Summer With Nick

Almost every summer when me and my little brother were kids, around this time of year - about the middle of summer - we would go visit my grandma and grandpa in Indiana for about a week or two, sometimes staying with them while our parents went on trips (they went to Arizona one year and generally out West another - Oregon and California). These weeks would be spent fishing with my grandpa and cousin Brandon, climbing their pine trees, shooting at Diet Rite cans with BB guns, watching hummingbirds at the feeders, and visiting the A & W to get cheese fries and root beer floats. It was always a fun time. But we spent a lot of the days down in the basement, watching Nickelodeon on TV.

My brother and I were deprived as kids (insert sarcasm tag here). We never had cable growing up, except for one brief summer in high school where we had Direct TV. We still don't have cable in my house, and don't really feel a need for it. Now that the stations have switched to digital, we have five channels of PBS, where I can watch all the Nova, Nature, Frontline, and Ohio's government at work that I need to be content. During that time we had cable, it sucked so many hours away from each day. But I'm not posting to bash cable and admonish people to value simplicity; I'm actually remembering how great it was for those few weeks every year to veg out in front of the TV from around two in the afternoon to midnight, and I'm starting with Nick. The next post will be about Cartoon Network.

Nickelodeon had some awesome programming in the '90s, but the very best show they ran was The Adventures of Pete & Pete. This is a story about two brothers, both named Pete, and their adventures, if you will, in a weird suburban neighborhood. The show is very funny, as I can confirm from having watched season one again recently.

Big Pete, the older brother, is the overly-dramatic and philosophical narrator, and most of the episodes are told from his perspective. Little Pete is his weird and obnoxious younger brother. He has a tattoo of a lady named Petunia, and calls people "blowholes."

Each episode is well-written and has a different feel to it, and one of the things I found most interesting on watching it again was that the episodes narrated by Little Pete have different themes and express a very different worldview - a more cynical, practical, self-interested worldview. The show is so well-written that I'm certain most of the humor went over my head when I was ten years old, and is much funnier now. And who can forget the catchy and memorable theme song?

Perhaps my favorite show when I was a kid was All That, a kids' comedy-sketch show. As a testament to how limited its appeal is, though, I can't remember much of anything from it, except the in-your-face attitude that typified TV kids in the '90s. I was certainly never like that, but I thought the show was very funny. Here's a sketch the illustrates the contrast between the now-cringe-inducing kids' humor to the brilliance of Chris Farley's delivery. Kenan Thompson is an SNL, now, and he is doing basically the same act.

The whole joke is just Chris Farley squirting ketchup everywhere, but he makes it hilarious even though he's just doing the same Matt Foley voice he did on Saturday Night Live. Notice how he also works in his "Bulls fan" sketch by faking a heart attack.

Another favorite was Aaahh!! Real Monsters! This was a show about three monsters attending a school to learn how to scare people - basically the same plot as Monsters, Inc.. It was right up my alley, because I like anything with dark themes or that has main characters who would typically be considered villains or anti-heroes.

Crumb, Ickis, and Oblina

Another Klasky Csupo cartoon that I enjoyed was Rugrats, a cartoon about a group of talking babies. Chuckie was my favorite. It's a lot like Bobby's World, a show I liked better, and Muppet Babies, a show I didn't like, but which Nickelodeon aired during the day. Most of the humor comes from the way the babies talk, similar to Bobby's World, where the humor is based on Bobby's misunderstandings of what older people say. Rugrats has too many gross diaper jokes.

Two of the shows that stood out from the afternoon lineup were :Legends of The Hidden Temple and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Legends was a game show where kids had to run an obstacle course themed as an Indiana Jones-style ancient temple. Teams competed against each other to find keys and artifacts that would allow them to move onto the next round. It's especially interesting because there are six teams rather than the standard four or two. Best of all was the giant talking stone head Olmec (who sounds nothing like what a giant stone head should sound like). I never watched GUTS, Double Dare, or What Would You Do?, but I did watch this every chance I got.

Are You Afraid Of The Dark? was a horror show. It was like the Goosebumps TV series. It had good atmosphere (just check out the opening) and some pretty scary stories. The most memorable and disturbing episode is the one where some kind of disease is causing everyone to die of laughter. It was called "The Tale of The Ghastly Grinner, and is a perfect example of nightmare fuel.

This is still pretty creepy.

I've left out a lot here, most notably Ren & Stimpy (which I didn't like), Rocko's Modern Life (which I only watched once or twice, but which sounds like a funny show), and Doug (which was okay). But that's a pretty good summary of what I liked about Nickelodeon.

Next week, Cartoon Network. See ya then.