What Makes a Cartoon Forgotten?

I'd say that stuff that was restricted to a few locations/minor stations, had very short lifespan or was broadcast in a dead/graveyard timeslot is more likely to fade into true obscurity. Subpar productions are also often avoided by the general public, a fact that favors contemporary productions and helps them on overshadowing the inferior ones, rendering the effort of keeping those out of obscurity exclusive to the few who cared enough to like or despise them.

A lot of recent "forgotten" cartoons are probably stuff that just plain sucked so no one really watched and it was quickly pulled. I'm talking Butt Ugly Martians and that kinda thing. It was on enough to be noticed as bad, but not long enough to be reviled. So it just ended unceremoniously, faded into obscurity, and now no one talks about it anymore as it slowly fades from our collective memory. The vast majority of forgotten stuff deserves to be forgotten, in my experience. That said, every now and then you find a hidden gem. I search for older 60s albums, and while a lot of the rarer stuff is interesting and there's maybe a song or two I really like, a lot of the obscure stuff got that way for a reason. But then again, there's always that one buried gem which makes it all worth it.

Some of these shows I don't know


thats the point

Forgotten means no one, literally no one at all, has no memory of it.

Here's my sort of way of seeing this:
What can make a piece of media forgotten can be put into various reasons:
1. Aired on a small channel/TV station: Some shows will just end up on such channels with not much of a chance of gaining a big audience due to the obscurity or limited reach of it. For example, if there was a show that only aired in like, 3 TV stations & they were in Idaho(FOX affiliate), Arkansas(independent station) & Tennessee(UPN affiliate) respectively, it's bound to be barely remembered, or really known about in general. Nicktoons, a premium cable channel, is used as sort of a dumping ground for Nick shows that start to not be considered profitable enough for the main network, a basic cable channel, & whatever originals they had tend to be short-lived, even if said show has been well received(see: Wolverine And the X-Men)
2. Little-to-no marketing/promos/adverts: Whoever's in charge of the channel it's airing on can decide to screw it over. One of the ways to do so is to not give it much, if any attention. There have been times where a show can just air on a channel with zero acknowledgement, such as with French-Canadian import Atomic Puppet when it aired on Disney XD, in which it wasn't even so much as mentioned in any commercial breaks on their website with the sole exception of the schedule listings.
3. Bad timeslots: Putting it in a timeslot where most people wouldn't tune in to watch the show can spell doom on a show. Say, there is this cool new cartoon you want. Guess what? It airs at like, 1:00 AM on a Friday morning, despite not containing anything that would've given it a TV-MA or even a TV-14 back in the '90s. Yeah, you could set your VCR to record it on that time every Friday, but unless you had the manual lying around, you would have no idea on how to make your VCR to do that & you probably didn't have any blank VHS tapes either. And that's just for basic TV & VCRs. With DVD-R's, cable & satellite TV, things become trickier. All of this combined with little-to-no advertising & you got yourself a true specimen of obscurity.
4. It's kinda mediocre: Let's be honest, for all the good & bad shows that people remember, ones that tend to just be mediocre or below average are often forgotten because they're... not all too fun to talk about & are not all too memorable. The stories are generic, the writing is cookie cutter, the animation is passible at best, the dialogue is just ok, it's just a mediocre, boring to watch cartoon that doesn't really do much. It just wastes a timeslot that could've gone to a better, more interesting show. Or...
5. It's a bit too niche: Despite their best efforts, sometimes a show fails & becomes forgotten because it was a bit too niche. Perhaps it was a cartoon whose humor was a bit too genius-ridden to be enjoyed by kids all that much, maybe it was too ahead of its time & touched issues that would be considered too risky back in those days, or it was too behind the times with the show being based on some trend that died a decade ago. Maybe it's based on some property that barely had an impact in any way. Or heck, the show was just too bizarre & absurd for most to really enjoy.
6. Overcompetitive market: Face it, for all the possible reasons something can become forgotten, one big reason can be because the market that something is in is just WAY too large for it to be half as popular as even something like Butt Ugly Martians(just let that thought sink in for a moment). Too many timeslots, VHSes & DVDs(the latter especially for direct-to-home-media productions) are being used by so many other shows & thus there's bound to be ones that slip through the cracks, falling into the worst of timeslots with no advertisement. Better hope that someone out there has preserved a few episodes out there so that it can get a small cult following years or decades later.

That sounds like something Cartoon Network did with Teen Titans Go! & I'm pretty sure they did do that at one point. Might be wrong, but I swear CN would just become nothing but constant TTG reruns.

There was a 2 week marathon of JUST paw patrol in Serbia back in 2021/2022, like man who needs that much paw patrol. At least kids can now tell how repetitive it is.