RIP: Kids WB!

Bye Bye Batman, Tom & Jerry, and The Legion of Super Heroes. Hello more Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and crap like that.

Variety is reporting that The CW will shut down Kids’ WB! at the end of this season and turn Saturday mornings over to 4Kids Entertainment (which has taken over Fox’s Saturday morning kids block for the past six years). According to Variety:

Under the five-year pact, 4Kids will program five hours of children’s programming between 7 a.m. and noon on Saturdays on the CW starting September 2008. 4Kids will handle all national commercial advertising, and will share in ad revenue with the CW.

The CW is the last broadcast network to air original kids programming produced in-house. With one less outlet for homegrown animated shows, this announcement is another blow to the local SoCal production community.

On the plus side, it’s one less outlet for the perennial spin-offs of Scooby Doo. Zoinks!