The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story

If you grew up watching Nickelodeon, you should check this out. Lots of great info on the network I never even knew. Highly recommended!

Nickelodeon was my life. I grew up watching it as a toddler, stuck with it as a child, a pre teen, a teenager and rewatched all of the old shows as an adult. I still watch them any chance I get. Rocko's Modern Life was my favorite to rewatch, but they were all great cartoons and live action shows. I started life watching today's special, noozles, David the gnome and the little bits, progressed into Rugrats and just gave my life to Nick after that. My dad says he hated me watching Ren & Stimpy and Aaah Real Monsters, but those shows gave me character. To be honest, Nickelodeon raised me. It was the only channel I watched 24/7 when Beavis & Butthead and Daria weren't on MTV. My parents fought and I ran to Nick. I was a lonely loser and Snick was my Saturday night. I'm more cultured a person because of the diversity of those shows. Weird is cool. I defended Nickelodeon to all the cool kids watching MTV or Adult Swim because they weren't learning empathy or humility. The shows for kids now are embarrassingly bad by comparison and there is no one channel that educates kids while making them laugh without simultaneously brainwashing them. The songs I learned from that channel are still sung to this day (even the Stick Stickley P. O. Box 963 song!). Everyone knows happy happy joy joy, even if you didn't watch the show. There isn't anything like those shows on TV now and it's really sad that kids have no way to learn a sense of humor or quirkiness. So I want to thank every writer, director and producer that did anything for Nickelodeon between 1985 and 1998, because it made my life better and got little me through some really dark times.

It was nice seeing some of the old shows I used to watch and how they started, but after watching this documentary about nickelodeon it's easy to see where they lost sight of what they started out as, way before sponge bob and Dora as stated in the show. When your breakout show is about kids being kids and just having fun and making fun of everything (You can't do that on television) in fact most of what the kids did in that show would not be allowed now, which is why they will never release the series. They also a few great shows after that. But once you start to guide kids thinking you will lose them. I think it started with nick news, they kind of mention it in the show that they had this huge audience now what do we do with them? Once you start manipulating kids into seeing what YOU want them to see and care about and inject political correctness into their shows, you start to lose some of them and before they knew it they were just another corporation that lost touch with its customers. Don't get me wrong they had some good shows in the later years, Josh & Drake, I-Carly and a few others but even those were best in the early episodes because they were much rawer and a little less P.C. but I suppose that happens to every show.

I came of age in the late '80s and early '90s, and in retrospect, I'm not sure there was a single more powerful influence on those formative years than Nickelodeon. Pinwheel and Danger Mouse colored my earliest memories, Double Dare and Mr. Wizard arrived a bit later, Salute Your Shorts and Ren & Stimpy spoke to me as a pre-teen... it seemed that as I grew and matured, so did the network, catering its programming to meet what I wanted or needed at that specific point in my life.

Looking back at it here, through a wide-angled lens, I was startled by how much of this material has lingered in my long-term memory banks and still, subtly, feeds my personality today. That's where The Orange Years makes its hay: coasting through a laundry list of beloved short-run TV shows and catchy pre-commercial bumpers, refreshing fond recollections in its audience while serving a dash of backstage skinny to better humanize the men and women behind this little network that could. And that's really what it was, at least in the early days: a boutique cable channel, catering to a very specific market, in an era before that was a proven formula.

The peeks behind the curtain are wonderful and inspiring - happy conversations with stars, creators and executives who are still jazzed about the product, twenty years after moving on - but the greater urge to service nearly every original property with some degree of inspection grows tiresome after nearly two hours. Should've been twenty minutes shorter.

What a energetic, and joyful journey seeing old friends from my childhood and learning about Nick itself. A must see for anyone who grew up with Nick!