I grew up with 90s Nickelodeon. Best time to be a kid, plus The Muppets were on there too.
Ren & Stimpy was great, my 2nd favorite show ever (The Muppet Show being my first of course
). I got to meet Billy West at my local Comic Con and got my Ren & Stimpy DVDs signed, what an honor
I even got to meet the guy who does the voice of Rocko of Rocko's Modern Life and got my season 1 DVD signed. Anyone know that the complete Rocko's Modern Life is coming to DVD this February
It's totally on my list. But yeah I also loved Angry Beavers and KaBlam, they were a couple of my favorite shows that I watched all the time. Kenan & Kel and All That were my opinion the best live action shows they had. Nick Arcade was pretty good, Legends of the Hidden Temple was great. I loved the talking head. lol Weinerville I LOVED, I want the DVDs when they come out. Boney cracked me up where he would tell a rotten story to the kids and make then cry and run away "NOW GETT OUTTA HERE! I'm Boney, I'm Boney, Leave Me Aloney!" lol The last good show Nickelodeon had in my opinion was Invader Zim. Huge Fan! As soon as the original DVDs were released, I bought them as soon as they came out, the bonus features disc and house was hard to get but I got it
The writing was amazing, it wasn't just the comedy but the strong sci-fi story writing that was involved. But what's so Ironic about Zim and Dib is they are basicly quite simular. They are both social outcasts and society doesn't except them so they want to do something courageous that would grant them acceptance. But what's interesting is their goals are ironicly against each other from the very begaining. I don't think Dib ever found out that Zim wasn't really a true invader of his Irkin species and Zim never took the time to see Dib's acceptance in society. There was never a proper ending to the series, just a Christmas special and a few unfinished episodes where the audio sound track was made but no animation. I noticed that there's this fan team that's animating Invader Zim episodes online but what's funny is that they got Andy Berman do revive the role of Dib, plus other fans created this Invader Zim Convention, DoomCon I think it's called and they got the original team to go there. Richard Horvitz, Andy Berman, Jhonen Vasquez, and the rest.
Plus Rocko's Modern Life's cast is doing live script reading shows in California.
I currently have a DVR so I'm getting a chance to watch some of these shows again. Especially Doug and Hey Arnold which I haven't seen in ages. lol Most of them are coming out with DVDs and iTunes but I'm still waiting for KaBlam, that to me was the hippest show to start off the Friday nights on Snick. Everyone here remember Snick right? Where Nickelodeon started showing the more risky cartoons and shows like Are You Afraid of The Dark and Roundhouse (I haven't seen much of that) And Clarissa Explains it All (I rarely seen this show too, though I've became a huge fan of Sabrina the Teenage Witch since it has Nick "Angry Beavers" Bakay as Salem. Plus I love Cats
)
Funny thing about Nickelodeon is every time there was an adult cartoon on the channel, they would become a huge hit then get canceled. Ren & Stimpy....well got taken over and John Kricfalusi got fired because he never meet his due dates and Nickelodeon thought that his psycho dark humor was a bad influence to children especially the banned episode "Man's Best Friend". Plus there's tons of stuff that got edited out of the original shows permanately. Even the DVD set Ren & Stimpy UNCUT isn't really uncut, stuff I probably won't get away with mentioning on this forum. lol Especially one of the episode names. lol Rocko got canceled because of advertisers having a hard time selling toys during the Rocko timeslot because they were attracting more College students then kids so Nick wanted Joe Murray to tone the show down and Joe stuck with his art and said to them he's sticking with the original agreement so they canceled the show. Apparently Nick was in fact searching for risky cartoons due to the success of Ren & Stimpy at the time. Angry Beavers ended because Nick didn't want to fund another season so The Angry Beavers teams recorded the audio sound track for the final episode. The audio is from a podcast Richard Horvitz was a part of plus it floats around YouTube. It's really funny but it was never made because the whole thing was a satirical mockery of Nickelodeon canceling the show. The Beavers discover they aren't real, they are fictional cartoon characters which is one of the guidelines in creating a show for Nick they couldn't break and that was the characters admitting they aren't real. So Norbert and Daggot start calling each other Nick and Richard (inside joke) and at the end they sadly say goodbye. Daggot asks Norbert since the show isn't on the air anymore and they aren't going to get paid for reruns would that mean they can get away with saying anything, Norb says yes, Daggot says "There's one thing that I've always wanted to tell you. SHUT UP!". This alone might not sound like a great joke but then again, it's an inside joke. Because there's an episode where Daggot told Norbert to Shut Up and a parent called up and complained. So Nickelodeon had to get Richard Horvitz to dub Daggot saying "Hush Up!" over the episode. lol And finally the ending of Invader Zim. Zim got canceled because of "The Bloody Gir Controvery" Jhonen Vasquez who's a dark cartoonist in his own right with his work of underground comix, he wanted an episode where Gir the Robot had blood coming out of his head and Nickelodeon said NO! It went back and forth, even a jam or jelly gag and they said no. They sent Nickelodeon a concept drawing and they said NO! So the Invader Zim team snuck the graphic design image they made into the last few episodes of the show in weird places like when ever there's a night sky, the Bloody Gir Image would be slightly visable, or if there's a worm hole or an explosion it would be a flash frame. But the most odvious was the Halloween episode, when one of the pipes come toward the screen like it usually does in the original opening, the image does flash on the screen. The Zim team got caught, and the show got canceled unfortunately. But I love that about these cartoonists on how they rebel against what was a threat to their artistic vision and creation. It's like the old saying, going down with your ship and as an artist I couldn't agree more. I'd probably would have pulled something like what the Angry Beavers team did myself. lol
Anyway sorry about the long post, I'm a HUGE classic Nickelodeon fan. My best friend is too, in fact that's how we became friends over a decade a go.