Twenty-five years ago, Nickelodeon introduced three cartoons that ushered in a generation of animated greatness. This month, The Dot and Line has dedicated its feed to discussing exactly how they did that.
Dearest Reader,
Ahoy there, and welcome to Nicktoons Month! at The Dot and Line. For all of August, we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversaries of the three original Nicktoons that aired on Nickelodeon — Doug, Rugrats, and The Ren and Stimpy Show — as well as about a dozen other cartoons that followed their example in the years after. (Eds. note: John Kricfalusi, the creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show, was accused of underage sexual abuse on March 29, 2018.) -Since August 11, 1991, when Doug et al. premiered, incredibly, on the same day, these TV series have left agape and drooling the mouths of babes, held adolescents in the only embrace (metaphorical or not) they would tolerate, and informed the lives of adults around the world.
It’s time to show we give a shit. For the Nicktoons’ quarter life crisis, The Dot and Line will publish multiple stories a week on the Nickelodeon cartoons you grew up on. That means original art. It means Doug, Rugrats, and Ren and Stimpy, but it also means Hey Arnold!, Fairly OddParents, The Loud House, and beyond. (Eds. note: Chris Savino, the creator of The Loud House, was fired by Nickelodeon following accusations of sexual harassment on October 19, 2017.) It means poems. It means personal essays. It means interviews. It means lots of great GIFs. Like this one:
To kick it all off, we’d like to talk about why we’re doing this.
Early Nicktoons had a very good reason to be crazy.
Think about it. The Ren and Stimpy Show proudly featured mucus, vomit, exposed eyelids, open sores, feces, and desiccated, emaciated, emotionally and physically crushed visages of their characters on a kids’ channel every week. Such horrific genius does not run away with the nuclear codes without an enabler, and early Nickelodeon was the best of enablers. The channel’s branding—for years—hinged on a font shockingly reminiscent of Comic Sans, inset within a very literal splat. In one story we’re excited to share with you later this month, an insider responsible for many of Nickelodeon’s successful ’90s cartoons reveals just how fluid the creative process was in its infancy. The early cartoons, he says, “were done when they had no executive oversight in place.” The inmates ran the asylum.
It helped that those shows were actually good. Like, really good.
Do you remember the episode when Helga Pataki went to therapy on Hey Arnold!, stressing out all the while over whether people would judge her for it? Or the episode of Rugrats when Chuckie Finster swallowed a watermelon and thought a watermelon would grow inside of him — resulting in a dream sequence as trippy as a Sam Raimi movie? HOW WERE THESE KIDS SHOWS!?
Nickelodeon knows how to hook, line, and sink you.
From a marketing perspective, Nickelodeon’s almost always known what it’s doing with these shows. There’s a reason that in the Year of Our Trump 2016, Nick runs a late-night programming block and operate a full content hub entirely devoted to, we shit you not, “Those Original Nickelodeon ’90s Shows Trending on Social.” That may be the most cynically on-the-nose NYC #contentspeak on the planet, but who cares? They want you, post-millennials. They want you.
These toons still matter.
In a very tangible way, neoliberal-era Americans truly believe that we are the products of our cultural consumption. It’s why Hayao Miyazaki’s almost exclusively positive and humanistic films resonate with such a wide cross-section of audiences. It’s why our parents freaked out when we watched too much Gundam Wing and Dragonball Z and not enough PBS — if they let us watch TV at all. If you came of age in the United States (and abroad) at any point between 1985 and 2005, Nickelodeon factored into your childhood development, whether you realized it or not. Those lines and colors and orange splats meant something.
So get ready.
Nicktoons Month will be full of memories. There will be babies. There will be sponges. There will be monsters. There will be poems. There will be friends — some of whom have made appearances on The Dot and Line before.
But more than anything, there will be fun. We promise.
Sincerely,
Thanks for reading The Dot and Line, where we talk about animation of all kinds. Don’t forget to ❤ this article and follow us on Twitter and Facebook.