The ‘90s marked the golden days of Nickelodeon cartoons

When I reflect back on my child­hood, a pleas­ant mem­ory that comes to mind is watch­ing Nickelodeon car­toons back in the ‘90s.

In the past week, I’ve been in a nos­tal­gic mood. I’ve been watch­ing YouTube videos of Nickelodeon pro­mos and the com­mer­cials. The ones that would run just before “All That” came on. “All That” was the orig­i­nal Saturday Night Live for kids and, I believe one, of the great­est shows of the ’90s, along with “The Amanda Show”, “Rugrats”, “The Angry Beavers” and many more.

Who can for­get the catchy promo phrase “Nick, Nick, Nick, Nickelodeon!”? I sure can’t. Remember the green slime? Kenan and Kel and their orange soda? “Nick News with Linda Ellerbee” was my prime news source. Oh, and Melissa Joan Hart pre-“Sabrina the Teenage Witch” in “Clarissa Explains It All”.

Recently, a friend of mine and I were dis­cussing how great ‘90s Nickelodeon tele­vi­sion shows truly were. In our dis­cus­sion, we pon­dered why the tele­vi­sion shows and car­toons cur­rently aired today are not as appeal­ing or catchy as they were in the 1990s. One con­cept I’ve come to terms with is that many of the clas­sic “Nicktoons” had an edge to them.

One show in par­tic­u­lar that had edge along with humor and was absolutely a bit provoca­tive at times was “Ren and Stimpy”, which aired on the Nickelodeon net­work from 1991–1996. I won­der if it was that show that opened up the door for future shows to dis­play a bit of “toi­let” humor and sex­ual innu­en­dos. As a child watch­ing a show that was pri­mar­ily tar­geted for older audi­ences, I have to admit I was quite enter­tained by the deroga­tory, raunchy humor of the series.

The group of quirky ani­mals in “Rocko’s Modern Life” is another clas­sic. This is another great show embed­ded with sex­ual innu­en­dos and odd, sur­real moments. The writ­ers and pro­duc­ers of these shows are cer­tainly geniuses. No longer does Nickelodeon show­case ani­mated com­edy car­toons fea­tur­ing char­ac­ters with bizarre, witty qualities.

Then there was the car­toon that taught us about being caught up in a tough sit­u­a­tion and help­ing peo­ple with real-life issues; I’m talk­ing about “Hey Arnold!” which aired from 1996–2004. If you’re a ‘90s kid, you remem­ber in the show Helga who con­stantly bul­lied Arnold because she was secretly in love with him. This pro­ceeded to indi­cate that when some­one referred to you as “foot­ball head”, they had a crush on you.

The tele­vi­sion shows that are cur­rently on Nickelodeon will never com­pare to those of the ‘90s. What hap­pened to the golden days of Nickelodeon? Today’s “Danny Phantom” could never replace yesterday’s “Rocket Power.”

I sup­pose the rea­son for ceas­ing won­der­ful shows, includ­ing the well known “Double Dare 2000” on Nickelodeon GAS, could be due the fact that Nickelodeon Studios closed down on April 30, 2005. This sig­naled the end of what I could con­sider an “awe­some” era of game shows, chil­dren sit­coms and cartoons.

In ref­er­ence to “Boomerang”, the spin­off chan­nel from Cartoon Network that fea­tured many clas­sic car­toon shows, I hope Nickelodeon will one day come out with a sim­i­lar net­work fea­tur­ing Nickelodeon car­toons of the ‘90s. I’d sure tune in to that.