Submitted by: kirkland on Sunday August 29th, 2004 at 12:56 AM EST

Talking meatballs and bumbling sea explorers may have made the Cartoon Network's late-night cartoon lineup a monster hit among the young and hip. But some of its popularity is owed to a trendy corps of college students enlisted to market the network's "Adult Swim" cartoons on campuses nationwide.

They come from 30 campuses to the network's Atlanta headquarters each August for some cartoon-marketing training before the start of their fall-semester classes. These students are culled for being business-savvy but not the typical khaki-wearing business student.

Their job: Making cartoons cool for peers who likely had ignored them since elementary school and probably associated Cartoon Network with baby-sitting, not TV nights at the frat house.

Now, three years after they started, "Adult Swim" cartoons are often ranked No. 1 in their basic cable time period Saturdays through Thursdays, 11 p.m.-5 a.m. EDT among both adults aged 18-to-34 and men aged 18-to-24. Shows such as "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" about a talking meatball, milkshake, and box of fries regularly beat network late-night comedy shows in the ratings among young people.

Cartoon Network executives say the college marketing program, mostly made up of sponsored drinking parties at hot college bars, had a significant hand in creating buzz for the quirky, sometimes hilariously absurd, block of cartoons.

» Read full story @ ABCNews