The Death of Nickelodeon
It all started with that gay sponge and his starfish lover. It all ended with a idiot kid and his fairy godparents. Nickelodeon had finished its transformation, it had become a real kids network, one that espoused silliness, pre-adolescent interests, sports and cool strange animals. Gone were the days of 'Pete and Pete'. Gone were the days of 'Clarissa Explains it All'. Gone was 'Harriet the Spy' and 'Salute Your Shorts'. 'Figure it Out', 'Double Dare', 'Legends of the Hidden Temple' relegated to Nikcelodeon Gas. "All That" served as the last vestiges of a bygone era, where Nickelodeon spanned a gray area between kids and teens. The century was turning, and Nickelodeon turned with it. It had its power-lineup, a '27 Yankees batting order of 'CatDog', 'Rocket Power', "Hey Arnold', 'Fairly OddParents' and the Babe Ruthian 'Spongebob'. Among the all-stars, lesser known role players and veterans like 'Rocko's Modern Life', 'According to Ginger' and 'Ahhhh, Real Monsters' came up and down, like September call-ups filling the roster, stealing bases and entertaining audience looking for more edge, more sex and more gross-ness. Nickelodeon was on top, and they even catered to the highest level of childhood delights, dumping goo on unsuspecting and absolutely suspecting, if not awaiting, people, with Slime Time Live. Sure, the remnants of Doug Funnie, Finster and the 'Are You Scared of the Dark' gang was gone, but a new, funnier, fresher generation was here. It was here to stay. Cartoon Network was dead, killed by the combination of worse programming and a lack of a flamboyant Sponge, a football-shaped teen and a pair of beavers.
As the decade turned over to the teens, Nickelodeon is battered, a shell of its former slimy self. The Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios has seen visotors drop by 35% since 2002, the height of Nick's powers, while general attendance to the Universal Studios has been increased by 27% in that same timeframe. 'Wild Thornberry's', gone and replaced by 'Danny Phantom.' 'Invader Zim' gone, replaced by 'My Life as a Teenage Robot'. 'Hey Arnold' gone, replaced by 'Jimmy Neutron' which in turn is gone, replaced by some cataclysm of suck 'Mr. Meaty'. What happened? Why had the network that stood out, the network that won the race to draw in kids, done to itself? How could a network that once put out stuff that obviously made the kid viewers dumber but still enthrall them to the point that their shows were getting ratings primetime cable shows weren't getting fall out?
It is a sad feeling to get. Looking at a list of all the Nicktoon shows that were once so prominently a part of the daily life of millions, smart, edgy funny shows, just gone, with the waste lying in a dump. There was something beautiful about 'Spongebob' (easily the most reprehensible show on the network in its Glory Years, so reprehensible I would never allow my kids to watch it), there was something majestic about Mr. Krabs. Everyone wanted a Krabby Patty, I'm pretty sure no one wants "Chum" eaten on the I can only assume captivating show "Fanboy and Chum Chum". Maybe I am wrong, maybe kids are watching, however, there will never be another time where a kids network is as important, as meaningful. This was past the era of scripted live-action shows, the ones that got the name Amanda Bynes into the lexicon, the ones that remain Nick Cannon's only work of consequence. There was nothing better, nothing more relatable than Hey Arnold! (still the most truly meaningful and legitimate nicktoon post-Doug). It was the story of a boy, his secret love, his secret lover, his black fried, and every single ethnicity and background mixing in that melting pot of Sunset Arms. Who can forget Pheobe and Rhonda, Gerald and Stinky, Harold and Sid, Mr. Kokoshka and Dino Spimoni, the uber-cool Iggy and of course the bastardized brilliance of the unibrowed Helga Pataki. They were relatable, they were real. They were just animated people. It all changed, though, with The Fairly Oddparents, the last true great Nicktoon, and it did for one single reason: Nickelodeon thought kids wanted crazy.
Up until the Fairly Oddparents, everything about Nickelodeon was real, was human. Sure, they had shows where Baby's talked and Cats were siamese-ly conjoined to Dogs, and Beavers lived in woods with the ability to sing. Sure, there was a whole society of bipedal sea creatures, headed by a squirrel that lived in a reverse fishbowl. However, all of these shows were essentially based on humans. All of these shows, whether featuring human man or cold-blooded creature, created an infrastructural system, a seperate environment eerily similar to the human world. Spongebob worked an everyman's job, had a difficult boss, had a depressed terrorist (Plankton) in his neighborhood, and fell in love (whether that token of effection was Sandy or that bastion of hilarity Patrick is debatable). CatDog, too had a house, had jobs and lives. In Angry Beavers (probably the two most underrated characters in Nickelodeon history, just becuase they combined the most alpha-dog mentality into what can only described as a homosexual relationship setting), those two shared "marital" strife. In rugrats, there was an alternate reality created, sure, but that reality emulated much of the real world, with real-life problems. There were no special powers granted, no special storylines that exhibited some character far away from modern-life. Everything represented some aspect of human life. Sure, animals were fighting in 'the Wild Thornberry's' but the fight always centered around some all-too-human problem.
Again, that all changed with one Timmy and his Special Godparents.
Timmy was ordinary, as was his living situation, but aided by the fact that his 'parents' were 'Fairies" that could grant wishes, making it a wholly moronic premise altogether, made the reality of the situation dissapear. This wasn't a kid, he wasn't facing normal kid problems. There were episodes that centered around saving Christmas and Cupid. No kid cared about those things. Those things aren't real. What was real was helping a depressed Plankton have F-U-N. Fairly Oddparents budded into 'Chalkzone' and 'Jimmy Neutron' all shows that centered around 21st Century premises, magic and technology, whether it be a kid with magical chalk or one with an Einstein-ian brain. What kid cared about the daliances of a boy genius with an IQ that exceeded most adults? What kid cared about some subversive chalk-world? The game was over, evolution had taken its toll. Down-to-earth relatable storylines, in Nickelodeon's mind, died off with the 1900s. They evidently and certainly wrongly ascertained that kids needed to be stimulated with what is magic: Teen-robots, kids that were phantoms (I assume that is what "Danny Phantom" does in his time). They assumed that kids needed to watch kids save the world. What they forgot was that kids don't care about the world. Kids only wanted to watch kids save themselves. Gone was the humor, however silly and irreverent it may be. Thrust into the spotlight was problems and built-up heroes to solve it.
Nickelodeon vastly underrated the ability of a kid to comprehend that the world was not an inherently magical place, that there were problems that needed to be solved, and couldn't be solved with the help of robotic children or genius-pubescents. Even in the strangest of nicktoon premises, 'Ahhh, Real Monsters', a show that did end before the Glory Days, there was a government set up in the monster world. It really is brilliant to see how those old Nickelodeon shows did, in each their own way, connect to the real world. Again, nothing stressed this point more than Hey Arnold, where Arnold was the real magician, waving sense and compassion, instead of a wand, fixing problems like the mid-life crisis of a hilariously spoofed Sinatra, in Dino Spimoni, instead of building a force-field to protect the earth from a meteor (something that even real geniuses can't do). Nickelodeon was underratedly funny (the duo of Patrick and Squidwerd rank right below George and Kramer for me), but even more underratedly meaningful. The world's problems certainly have changed, but the best Nickelodeon could do was to allow kids a glance into the Iraq War by showing the Fairly Godparents trying to beat a Saddam-Schwarzennegar lovechild in Jorgen Von Strangle and his nazi-esque pixies (these are all legitimate comparisons written by critics of the show, not cultivated figments of my mind) by leading an army of fairies. The world still has problems lide environmental disregard and stealing, problems that were addressed in more real, more truthful ways in shows that still managed to be far funnier.
Nickelodeon will probably never rise to the levels it once was, unless the entire cycle starts over, and the neo-'Adventures of Pete and Pete' come about (which I'm fine with - I would dig a neo-Michelle Trachtenberg) followed by the neo-Rugrats and neo-Doug (Again, I would dig some neo-Patty Mayonnaisse). However, Nickelodeon seems to far gone, as once you release a program called Mr. Meaty, all bets are off. Nickelodeon will never have the cultish sublimity of the early nineties (remember Wild and Crazy Kids), but will also never have the singular popularity and importance of the period from 1998-2002. Nickelodeon was an integral part of each child's upbringing, and did more, in an insanely humorous and subtle way, to instill values and the ability to solve actual ethereal problems than it will ever be given credit for. I hope to God that Nickelodeon is no longer an important part of every child's upbringing. Just as Blues Clues killed Nick Jr by teaching every kid that there were magic pails and that a band of jolly kids would point out the answers to lifes problems, the new Nickelodeon killed itself by teaching kids that there are children out there that can build airplanes and get all of their wishes granted. Danny Phantom is not waling through that door when a problem arises in a kids life. Sadly, neither is that gay Sponge, his cyncical squid neighbor and his idiot starfish friend. Somehow, we need those three people more than ever.
