90's Nick, Where Kids Rule!

I like my butt. I especially like sitting on it. And that's exactly what Nickelodeon made me do to it in the 90s. So sit right down and take a trip through the weirdest blacktop spin LSD roller coaster of a television lineup in history, because that was Nick in the 90s. Don't get me wrong, there were some turds in that laced punch bowl of a "children's entertainment network," but it was all good. Trust me. If Nick Reboot is any guide, not every show was as great as those we remember, but still, it was damn good punch, even with the turds. And if it wasn't all great, that's what Cartoon Network was for! (But seriously, only as a last resort... don't bring that evil in here.) 

I recently heard someone criticizing shows like iCarly for all the perversity, and it got me thinking, "when wasn't Nickelodeon perverse?" You're talking about a network that got its start with dumping green slime onto unsuspecting kids who said "I don't know." This is the network that has brought us the surreal, sick depravity of Ren and Stimpy and Invader Zim, the gross-out splashes of Double Dare and You Can't Do That On Television, the trippy postmodernist double-entendres of Rocko's Modern Life and Adventures of Pete and Pete, the subversive goofyness of Salute Your Shorts and All That, all that bizarre claymation, the existence of puppets of any kind, and those other assorted surreal clips, shorts, and bumpers where giant orange balls leveled cities and boys turned inside out. Plus, a whole lot of Marc Summers working through his germaphobia... and perhaps truly enjoying the process of putting kid contestants through the rigors of "Harvey's Wild Oats" on national television and still not letting them go home with the Garfield telephone.  

My childhood Nickelodeon fanboy obsession probably began when I used to watch Eureka's Castle (don't ask, I just remember the castle), Maya the Bee, and Fraggle Rock... but I was so young then my memory of some of those shows bleeds into the commercial breaks, so if you ask me, Fraggle Rock involved the board game "Knock Out" and for some reason I remember seeing a traffic light with about 10 multicolored lights on it inside David the Gnome. Also, the less said about Weinerville the better, especially in these times (I'd need substances and maybe therapy to deal with it), although I have to admire Nickelodeon for giving what I can only assume was a homeless street performer ("puppeteer?") they found outside the studio his own kids' show. Did the gamble pay off? Well... all I remember is the Halloween one where he asked what the kid in the zombie costume was eating and the kid says, "a hand." Some of it seems to seep up from my subconscious to this day, but some of it may just be a fever dream. I did watch a lot of Pete and Pete and Wild and Crazy Kids in the heat of the summer, so I was quite literally in a fever dream half the time. 

Speaking of Wild and Crazy Kids, that show used to get me downright dizzy, and not just for the opening montage. You couldn't watch any second of that show where all these kids would be outdoors doing fun competitions and not turn your head, see a bright beautiful sunny day outside waiting for you, and then turn back to the kids having fun on TV and go... "haha... they got messy!" I distinctly remember watching one in the middle of the blazing hot August sun one day from the couch where the dads had to place their foreheads on the end of a baseball bat and spin in circles until they were dizzy, and then try to play baseball with their kids or something while in the state of delirium. And I distinctly remember the exact combination of my sedentary dehydration, the overstimulation of my eyes, the under-utilization of my brain, the dry heat in the middle of the day, and the repetitive motion of the guys spinning around dizzy, actually making me want to blow CHUNKS. Not to mention it was fun watching the kid from Roseanne get stuck to the Velcro wall and left to die in one very strange cross-promo. 

This is to say nothing about Salute Your Shorts, which actually had the nerve to acknowledge FARTS (celebrated in song no less, and at the start of every episode!), along with the titular underwear hoisted from the mast... and yeah, also mullet punks named Budnick and fatties named Donkeylips who were regular gassholes... plus Zeke the Plumber and Ugg's Nose giving you trauma to this day... and everything else that allegedly happens at summer camps (and no, for the last time, I Am Not Sponge... although that would make a good title for my autobiography). But we are only getting warmed up, because then there was Nick Arcade, which looked like actual freakin' magic as far as I was concerned back then (and not just a kid in front of a green screen) when they somehow managed to actually transport kids INTO video games! Don't even get me started on which Game Wizzard I wanted to go up against in the Video Zone (of course it was Scorchia... give me some good ole clean FEM-DOM any day! Come on baby light my FIRE!). But no, I have no desire to "control Mikey"... just saying. 

"Dun-dun-dun, da-dun dun dun, da-dun dun dun, da-DUN!" (Slowly watching the host lose his mind to that tune day after day MADE the show!) 

URRRRRPLet's see... what else? Seriously Rocko and Pete and Pete are deserving of their own posts. There is just too much to cover. Legends of the Hidden Temple? Own post. GUTS? Own post. What Would You Do? Own post. Nicktoons? Own post. I mean, let's focus on the Arcana of Nickelodeon, the dark underbelly of the orange beast... and by that I mean, the only show that probably was conjuring demons, Are You Afraid of the Dark? To which the reply by me was usually "yesss..." if it was past my bedtime, and especially YES if it was the CLOWN ONE, the ALIEN ONE, the MIRROR ONE, or the "I'm cold..." one! (Fun fact that "only 90s kids know TM" but the Harry Potter actually got his start in Are You Afraid of the Dork. Yeah. He played the dork. And if you don't know what I'm talking about then you probably didn't watch the show.) 

But let's really have a debate about just what slime tastes like for the millionth time. You know they probably changed the recipe often because sometimes it was practically water and other times it was like green cottage cheese. Now I have no idea what Nick Slime tastes like (some say corn starch), but being a booger-eating boy, I manufactured my own slime and I gotta tell ya, it probably had nothing on me. One thing they had that I didn't though were pools, canons, fountains, and explosive taps full of the stuff, literally gushing, splashing, and raining the green ooze from the fucking sky down upon children. THIS was glorious schadenfreude that still gives me a buzz. Nothing beats watching kids get hit with slime, especially GIRLS (and really annoying boys)... so yeah, basically the entire cast of You Can't Do That On Television. This was Nickelodeon Studios... and it was (probably) better than Disneyland. I mean, you can have snot rain down upon you at Nickelodeon studios. You can't even SAY the WORD "fart" in the Lion King. So there!

But let's just discuss KaBlam! for a second. If Nickelodeon in general was a fever dream, this show was its own fever dream inside of that one, containing the stop-motion bumbling stupor-heroes Action League Now, which was just Robot Chicken before Seth Green decided to blow up his childhood... Life With Loopy, which was an acid trip of cardboard cutouts about a kid who somehow manages to be even more insane than his actually insane sister just by being so blase about what clearly is a problem, Promethius and Bob ("an alien's attempts to educate a caveman"), which just proves there never has been intelligent life on Earth, and a whole other universe of whatever bizarre shit they could cram into that animated comic book of theirs. But perhaps more awesome than anything was just getting to see Henry and June open the show with some rather on-point dance moves... well, not as awesome as watching Henry get hit in every episode! Boys are great as punching bags, girls... just sayin. Have at it. (Jk!) 

Damn, I have not even scratched the surface. I mean, All That had a freakin' Giant CORN for some reason they toted around through the sky attached to airplanes and we got to watch Mary Beth and her very real love-affair for the thing blossom over several seasons of SNickL (see what I did there?). She gave us endless "vital information" words of wisdom we've all benefitted from ("All's fair in love and war, all's smelly in a closet full of baboons"), while Keenan Thomson just loved chocolate and bathtub French lessons. Both of these sagas were truly a better love story than Twilight. Clarissa was not always clueless and the Pink Ranger was, well... The Pink Ranger... but the undying love I had for Harriet the Spy and Alex Mack... no human tongue could tell. Heck my love for Larisa Oleynik continued into Third Rock from the Sun and beyond (hell, even now)... and when it comes to Harriet the Spy (Michelle Trachtenberg), what can I say? She was my first love, my soulmate, my flame... I'm sorry, it's just that I always liked girls. Especially powerful ones who could beat me in a fight (I'd see to that) and would definitely beat me in a battle of wits (...I'm gonna go cry now). 

Anyway, speaking of GIRLS... it certainly seems these days Nickelodeon has gone to the teenage girls, but at one time, it was known as the television network for kids that kids actually liked to watch... all the dirt, guts, butts, and grass stains included. If the 80's showed us a Nick that was more about kids watching the world of adults through the travels of a pinball, in shows like Lights Camera Action and Mr. Wizard, mixed in with kiddy sock-puppet shows, the 90's showed us a Nick of slimy, grimy, kooky craziness where kids ruled and adults could take a hike. And you know what? Both still sound awesome. And it wasn't so cut out like that, because the 80's had the early beginnings of what would be the 90's in You Can't Do That on Television, and the 90's had lingering traits of the 80's in shows like Nick News... Oh damn, Nick News could clear a playroom faster than a ... ahhh who am I kidding? I even watched Nick News! 

The only period where Nick could have been classed as "not perverse" (at least not overtly) would be the late 80's and early 90's when all those foreign cartoons were filling up the morning slots, like the Lit'l Bits, Maya the Bee, and David the Gnome, and they were great too. At one time, Nick had something for everyone: the kiddies who liked the soft-lined musical sweetening of the foreign cartoons and puppetry weirdness, the older kids who liked the subversive guts-filled, surreal, anti-PC "kid's rule" middle-finger at the yawn-fest of "social graces," and the teens who were just into looking cool and getting their way past their clueless parents (Clarissa Explains it All). Girls were always tough and smart, boys were always goofy and slick, little brothers were dorks, big brothers were buttheads, and sisters were just evil and proud of it.

It was an age where the silly gelled pretty easy with the crazy, the absurd, the downright nasty, and even (at times) the educational, but it was always perverse... because a half hour before the archeology fun of Legends of the Hidden Temple, it'd be Wild and Crazy Kids, where kids were sure to be competing to fill a bucket with slime after sitting in a pool of it with a sponge strapped to their butts. 

Speaking of which, I think mine's gone numb.