Nickelodeon at 30

Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Nickelodeon, the premiere cable network geared exclusively toward children. I’ve been thinking about this event for the past couple weeks, and I suspect that no other station, in any country, has had as much influence on children’s television—and hence all of children’s media—as Nick. I say that with full cognizance of PBS and Sesame Street’s fortieth anniversary this fall, and that’s probably hyperbole, but the point I want to really make is that it would be hard to overestimate Nick’s importance in the history of children’s media, particularly in the past PBC decade (Post-Blue’s Clues).

Rather than launch into a major history lesson, I want to start with my own introduction to Nickelodeon: watching Double Dare at the house of my only friend with cable TV in the mid1980s. (Though this is from the 90s, long after I’d moved on to "cooler" things like Animaniacs.)



We weren’t like die hard every day fans, but it did subtly change our perception of 1) what was cool, and 2) what a game show (today read “reality TV”) could mean for someone our age. 

This is pretty cool. It’s a little Nick-produced behind-the-scenes documentary about Double Dare from 1989. There are more segments of it floating around YouTube somewhere.



Now, amazingly, when I googled combinations like “Nickelodeon 30” I came up with nothing, so it doesn’t seem like the network is doing much to publicize its anniversary. (The closest I got was a fan page asking people to list their top thirty favorite Nick shows.) The Nick website had nothing also, just info on last week’s Kids’ Choice Awards, the new Penguins of Madagascar show, and the like. Although one could profitably check out this Penguins sample video as a way to gauge, for instance, how far the station has come in the past twenty-some-odd years.

So there’s not much online about the history of Nick itself, with perhaps Wikipedia being the best brief source; it also has pages about all the satellite channels like Noggin and TV Land.

Here, then, is my summary from chapter two of Dade Hayes’ Anytime Playdate. All credit goes to him, and I won’t quote any of his material directly. (The book is well worth reading, and I’ll be writing about it soon.)

The station essentially started as a single program, called Pinwheel, although its leaders wanted to branch into increased children’s production to vie against PBS children’s programming. The station’s first head was an advertising veteran named Cy Schneider who had already made a name for himself at Ogilvy & Mather developing children’s advertising, among other things. The most prominent foreshadowing of his Nick work was a 1955 commercial for the Burp Gun, considered the first toy commercial ever aired, and the Hot Wheels television show he’d done in the 1960s for network TV, essentially nothing more than a half-hour commercial for toy cars. Pinwheel was a long way from that, though. It was an hour-long live action puppet show, with animated segments. Here’s a nine-minute compilation video—sorry the sound doesn’t come through too well, but Bill Cosby (who has a doctorate in education) is great, as is the original animated Curious George:



The show ran for four years and won a Peabody but didn’t sufficiently differentiate the new station from PBS. Schneider came to television with an obvious advertising bent, but ironically much of Nickelodeon’s fare was so “wholesome” and educational that kids stayed away. (Schneider wrote a memoir entitled Children’s Television: The Art, the Business, and How it Works.)

The station grew gradually until the mid-1980s (my Double Dare-watching era) when Geraldine Laybourne started steering things. Her main contribution, according to Hayes (p. 32), was to start branding and gearing the station to twelve-year-olds. Previously it had been rather rudderless (astonishingly, given Schneider’s advertising background) and hence ineffective in reaching its target demographic. So Laybourne decided to make the station something cool, something kids wouldn’t be ashamed to watch (i.e. it wouldn’t skew too young, be a “baby channel”). And it happened at a time all kids’ TV was booming with Reagan-era deregulation—and, ironically but not coincidentally, PBS saw its funding slashed. She also strongly emphasized animation, increasing its production many-fold (think of Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy, for instance). Nick Jr. launched as a daytime programming block in 1993, and from that point the station has grown exponentially. Herb Scannell took over in 1996, so it was under him that Blue’s Clues, Dora, and, most recently, the entire station of Noggin were launched. Now, whether we want to call Blue a “tipping point” or not, it did alter the face of kids’ television, and in this decade Disney has made a strong run at Nick’s market dominance from the 90s; I haven’t really looked at Nickelodeon’s Kid’s Choice Awards, for instance, but Disney (Hannah Montana, for instance) did well against their hosts/rivals. PBS has also managed to launch Sprout on cable, and Discovery Kids and others are eating into Nick’s share here in the states. That said, I don’t think they’re hurting overly much, in either the preschool or older demographics, and international growth remains strong; one of my first posts on this blog was about the launch of their fiftieth station, in Arabic in the Middle East.

That brings us to the present, and I can’t really give a survey of all things going on the air at present (ironically because I have to finish a sample script for a company that is one of their main live action producers), but that Penguins episode is a good indication of the breadth of material on the air now. I’m excited about the many shows being announced by firms like Little Airplane in the past couple weeks. As I said months ago in one of my very first posts, there’s more good stuff out there than we could ever get to in a lifetime, and I think Nick is right at the heart of it. I think the world would have been a better place without the advent of Ren & Stimpy, or even SpongeBob for that matter, but I’m willing to put up with those in order to see Steve Burns and the Umbilical Brothers and Toot and Puddle and Yo Gabba Gabba (Jack Black’s on this Friday!). I’m glad I had Mr. Rogers to watch when I was a kid, and I’m glad, since he had passed away, that Loretta has had Steve. That’s one case where Nickelodeon picked up the banner and carried kids’ television exactly where it needed to be. Thanks, guys.