Why did Nickelodeon murder itself?

Ah, Nickelodeon... one of the iconic fantasies of the 1990s and one of the heroes of the animation renaissance is falling flat. They had their groundbreaking Nicktoons such as Rugrats, the creative cartoon shorts that would appear as bonus on their VHS and DVDs and the classic bumpers with the orange logo. It seems that Nickelodeon got everything they knew to stand out from the competition. There was a charm on everything Nickelodeon-related, ranging from cartoons, game shows, sitcoms, merchandising, advertising and brand presentation. Nickelodeon used to be the king of cartoons. However, over the past decades, the brand has been steadily declining. Why is this? Let's go back to time...

In the late 70s, Nickelodeon used to be called Pinwheel. It was sold to Warner Bros. and rechristened as Nickelodeon in 1979. That was an experimental period when management was seeing what would work and what would NOT and what kids would like to see. You Can't Do That on Television was Nickelodeon's breakout success. It was a sketch comedy and variety show that was made on Canada, but Nickelodeon acquired the intellectual property. It was fun, creative and coined the iconic slime that would be forever associated with the network. Moving to the early 1980s, Nickelodeon unveiled their new logo: the orange splat with their brand written in the balloon font. They also created new jingles and IDs to give it a fresh look, to greatest success. Nickelodeon was dominating as the number one children's network and didn't stop experimenting, with the addition of Nick at Nite, Nick Jr. and the Kids' Choice Awards. In 1986, Warner Bros. decided to sell Nickelodeon to MTV Networks which would later become Viacom.

Nickelodeon continued its creative streak in the early 1990s with more original programming: Hey Dude!, Salute Your Shorts, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Clarissa Explains it All and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. There was so many to pick from and it all focused on kids who finally had a network to call their own. Yet, Nickelodeon's most groundbreaking feat they ever achieved was their own original animated programming: Nicktoons. The network originally used to be against in-house animation production, believing it to be too expensive. Their thoughts were not unfounded as their first Nicktoons called Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show were as expensive as Hanna-Barbera's The Pirates of Dark Water and Warner Bros.' Steven Spielberg-produced cartoons such as Tiny Toon Adventures, but all three of them paid off. They all unlocked a new era for Nick which grew over the time: Rocko's Modern Life, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, KaBlam!, Hey Arnold!, The Angry Beavers, The Wild Thornberrys, CatDog, SpongeBob Squarepants, As Told by Ginger, Chalkzone, Invader Zim, The Fairly Oddparents, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, My Life as a Teenage Robot, Danny Phantom, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Catscratch, El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, The Mighty B!... Nickelodeon was ruling the animation landscape in the 90s and the first half of the 2000s and was also pushing foward with their live-action comedies and game shows such as All That!, The Amanda Show, Kenan & Kel, Legends of the Hidden Temple, GUTS, Double Dare, Drake & Josh and iCarly. They were the powerhouse of the 90s and first half of 2000s and created a legacy of entertainment that stood out from everything else. They had variety, talent, magic, creativity, momentum. All these wonderful aspects that built the Nickelodeon empire and, in the turn of the millenium, everything started to fall apart. So, when and why did their brand stop being relevant???

Nickelodeon may have embraced aspects of hip-hop and that era's visual tastes in order to make their brand resonate with the audiences, but they were making the 90s more memorable on their own by innovating, creating unique shows and showcasing artists with new ideas. While none of that was flawless, it was still an iconic era full of creativity and innovation that embodied Walt Disney and the Golden Age animators and artists' spirits. But the biggest and worst problem is that Nickelodeon had imprisoned themselves in the comfort zone with no way out, with the formats that made them money in the past and the only changes they made were moving away from pioneering the family entertainment industry to their status quo. Nickelodeon Animation has since had moderate to reasonable to little to even NO success. Their biggest fall from grace had its roots in 1996 when Nickelodeon noticed that there was demand for more family-friendly programming. Shows like Friends were so popular that they were the target of pop-culture referencing in children's shows, yet that show kinda alienated families who didn't want to watch that overrated bullshit with their kids. So, Nickelodeon didn't hesitate and began providing programming that would be more ideal to this demographic. This is when the more corporate version of Nickelodeon was established. They saw success but it also started to fuck up shows that were very different. The direction was starting to shift. According to Hey Arnold! creator Craig Bartlett, "they got bigger and more corporate than when they were young. While Herb was running things, it just grew more and more corporate, and less like you have a personal touch. It was probably just inevitable that it was the way it was going to be. It wasn't Herb's fault. Herb's Nickelodeon was still a great place to be, but each year it got bigger and more out of control." This was the trend on the horizon.

Both SpongeBob and Rugrats became Nickelodeon's biggest cash cow franchises, with their theatrical movies being commercial blockbusters. Such success have led Nickelodeon to extend their runs longer than they really needed and thus their quality dwindled. Both shows have been the tip of the spear for the network for their respective decades. What really happened to the variety? Why Nickelodeon has since placed all of their tips on the SpongeBob-Rugrats combo? To Rugrats' credit, it had friendly competition. Now all I see is nothing but both SpongeBob and The Loud House, their newest cash cow. Sure, they had Avatar: The Last Airbender. That show was mature, fun and unlocked many possibilities. Unfortunately, this resulted into an abysmal live-action theatrical abomination and a sequel called The Legend of Korra that barely made across the finish line. While the actual show is good, Nickelodeon failed to milk it properly. The final season didn't even air on the network itself, but on their streaming services. Why couldn't they have done both? It's almost like they have forgotten to produce and market a show outside the likes of SpongeBob. Meanwhile, shows like Harvey Beaks, despite being a critical darling, were cancelled for not being Nickelodeon's cash cows. To add salt to their injury, they had the opportunity to house Adventure Time, one of the cartoon masterpieces of this decade, but they had since become so corporate that they turned it down not just once, but twice, allegedly in favor of Fanboy and Chum-Chum. This has led Cartoon Network to immediately take it under their wing and make their own SpongeBob out of it, resulting not just on the Cartoon Network Renaissance, but on the current overall television animation renaissance. If this wasn't enough, Nickelodeon also rejected Phineas and Ferb which is also a masterpiece that could easily fit their network's formula but it was instead warmly welcomed into the happiest place on Earth that is Disney.

As I said, Nickelodeon has gone so corporate that they've been over-reliant on past formulas for success, mainly if not just sitcoms which are genreally pretty formulaic and repetitive, but on Nickelodeon's case they're just trying to copy-and-paste the formulas of Dan Schneider and Disney Channel. Stuff like All That! and its successors reflect what many of us think back to when someone mentions the 90s or the overall good days of the network because at that time it was new and the kid stars were able to have fun on the set to resonate with the younger demographic. However, Nickelodeon's current sitcoms feel uninspired, tiresome and when the kid audiences grow up these shows will never hold up unlike when that demographic were just kids. But the worst problem that Nickelodeon is facing and still won't solve is the building of their line-up and the way that's reflected by the brand. Nothing on that channel stands out in a way that can realistically compete with other platforms. While The Loud House still has its heart and charm, it can't top the likes of Steven Universe and Star vs. The Forces of Evil and plenty other modern hit cartoons, which it's actually alright because you don't have to try trumping over the competition to be a good show, so there wouldn't be a cartoon cannibalization. The real issue is Nickelodeon's lack of saving grace in this modern western animation era and landscape and this is the red signal that Nickelodeon is now nothing more than a third-and-last-rate. Alongside the modern programming, it looks like they're also trying to cash on nostalgia for their good old days with endless revivals of Hey Arnold!, Rugrats, Invader Zim and Rocko's Modern Life. Their plan B just seems to be cashing on nostalgia since their animation department is in incredible danger, but the problem with this is that the original Nickelodeon brand can't simply be brought back the way it used to be because the world has changed too dramatically and just because 90s in nostalgia were hip and cool for so long and might still be hanging on, Nickelodeon's charm has always been the fact that it felt like a channel for kids and when the only bits and pieces of a unique brand that it has left are appealing to the childhoods of people in their 20s and 30s that's not going to end the same. The brand that made all those shows successful was a product of its time. In the 90s, it was to find an era. Today, it's nothing but nostalgia. So, what does the Nickelodeon brand currently has to offer that isn't nostalgia? If you take a look at their current brand, it seems like a bunch of adults got together and said:

Person 1: "This is what kids like these days: smartphones and random nonsense."
Person 2: "But, wasn't the original Nickelodeon brand about just random nonsense?"

It may have seemed like this and I don't wanna put any of this on a pedestal, yet there was at least some degree of familiarity to it. They would choose an idea and stick to it and every single idea would be different. It would be something specific but it would change itsetlf apart from itself. While it would be strange, they wouldn't sacrifice structure because without that pilar weirdness just blends into itself just like Nickelodeon's current presentation which does nothing to set itself apart from other networks aesthetically, especially since Cartoon Network has also been doing the random humor bologna for years to a point of just being dishonest with their corporate pandering to kids. Regardless, to CN's credit and defense, their brand is somehow more a love letter to their classic age than Nickelodeon. Also, who said to these brands that the so-called random humor humbug is still cool? Sure, that trend died with MySpace, so now if you do this, you're no better than Oscar, the dashing hero from the DreamWorks film Shark Tale.

Sincerely, I'm kinda heartbroken at the fact that Nickelodeon has since gone in all ways possible from Garfield and Snoopy to Charlie Brown and Jon Arbuckle and to creeps, televangelists, telemarketers and evil businessmen who's cancelling all your favorite shows and building SpongeBob theme parks. It's not Nickelodeon's animation deparment that's failing miserably. On the contrary, it's still standing strong. It's just being overlooked by the network that may no longer be the home of the Nicktoons. Looks like Nickelodeon has simply fled from the epic war for the television animation market and dominance in general media. Whatta bunch of wimpy and sissy cowards. While Cartoon Network is no longer perfect anymore, they still have a line-up of revolutionary shows that people absolutely have hoots for and their brand is still a huge western animation powerhouse. Disney's on the same ship than Cartoon Network, churning out shows that are worth of their brand even if their treatment of cartoons is sort of debatable occasionally and they're still not as popular as Cartoon Network in the modern animation reality, but they don't have to be popular to be good. Even companies like DreamWorks and other streaming-affiliated animation powerhouses are churning out game changer after game changer while Nickelodeon seems to have SpongeBob, The Loud House and its 90s material as its life support. If they really want to reclaim its long-lost glory taken away by the competition by force, please stop being too comfortable on formulaic success and don't be afraid to take risks anymore.

Looks like Nickelodeon has gone to the point where they're toxically dependant on old formulas to survive because it's not overall bad business. No wonder since it was born Nickelodeon has gradually gone more and more corporate. If I was on a creative studio where the business people have all the invicible power, so naturally they're going to care more about the business' financial well-being than their products' actual quality. So why taking risks of letting creative talents innovate and dictate their own visions when not innovating and playing safe is your shelter from poverty? Just... bite me. Sure, Nickelodeon has recently gone under management shift, Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie is a masterpiece, I can't wait for the Rocko's Modern Life and Invader Zim comeback specials and the Nickelodeon animation department still amazes me. So who knows what kind of future might hold for the network? Yet, if they don't make any effort to present themselves in new ways and recoup their long lost creative spirit, I'm afraid that the network will remain mediocre as the competition single-handedly crushes them mercilessly.

Heroes in the Half-Shell

Last sunday, I went to Comic-Con Experience in São Paulo, Brazil. While I was on the Nickelodeon stand, I saw natural-scaled statues of the Turtles on display and costumed TMNT characters on meet-and-greets. This is what inspired me to write about the TMNT franchise as the second post of my blog.

'80s: the rise of the Turtles.

As famous for the 1987 toyetic cartoon as they've always became, they weren't created in the animated cartoon format. They were instead born in an independent comic book created and published in 1984 (the same year my parents married) by cartoonists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. Everything began out of nowhere in an afternoon when both were searching for good ideas. Eastman drew a turtle wearing a bandana and playing with nunchaku. They both found it really funny, because the slow stamina of a turtle and the badass ninjitsu skills obviously detracted from each other. It was so unusual that they decided to develop that idea, and, consequently, created a quartet of turtles, each one specialized in a certain Asian weapon.

Thanks to Kevin's uncle's financial support, the duo published 3000 copies of the first issue of the original series in the magazine format, black-and-white and newspaper. It wasn't a over-serious story, it was just a funny parody of the likes of Marvel's New Mutants and Daredevil which were on vogue at that time. The plot of the first issue was simple, yet magnificent: due to a car crash which caused an radioactive substance spill, the same substance seriously affected four normal turtle pets which were carried by a boy. Shocked by the accident, the boy drops the polluted turtles in a sewer. Meanwhile, a formidable ninja master Hamato Yoshi leaves Japan to live in USA after a love triangle killed his best friend Oruku Nagi. Yoshi has a pet rat called Splinter who also became a formidable ninja master by copying his human master's skills while training. Nagi's evil brother called Saki the Shredder, nevertheless, tracks down Yoshi in his despair for vengeance and kills him in the pursuit, An unscathed Splinter runs away to the sewers where he befriends the four turtle pets still bathing in the radioactive shit. All five animals are simultaneously affected, acquiring anthropomorphism and speech abilities.

Splinter decided to train the turtles as his pupils to revenge on the Shredder, the ruler of New York's crime-filled neighborhoods with the help of his Foot Clan subordinates. He named the Turtles after four Renaissance artists Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michelangelo, and specializes them in their respective weapons katana, sai, bo and nunchaku, so they could perfect their skills as a team.

Eastman and Laird took their then-created story to a New Hamsphire comic-con where the print has quickly run, making the Turtles an instant success, leading the duo to establish their own comic studio and publisher Mirage Studios to write, draw and publish the regular series which would still be black-and-white. The new series introduced April O'Neil and mercenary Casey Jones, the Turtles' best human friends, mad scientist Baxter Stockman and an alien race Utrom. The turtles had already killed the Shredder, only for him to be revived by a mystical rite and remain the Turtles' pain in their assholes until issue #11 where he was beheaded by Leonardo. At that point, the Turtles were already a phenomenon, with lots of merchandise gallore, and to increase the workload their creators relied on "guest artists" to write and draw the stories, leading to a more episodic continuity. It wasn't until issue #50 that the continuity was once again defined when the original creators supervised the bulk of work and wrote and drew a new saga which lasted until the classic series' final issue #62 in 1993. Two months later, a new series, this time in color, was published as Volume 2 which only lasted 13 issues due to the crash of comic books. In 1996, Erik Larsen took over the series, launching what would be known as Volume 3 through Image Comics, again black-and-white. The jumping-the-shark additions to the characters (such as Leonardo losing one hand, Donatello turned into a robot and Raphael becoming the Shredder, for example) pissed the fans and killed the series in 1999 after 23 issues. Voulme 3 is not canon in the Turtles' chronology.

The show that was the face of the franchise in the late '80s and early '90s.

On the other hand, as the classic series was striking the hot iron, Eastman and Laird partnered with Murakami-Wolf-Swenson to turn the comics into cartoon format. Premiering on December 1987, the TMNT cartoon was so successful that many people thought the cartoon came first. However, the cartoon distanced from the comics, as it was more kid-friendly alongside the story differences. For example, Splinter and Hamato Yoshi became the same character: a human who, after being betrayed by his teammate Oruku Saki and expelled from the Foot Clan, moves out from Japan to USA where he lives in the NY sewers where he adopts four turtle pets who were abandoned by their former owners. One day, a strange liquid befalls all five, turning the turtle pets into talking anthropomorphized animals and Splinter into an anthropomorphic rat. Another difference is that Shredder is a standard supervillain instead of the organized crime lord, who happens to act as a subordinate to Kraang, an alien who wants to take over the world with his superadvanced technology and lives in his Technodrome. The Foot Soldiers are merely reduced to Shredder's robotic minions built by Kraang. But the most famous change is that the cartoon gave the turtles' bandanas more distinct colors (Leonardo's became blue, Raphael's is red, Donatello's got purple and Michelangelo's would become orange) while in the original source material all of them wore red masks. The cartoon also added Shredder's two bumbling lackeys Bebop and Rocksteady (an warthog and a rhino, respectively), and April's friends, news reporters Irma and Vernon.

The cartoon was able to last 10 seasons until 1996 with 193 episodes (a feat successfully matched by Spongebob Squarepants from Nickelodeon, whose parent Viacom would later acquire the TMNT property, which I'll talk about further). Despite this, the cartoon was not officially canon on Mirage's eyes as Eastman and Laird had yet to utilize the cartoon-only characters in their works. Despite this, most of the TMNT merchandise utilized the cartoon's aesthetic approach and, conversely, the animation fans only view the show as official, ignoring the comics. As a result of fan demand, Archie Comics published a comic series whose stories and visuals were based on those from the 1987 cartoon.

The turtles' first foray into Hollywood

The cartoon's popularity also led to production of a trilogy of live-action movies produced by HK-based major Golden Harvest and released by New Line Cinema. The first one came in 1990, featuring the revolutionary animatronic costumed puppets designed and built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop (the same guys who created the Muppets, the cast of Sesame Street, the Sinclair family from Dinosaurs and the title cartoon character Sid the Science Kid). The movie's story was more faithful to the comics, specifically the classic series. The first sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze from 1991 was closely faithful to the cartoon as it was more comedic and light-hearted due to the original film's criticisms launched by parents who found it more violent. In this sequel, only Donatello used his bo while his brothers used other on-set props. While based on the show, Eastman and Laird couldn't find a good room for Bebop and Rocksteady, so they decided to create Tokka and Rahzar (an evil mutant turtle and a big bad wolf, respectively) instead. The third and final movie premiered in 1993, focusing on the Turtles turning back to feudal Japan to rescue April who got stranded there by accident. Because they were busy The Flintstones, Babe and Dinosaurs, the Henson Creature Shop couldn't get a job in this movie. As a result, the Turtles and Splinter were created by All Creature Effects with less-than-stellar results.

A well-known stop-motion animation/animatronic/puppet firm Chiodo Brothers worked on Saban/Fox Kids' tokustatsu series Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation which premiered in 1997. The new show was set after the events of the third movie and introduced the turtles' sister Venus de Milo. As the show struggled to find an audience, the show got plugged after only one season. Before the cancelation, the Turtles had a crossover with the Power Rangers in a story arc from Power Rangers in Space.

In 2001, Peter Laird decided to revive the Turtles on his own accord, first as a new comic series known as Volume 4, again through Mirage Studios. This new bi-monthly series is set 15 years after the events of Volume 2, dismissing Volume 3. Three years later, a new comic series Tales of the TMNT was launched as an interquel between Volumes 2 and 4, being essentially the true Volume 3. This series was named after a seven-issue miniseries published in 1987.

The millenium Turtles

The new comics' popularity led Mirage Studios to co-produce a new cartoon for Fox with 4Kids Entertainment in 2003. The new show would be more faithful to the comics, complete with a more mature tone, despite still kid-friendly. The 2003 cartoon was adapted into a seven-issue comic miniseries published by Dreamweave and lasted until 2009 when Viacom acquired the TMNT brand. Because of the changes on the Turtles' personalities, Shredder's origins (in this show, he was an utrom) and Bebop and Rocksteady only appearing in the 2003 cartoon's series finale, the TV movie crossover Turtles Forever, the original show's fans didn't respond to the new one as well as the comic book fans who viewed the old one as kid-friendly. All the TMNT merchandise at the time was based on the 2003 show. A 2007 CGI animated feature film was produced by Mirage Studios and also HK-based Imagi Animation and released by Warner Bros. Pictures and the Weinstein Company, featuring the voices of Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy) as April, Mako (in his final role before his death) as Splinter, Chris Evans (Captain America) as Casey Jones, Patrick Stewart as Max Winters/Yaotl and Laurence Fishburne as the narrator. In the new movie, the Turtles, having grown apart after their final victory on Shredder, must reunite to save New York from ancient monsters.

Not just cartoons... we're Nicktoons!

In 2009, Viacom acquired the TMNT brand. As part of the merger, Kevin Eastman would resume writing and drawing new TMNT stories to be published by IDW. The new comics were launched in 2011 and feature characters from all TMNT incarnations from the past and the present, most notably Bebop and Rocksteady, and the Mighty Mutanimals, in addition to new characters such as Old Hob, a mutant stray cat, and Alopex, a mutant polar fox. Also, a new storyline introduced Splinter and the Turtles as reincarnations of the late Hamato Yoshi and his sons.

In 2012, Nickelodeon produced a new CGI cartoon blending characters, concepts and plot devices from every single TMNT continuity. Two years later, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies released the Michael Bay-produced the live-action remake starring Megan Fox as April, Will Arnett as Vernon and the Turtles as performance-captured animated characters by Industrial Light & Magic. A sequel premiered this year, introducing Baxter Stockman, Kraang, Bebop and Rocksteady in the new movies.

To close this post, here's a fun fact: the original 1987 cartoon was renamed Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in Europe, as censorship didn't want certain violent words to be used in a children's product such as "ninja". However, as the European censorship was increasingly toned down, all future media released on European territories retain the original title.