived through the 80s, which I didn't, or know some pop culture history then you'll probably remember the Televangelists. That is what the Family Channel originally was a Christian network called CBN Cable that focused on showing televangelists and the 700 Club. It later changed its lineup to include reruns of game shows and old T.V. shows, but it became too popular to keep the CBN name. It became the Family Channel and focused on the family. I myself really didn't know much about the channel before the ownership changed. To me it was always that channel I skipped over before turning on Nickelodeon or Disney, Cartoon Network was never broadcasted by my cable provider. The only thing I can remember about it was some game show a friend turned on involving basketball or something.

Back to the topic on hand, I was ecstatic to see in the promo a short of Donkey Kong. As it turned out, Fox Family would be showing Donkey Kong Country the T.V. show! Being a fan of the DKC games, I was hopeful for the T.V. show. Unfortunately I wouldn't see it until the Sunday which of course was the Sunday before school started. The show wasn't too great, but that's not going to be the focus of the article, Fox Family is.

What was so great about Fox Family to a kid at the time? Well it showed hours of cartoons. To be exact, it showed 8 hours of cartoons! Most of the cartoons weren't poorly made shows though; they were from the Fox Kids library. Most notably Bobby’s World and Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? I think they may have showed such shows as X-men and Batman too. They also had Pee Wee's Playhouse! Yeah, they were the first network since the incident to air the series. This more or less introduced me to the show.

The network didn't rely on old cartoons for their entire lineup though, they also had some original cartoons and live actions shows. Most were made in Canada, but I didn't really know or care. Some of the most prominent in my memory are the following:

Kids from Room 402- This show followed the misadventures of a class of Elementary school students. They usually had normal problems, but the children's attitudes made the comedy. Here's the intro.

Big Wolf on Campus - A weird sci-fi show about a teenage werewolf. The main character would go through living as a teenager who was the cliché jock. Except of course that he was a werewolf and had to fight threw various monsters. He befriended the school nerd who was in to that stuff to help him with the knowledge to fight the strange villains.

Angela Anaconda - Do you remember Kablaam? Do you remember that short lived segment Angela Anaconda? It featured black and white characters in a colored world? Well anyway that's basically Angela Anaconda. This show was about a young girl going to school and dealing with being a kid. Of course it had its own sense of humor. The show was later broadcast on Nickelodeon for a short time.

S Club 7 - More or less the station's flagship title. It was about a British band that ended up in the states. This show was sort of similar to the Monkeys as the band would usually sing an original song at the end. The only time they didn't was when they went back in time to the 70s and sang Dancing Queen. Anyway, the show's plot more or less changed every episode. It did have some continuity though. The band eventually broke up after the show ended.

Anyway, there were more shows on the network, but I either can't remember them or they aren't too important. They also had some great family movies on at night including one I can vividly remember, National Lampoon: Men in White. Another, Au Pair, is still broadcast.

So what went wrong with the network? Well the new audience was extremely different from the old Family Channel audience, which meant a loss of viewers. The network also had way too many employees. It tried to fill in the gap by getting the rights to air older family programs and creating one of their own, Saving Grace, but it didn't help the network. It was eventually sold to ABC. The network did worse under them, but that's a whole other story. They more or less eliminated all the cartoons and children's programs which were moved to Toon Disney. The purchase is also how they got the rights to Fox Kids shows.

So why isn't Fox Family remembered too often today? Well one reason may be that it simply wasn't memorable. It only aired for 5 years unlike Nick or Cartoon Network which are still on till this day. Another may be simply that the average intelligent blogger was too old for Fox Family. Whatever the reason, Fox Family was great and it is a shame that the new channel, ABC Family, has more or less gone way downhill.