The Beginning

Saturday Anime was the Sci-Fi Channel's, now renamed Syfy, two-hour long programing block which aired popular and obscure Japanese animated feature length films dubbed into English by prominent but now defunct North American anime distributors. Next to Cartoon Network's "Toonami," Saturday Anime was by far one of basic cable's longest running anime programming blocks, running for most of the 1990s. As I remember, Saturday Anime began at 9:00 am every Saturday morning before "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and was primarily aimed at young people just entering their teen years. The tagline was, "This ain't no swim in the kiddy pool!" 

"Cloud"

As we're talking about basic cable after all, the movies were often censored for language, violence and sexual content. If the movie aired didn't fill the two hour block, then Sci-Fi Channel would air a segment from the classic film "Robot Carnival" ,usually the segment known as "Cloud," to fill in the rest of the time. Some movies like Dominion Tank Police and IRIA: Zeiram the Animation, which exceeded Sci-Fi Channel's two hour time frame, would be broken up into segments with one segment airing one Saturday morning and the other airing the next. Even an epic series like Record of Lodoss War was only allowed three episodes, with the others never airing at all! During one week in the summer, around July or August, Sci-Fi Channel would air two of their anime movies every night beginning at 8:00pm with an encore beginning at 11:00pm. One of these events was hosted by the "Live Action Anime Girl", Apollo Smile who would often reveal facts about the movie being aired that night. 

Apollo Smile

Saturday Anime ran until the early 2000s, being relegated to the exceptionally early morning time slot of 2:00am, when it finally came to an end. Years later, in 2007, Sci-Fi Channel brought anime back into its programming schedule with "Ani-Monday," making it the successor of Saturday Anime. 

"Ani-Monday"