I’ve written about my beloved Cartoon Network and Toonami programs, and did a blog post about Disney, so why not go for the complete set? Hello everybody, and welcome to Hopped on Pop. Today, I’m turning the clock way back on Nickelodeon history: I’m going all the way back to the beginning in 1977, when it was just a humble children’s programming channel called Pinwheel:
You see, Pinwheel was the name of both the channel (until 1979 when it became Nickelodeon) and the edutainment program whose intro you see above. The channel started out based in Ohio, mostly airing Canadian programs like the one you see above, mostly edutainment as well. Once the ’80s rolled around, they added shows that are slightly more recognizable to Nick fans such as You Can’t Do That on TV! (love that Barth). That show became famous for being the first use of Slime on a Nickelodeon show (they would later rename it Nickelodeon Slime).
The real magic started to happen in the mid-’80s as Nickelodeon geared up for national syndication and the eventual broadcasting of Double Dare. I’ll let Marc Summers and co. take it from here (thanks to /u/Rikvidr on Reddit for connecting me with this video):
In case you decided not to watch that (you’re missing out; it’s all very eye-opening stuff about everything that went on at Nickelodeon Studios), the sea change happened when a bunch of young showrunners and network producers sat around and tried to take the channel in a new creative direction. That creative direction can be summed up as “let’s make a home for kids.” The underlying idea was that life is tough when you’re young: you have rules, your parents tell what to do and when to do it, you deal with school and homework and bullies…you get the point.
But more importantly, coinciding with that, we had what was at the time a relatively young board running things at Nickelodeon, doing all the crazy office-related things young people do (sitting on top of desk cabinets then, sitting on ergonomic bouncy balls now). The vice president at the time reported he was between 24 and 25 years old when he was directing You Can’t Do That on TV, the predecessor to Double Dare and All That; I’m around that age and still in school!
That composition of younger people lent itself to “younger” programming that actually understood its audience, because they had fresher ideas about how Nick should go about being a place for kids. They were more likely to reject the sort of programming that came before as “just how we do things” (in the video many of them talk about specific conventions they wanted to toss out the window, or about ways in which they tried to cause trouble), and they would break rules and knew how to get away with it. Perhaps it was just a different time then and thus simply a matter of the rights things coming together at the right time, or the network execs played dumb. Either way, Nick’s showrunners, staff, cast, and others were able to take a lot of risks doing stuff that probably wouldn’t fly today. But from those risks sprang innovation.
And what’s the result? Pure unadulterated fun. Because that’s what it is to get slimed or watch someone get slimed, to win prizes, or to simply enjoy Nicktoons. Just to backtrack to the Nineties nostalgia post for a bit, this is the point I was grasping at as why former ‘90s kids love that decade so much. It’s not exclusively about the branding and fuzzy feelings we get about our childhoods, even though that’s obviously a significant part. But Nickelodeon succeeded in its mission to feel like home base for kids. The culture wars felt like a whole other planet, because in Nick we had something that felt comfortable and familiar. We could relate to All That and Doug a lot better than grunge or old-style Saturday morning cartoons like He-Man; we were just a different generation with different needs, to which Nick handily responded (this is also why Urusei Yatsura was so important to Japanese young people in the 1980s).
But I digress. I’m not going to labor further to explain the practical reasons of how Nickelodeon was made to be different, so let’s continue with the consequences of being different in the ’90s. First of all, let’s look at the specific case of Doug. It totally reinvented the cartoon scene of the time by first of all creating the industry standard of one broadcast being two 11-minute episodes – even Adventure Time does this still.
Additionally, as explained in the video above, it was a “creator-driven” toon; rather than trying to sell G.I. Joe’s or Barbie dolls (in the words of one of the producers), Doug was a real story told from the heart. It meant something to kids and they could relate to it, because creator Jim Jinkins had gone through many of the things Doug went through on the show and those kids were or would soon also deal with those things. This show pitch philosophy is how we got Rugrats and many of the rest. That sort of relatable story and its sincerity is what creator-driven toons are all about; that’s how we got Nicktoons as they existed during that decade.
Even some of the kookier and sillier shows like CatDog and Rocko’s Modern Life – the latter being one of the rare and noteworthy permeations of the culture wars onto Nick – stuck to the philosophy of Nickelodeon being home base for kids. They weren’t relatable or from the heart (at least not most of the time or primarily), but I think the Nostalgia Critic put it best (in the context of Ren & Stimpy):
They were cartoons made of the sorts of things that appeal to the imaginations and sensibilities of those watching. I think that worked because creator-driven toons were obviously made by producers who could still get into that mindset, and may have even been fulfilling their own childhood dreams by bringing those shows to life. Nicktoons: For kids, and made as if by kids.
What made Nick’s live-action sitcoms and variety shows like All That, Clarissa Explains it All, Salute Your Shorts, and Kenan & Kel different was again about making entertainment that actually catered to the respective demographics and actually “gets” them rather than trying to talk down to them. Even Are You Afraid of the Dark? arguably also nets that older kid/teen demographic because it’s spooky and interesting, even if it didn’t actually scare the pants off the viewer (though I was five at the time and nearly crapped myself). More on all of this here. And then there were game shows like Figure It Out (or my personal favorite, Legend of the Hidden Temple), and programming blocks like Slime Time Live with their random contests:
What kid doesn’t want to win a free mountain bike or a trip to the Universal Studios: Islands of Adventure? And whether you win or lose, you get slimed or pied or have cereal thrown at you. Nothing could be better! To steal a line from those old Chuck E. Cheese’s commercials, the prizes and turning your parents’ rules upside down so that kids rule made it a great place (and time) to be a kid. At the very least, the thing that made these shows shine is they had personality.
From the ’80s until the mid-’00s, we had a channel that was willing to do something as crazy (for the time) as broadcasting cartoon and stop-motion shorts made and submitted by kids! Nowadays, even the team behind Avatar: The Legend of Korra has had to play it safe and even then suffered budget cuts and has been generally disfavored by Nick despite a significant following by now-grown former Nick kids. The general consensus on the Internet is that the channel’s golden age is over, and some say it’s worse than that. So where’d it all go wrong?
I sure don’t have an answer for that. I don’t think anyone does; most people at the Double Dare We Say It? panel (the video above) drew a blank on that question. A lot of people love to blame Spongebob, which is a shame because it really was an excellent show at one time:
I think “bad” Spongebob (i.e. after the first movie) is a symptom, not the cause. Nickelodeon’s former greatness came from having a lot of creative freedom, which was itself likely a result of feeling like nobody was really watching. The show producers and cast really felt like they could do what they wanted because they felt like there wasn’t much oversight, or at least that those who were supposed to be watching were too far away to do anything about it.
One panelist late in the video proposed one possibility of why that changed: national recognition meant that a lot of people were watching, which convinced Nickelodeon execs to play it safer with programming and how they ran their channel. But hey, if given the choice between playing it safer and stuff that – in the words of the former vice president of Nick – “you could go to jail for now,” I’d personally choose the former as my creative direction well into the unforeseeable future. I don’t know how much of what they did then was potentially against the law, but I doubt following the law and taking creative risks are mutually exclusive.
Anyway, there are probably other explanations. I still watched Nickelodeon fairly regularly until around 2004, and I did return sporadically for Avatar: The Last Airbender and the Legend of Korra, but by and large the channel is a bygone memory for me. My own falling out of love with Nick coincides with being drawn toward the more “hardcore” animation of Cartoon Network. My tastes were changing at just the time that Spongebob was beginning to edge out the otherwise more enduring (and often more subversive) hits like Rugrats/All Grown Up and Hey Arnold.
Around the time I discovered Cartoon Network and Toonami, incidentally, was also around the time Invader Zim was cancelled. I hungered for something edgier because of Zim and it seemed Nick was unable or maybe unwilling to sate my appetite. I learned years later that it had more to do with some controversy involving the show itself, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. In any event, Cartoon Network’s shows like Samurai Jack and Zoids had the sort of (relatively) more sophisticated storytelling and impressive animation styles that I was looking for.
I think that was inevitable though, because I know for a fact that most of my generation was undergoing essentially the same change towards the late ’90s/early ’00s. It started with either Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z, we all got into the Pokémon fad simultaneously (the games, the cards, the show, etc.), and then it was all downhill for Nick from there. Genndy Tartakovsky became Cartoon Network’s local powerhouse and the rest is history.
Anyway, unlike a few other topics I’ve covered, I don’t think Nick will ever be “back,” at least not in the form in which we all came to know and love it. Sure, we have #90swereallthat, but that Nickelodeon was very much a product of its time, and that time is gone. I know I’m ending on a bit of a downer note, but I can’t always have a solution. Sometimes things aren’t meant to “go back” or be “fixed.” What can I say? At least we can all be sure it was awesome while it lasted, and cherish those childhood memories.
Thanks for joining me today folks, hope you enjoyed it. See you next week!
Hopped on Pop 