This past weekend on the Saturday Morning Cartoon Show we watched Hey Arnold!
As I’m sure most of us are aware Nickelodeon was once the place to watch cool and unique cartoons on basic cable. Nicktoons, as they were and probably still are called, featured a wide variety of comedy shows that included the bizarre to the mundane…though mostly it was the bizarre. The originals ones of course were Doug, Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy. They were all pretty darn popular so it was inevitable that Nickelodeon would have to produce more shows. In 1996, five years after the original Nicktoons were aired, Hey Arnold! premiered. Despite its tendency to get a bit wacky, especially with gadgets and technology, Hey Arnold! was probably the most sane and down to earth animated show the channel had ever produced (And looking at the list of Nicktoons I’m not sure they’ve produced many sane cartoons since then either).
Arnold was originally a comic book character that was created in 1986 and has appeared in such publications as Simpsons Illustrated. He was created by Craig Bartlett who pitched his character as a cartoons series to Nickelodeon in 1993 but the series wouldn’t air properly until 1996. The show was a hit and lasted until 2004 although by then episodes had been extremely sporadic as the network had pretty much stopped giving a shit about the show or its fans by this point (SpongeBob Squarepants was in full force by then. Coincidence or something…sinister?). Which is weird because supposedly they were gearing up for this series to be a giant franchise with spin-off shows and movies. But that didn’t happen. And, all things considered, Hey Arnold!, was one of the best cartoons Nickelodeon ever produced. So how is it that the dream came crashing down.
More on Hey Arnold! after the jump.
