In 1988, a stop motion animator named Craig Bartlett created (in-between working on the "Penny" shorts featured on CBS’s Pee-wee’s Playhouse) a little two-minute video about a football-headed boy with an overactive imagination. It was produced by his wife, Lisa Groening, sibling of Matt Groening, and inspiration for the character of Lisa Simpson. The short, titled Arnold Escapes from Church, would help him get a job as a story editor and episode director of Nickelodeon’s very first animated television show, Rugrats. He would produce two more shorts (one of which aired on Sesame Street), multiple hand drawn comic strips for the Simpsons Illustrated magazine, a ten-minute pilot attached to Nickelodeon’s first theatrical release Harriet the Spy, and finally, a 5-season, 101-episode Nicktoon, all about this football-headed, over-imaginative Arnold.
Hey Arnold! was my favorite TV show as a kid. I remember first getting cable, in the residence I still refer to as “the big blue house” in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. I remember waking up as early as 6:30 in the morning, to the consternation of my parents, to watch Animaniacs on WB, before flipping over to Nick to catch the first Hey Arnold! of the day. It was 1996, I was five years old, and I must have been watching Hey Arnold!’s first season. I recall thinking how different Hey Arnold! was from the other kid shows on in the mid-90s, like Rugrats, Doug, or Ren & Stimpy. All of those shows were excellent in their own way, and I still remember all three fondly (well, maybe not Ren & Stimpy, it made me uncomfortable and a little scared, and uncharacteristically I put up no fight when my parents forbade me from watching it). Hey Arnold! was more low-key, less wacky, and more mature than those other shows. It had a mellow, jazzy soundtrack, (comparatively) realistic characters and situations, and it didn’t condescend the way those other three shows did. Of course, at the age of 5 or 6, I couldn’t articulate these reasons, I just knew that Hey Arnold! made me happier.
Kids don’t need to be condescended to, or bombarded with colorful chaos to be entertained, and most children can appreciate intellectual maturity when they see it, a fact I have become acutely aware of as a child care provider. While this lesson seems to have been lost in respect to more recent programming on Nickelodeon, which has more and more opted instead for CG spin-offs of movie franchises or overdone live-action sitcoms (Back to the Barnyard, and iCarly, I’m looking at you), those early years of the network’s animation studio were rife with intelligent, mature, and even occasionally subversive programming. Hey Arnold! was the epitome of that respect for a young audience (possibly with the help of some adult-oriented Groening influences…). Those years aren’t quite gone yet, and one only need look at the educational programming airing as part of the Nick Jr. block to see brilliant TV for kids. But overall, the genius of shows like Hey Arnold!, is a thing of the past at Nickelodeon, and is therefore worth revisiting, as a way to capture some nostalgia from childhood, and celebrate some truly rare artistry.
A few months ago, some friends and I got drunk on moonshine and pulled up episode 106, “Heat/Snow” on Netflix. We watched it, reminisced like drunken teenagers do, and passed out. But when I woke up nursing a hangover that next morning, the experience of watching Hey Arnold! stuck in my head. A couple weeks later, a furor erupted on the internet over (false, hopefully) reports that Nickelodeon would remake the show, among other 90’s classics for modern audiences. Shortly after, I finally renewed my long-dormant Netflix subscription, and added Hey Arnold!''s first season to my queue. And now we’re here.
What I’ll be doing: Writing reflective essay-reviews about every single episode of Hey Arnold!. These will focus heavily on the writing, voice-acting, animation, and soundtracks of individual episodes, as well as character development through the series, and running themes and jokes. These won’t be universal praise – there are more than a couple duds in Hey Arnold!’s run, and I’ll call them out, and cite what went wrong. I’ll do my best to tie the success of each episode to the creative minds behind it – writers, directors, animators, and actors. And I’ll also be having fun.
How I’ll do it: After posting this introductory note, I’ll post a follow up that deals with the three claymation shorts and the pilot episode that was shown before screenings of Harriet the Spy. From there, I'll try to post at least one essay a week. I intend on making each essay two episodes long, which will usually work out to four 11-minute segments a week. Each of these segments will be reviewed individually, since the creative team’s composition will vary. Right now, I think I’ll watch each segment at least twice all the way through before posting a write-up. If my method of watching/reviewing changes during the process, I’ll let you guys know.
What you should do: Read, comment, and follow along with the show. I’ll be more than willing to directly discuss my thoughts, and debate over the merits of Toran Caudell’s voice work compared to Spencer Klein’s. Seasons 1-2, and 4-5 are available for streaming on Netflix, and the claymation shorts and pilot are available on Youtube. I’m not entirely sure why season 3 isn’t available, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
So, keep an eye out for write-ups of the claymation shorts and the pilot. I think it’ll be fun, and I hope you read along.
J
