Chris Morgan - The Nickelodeon 90s: Cartoons, Game Shows and a Whole Bunch of Slime

Someday you will die, but the 90s never will

In my early twenties, in a fit of anti-nostalgia, I threw out a bunch of my old stuff, especially school stuff like yearbooks. Right now, I bet you are super pumped that the book you bought about Nickelodeon is beginning with a banal and solipsistic personal anecdote. Im just illustrating the point that our relationship with the past, and with our past, can be complicated. I honestly dont miss any of those old yearbookswhat would I have done with them?but I have no qualms with the thorny concept of nostalgia like I did then. I also mentioned it because I dont want you to feel like this is going to be a book of rose-colored-glasses love for shows from the past. This is going to be fun, but it isnt going to be about me talking about how I loved a show when I was seven and therefore it is beautiful and pure and will never hurt me like the cruel, uncaring world we were born into. In fact, I dont intend to talk much about myself at all, except when necessary, because Im not as interesting a subject as Nickelodeon. Were all here because, in some way, shape, or form, Nickelodeon was a big part of our life, and we maintain some connection to it. Maybe its as pop culture devotees. Maybe its nostalgic. In the end, were all here because were all interested in the quintessential network of our childhood.

Back in 1977, when cable was a primitive beast, Warner Cable debuted 10 channels on QUBE, one of the earliest cable television systems. One of those channels was simply called C-3. All it did all day, from seven in the morning until nine at night, was run a TV show called Pinwheel . It was an educational program in the vein of Sesame Street or The Electric Company . People and puppets interacted and taught kids about sharing. There was a character named Ebenezer T. Squint, which was basically an Oscar the Grouch rip-off, right down to being green. After a couple years of this, Warner figured a rebrand, and an expansion, was in order.

On April 1, 1979, Nickelodeon was born. It was the first-ever TV network aimed at children and entirely for children. There werent ads at first, and Warner envisioned Nickelodeon as a loss leader. They wanted to be in the market of being a TV channel for children. It made total sense. Adults have busy lives. Children, especially in the summer, could plop themselves down in front of a TV for hours. They had a friend, and their parents had a babysitter. You hook those kids in as viewers, and someday when you debut ads you have a built-in audience. Then they grow up and they are watching other Warner networks because theyve developed an affinity for TV. You entertain kids, teach them some lessons, and in the end someday they grow up and spend their disposable income on the products they see ads for on television. I say this without cynicism, as somebody who was raised by television in some respects and regrets not a second of it.

Nickelodeon was chosen as a name over options like The Rainbow Network. The initial logo, along with the name, harkened back to the old-timey nickelodeon theaters. Its actually the only real connection anybody has to nickelodeons these days, given that weve all agreed to forget about Peter Bogdanovichs 1976 movie Nickelodeon starring Burt Reynolds and Tatum ONeal. They dubbed it The Young Peoples Satellite Network, which is a hilariously wordy and clunky tagline for a childrens network.

The networks first bit of indelible history came in 1981 when they began airing episodes of a Canadian sketch show for kids they had ported over. You may know it as You Cant Do That on Television . In addition to introducing us to Alanis Morissette years before she was writing tunes partially inspired by Dave Coulier, You Cant Do That on Television brought green slime into the childrens zeitgeist. When performers would say, I dont know, theyd get slimed. The slime proved so popular it became a fixture of Nickelodeon, especially on the Double Dare family of shows. The crew on that program nicknamed the slime gak, in reference to the street name for heroin. And from that bit of adult irreverence and drug slang, I got the name of this introduction.