Blast from the past- The "ill-off-school" slot on Nickelodeon

As alluded to last week, being part of the generation that grew up with widespread access to cable and satellite TV had a profound effect on people of my age. Mostly, it made us a collectively fatter, frightened of the great outdoors and nature and helped, somewhat inadvertently and wholly regrettably, make being a nerd cool.

But were all of these new kids TV shows filling up the hundreds of new broadcasting hours worth the aforementioned consequences? No, is the simple answer to that, not one little bit. But that’s not to say the 90s marked a dearth in quality of kids TV, just the opportunity of playing innocently with your contemporaries everyday is something you really don’t appreciate until a decade or so after it finishes.

In fact, the 90s might even be a watershed for animation at children anyway. But first, a history lesson.

As anyone with the slightest knowledge of TV knows, the 1970s was the highlight of kids TV (in Britain at least) with shows like Bagpuss, The Clangers (basically anything by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin) and the wealth of American imports from Warner Bros and the like; all of which remain as entertaining today as they were then. Or I expect they were then, being only 21 means my personal experiences of the 70s were rather limited.

However, for my money, in terms of animated kids TV, the 90s was something of a high-water mark. Sure there was some real dross (Fat Dog Mendoza springs immediately to mind there) but there were some stone-cold classics in the mix.

Mention Nickelodeon cartoons and immediately you’ll most likely get two responses; the Rugrats or Hey! Arnold and rightly so; both were well written, identifiable at the respective ages, aimed at children but not patronising and easy to follow. They’re only downside being they were both American and so continued the Americanisation of the English language in Britain.

However, a ‘Blast from the Past’ article shouldn’t focus on TV shows everyone knows and remembers so let us take a wander down a quieter road and get closer acquainted with something a little more niche.

Aside from the unusual head shapes in Hey! Arnold and the weird hair colours and faces of the adults in the Rugrats (and possibly Phil and Lil as twins are scary as), there was no real what-the-hell aspect to either of these TV shows. All kids’ cartoons should have an element of abstract oddness as said concept very rarely works in other TV aimed at older audiences, as evidenced by the career of Noel Fielding on TV.

So, on the basis for sheer balls-out, what-the-fuckery, this blog post will, somewhat belatedly, look at two animations that occupied the coveted “off school ill” slots on late 90s Nickelodeon; Arthur and Doug.

We’ll start with Arthur, now into its 15^th series (with another two in the pipeline), a show that, in retrospect, was incredibly crammed full of moral messages. It is made by PBS in America, mind.

For starters, Arthur’s extended circle of friends contains an individual from every conceivable socio-economic background and a large number of the problems Arthur and his chums encounter are often solved by a trip to the library or opening a book in some manner. Elsewhere, Arthur’s parents work from home as a chef and an accountant, respectively. Thus, we have arguments for the benefits of multi-culturalism, reading/publicly funded libraries, the nuclear family set up and running one’s own business (in the form of his father).

Elsewhere, Arthur also doles out advice on real-life social issues too from the death of pets and how to deal with dyslexia to advice on coping with loved ones with cancer, Aspergers and Alzheimer’s which is also nice and cheery.

Somehow, as well as throwing in moral crusades and advice on social issues into a kids’ TV show, there is even a steady stream of pop culture references made that keeps the at-home-looking-after-the-kids crowd mildly interested. How Arthur managed to fit in any of his shenanigans when all these other themes were cramping his style is a mystery.

Thankfully, all these other, more adult elements were delivered using an anthropomorphic aardvark, (although if you knew he was an aardvark at the age of 9 you were a super-genius) with lots of fun being had so we were all but putty for the messages to seep in, especially after that intensely catchy, reggae-style theme tune. There is probably a link between the amounts of Arthur a person my age watched in their youth and how left-leaning they are now.

At the other end of the covert influencing of young minds scale we have Doug a show which, from my memory at least, was notable for two things.

Firstly, the obsession Doug and his friend Skeeter had with the Lipps Inc. tune ‘Funkytown’ and going to a theme park called ‘Funkytown’ that presumably played ‘Funkytown’ over the PA 24/7 in a distinctly unfunky dystopic version of the early 1980s. Chilling.

Secondly, that the show either had the worst budget in the history of animation and could therefore only afford one box of crayons a series or, the writer had never seen human beings before and so had no idea at all what they looked like. I say this as nobody in Doug had the skin colour of a real human being, besides Doug, his family and his love interest, Patti Mayonnaise. Yes, that was really her name. Incidentally, ensure SafeSearch is on before Google image searching “Doug”. I really mean that; I’ve seen things, terrible things.

Anyway, yeah, skin colour. The aforementioned Skeeter was an aqua-green colour, nemesis Roger was also green, and neighbour Buddy was purple, as were twins Al and Moo.

Perhaps kids’ TV of today is equally as strange and bizarre and full of underlying socio-political messages but, quite frankly, I don’t care as things were always better in one’s own day (and that’s a fact) and, furthermore, I’m not going to watch hour upon hour of CBBC as its hard to sell that as “research” to those close to me.