What is Nickelodeon? Depending on your age, the answer might be old-heady ( Mr. The result is many of those sweet spots for many people over the years, and many blank spots, too. Nickelodeon has been around for more than 40 years, and it’s well aware that its most fervent viewers will eventually leave it. It’s not too different from the way albums released during one’s teenage years, or the starting quarterbacks who play during one’s early 20s, loom forever: apt and influential in an outsize way, enduring even in absentia. Instead, they’re shocked and horrified that I’ve never seen a full episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, or heard of Henry Danger. Talk to a number of my colleagues, however, and this era of Nickelodeon means little. I was in second grade at the time, right in a demographic sweet spot, which means this kind of thing was, and remains, absolute primo Nickelodeon to me, a key inclusion in my own mental time capsule. Years after an event, you can examine and interpret the memories like they’re rings on a tree. The Best Nickelodeon Character Bracket Our Favorite Characters Who Didn’t Make the Nickelodeon Bracket A Salute to Budnick, One of Nickelodeon’s Most Memorable Characters Its Orlando setting, with its polka-dot-and-zebra-print facade and its fountain of slime, was a Xanadu I dreamed of visiting, a place where I aspirationally mailed in so many failed sweepstakes entries. This whole random shebang was the very essence of the network I’d been tuning in to daily for years to watch shows like Double Dare and Hey Dude. And the presentation itself was unmistakably Nickelodeon, too: absurd yet earnest manufactured yet chaotic treating green slime and the fall of the Soviet Union with roughly equal gravitas. The time capsule, the balloons, the building’s giant splatter-shaped logo-they were all the color Pantone 021, that unmistakable Nickelodeon orange. There were Reebok Pump sneakers, and materials about the AIDS crisis and Operation Desert Storm, and a hat bearing Lawrence’s himbo catchphrase: Whoa! When O’Malley couldn’t figure out how to extricate the tape from a “Kid Cam” operated by a girl named Vicki, he just stuck the entire camcorder into the vault. There was also a Ren & Stimpy shirt commemorating the launch of original Nicktoons programming less than a year earlier, and a jar of Nickelodeon Gak, the slimy-putty sensation banned by some schools and described by The Washington Post as a “jiggly, gross, stretchy, slippery, icky, and strangely addictive substance smells like the butt end of a bad bottle of wine, feels like oysters, and comes in nine strikingly bright colors.” There was a copy of a TV Guide and a Michael Jackson CD. Inside was a Game Boy, a VHS tape of Home Alone, a skateboard, and a piece of the Berlin Wall. The capsule contained items that had been selected, O’Malley explained, by an official “Kids World Council” that sought to best represent its generation’s cultural and sociopolitical enthusiasms and concerns. “On this spot, in 50 years,” O’Malley, dressed in a loud fuchsia button-up, declared, “the kids of the future will be able to come here and visit the first world headquarters for kids, and find out what was important for kids today.” NBC Blossom star Joey Lawrence was beside him in a vest and ripped jeans, ready to help seal and bury a time capsule for the next half-century. On April 30, 1992, Nickelodeon GUTS emcee Mike O’Malley stood on a stage in front of the gaudy, glorious Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, Florida, speaking to a crowd of stoked children and their obliging parents. Throughout the week, we’ll be publishing essays, features, and interviews to get at the heart of what made Nick so dang fun-and now so nostalgic. To mark the anniversary, The Ringer is looking back at Nick’s best-ever characters and the legacy of the network as a whole. Introduced on August 11, 1991, under the brand of “Nicktoons,” Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy would quickly become hits and change the course of animation, television, and popular culture at large. Thirty years ago this week, a rising, but not-yet-ubiquitous kids network by the name of Nickelodeon launched its first original animated series.
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