Only on Nick
A Love Letter to the Splat that Inspired Me
It snapped and crackled the moment it kicked in. It only took a few seconds, then — boom! Full picture at full force, sound pouring forth like an aural waterfall. In trying to grab two, it grabbed all six of my senses, throttling them endlessly, never letting go for a second.
It was large, all-consuming. It dwarfed me like a titanic monolith, throwing movement and color across every inch of what I could see. It turned invisible vibrations into visible illusions in a way I could never explain. But how it did it wasn’t the point; it wasn’t ever the point. The point was: I couldn’t get enough of it.
It was 1999. I was four. And I was already a hardcore addict.
Every good hero needs an origin story. The same can be said for a wannabe artist seeking initiation into the world of the wacky. I had to be exposed to cartoons at some point like all the other creative malcontents that woke up one day and decided to become an animator.
Television was the start; the mouth of the river, the North Star. Point A.
A good number of musicians, in a time before they were famous, spoke of the radio in near-biblical terms, a postwar prophet baptized in circuits and wires. From station to station, it carried this gospel of youth, vitality, soul, sorrow and freedom in the form of twelve-bar blues, twanging country, or the swinging king-in-waiting, rock and roll.
Television, radio’s kissing cousin, came into vogue after the war and soon supplanted both the radio and the fireplace as the centerpiece of the American family home. There’s a good reason it put the fear of God into the Hollywood studios: this small box could reach more people and tell far more stories than the movie theater could ever hope to. It now made the broadcast networks — who cut their teeth on the radio — serious competitors in the world of the projected image, where the movie moguls once reigned supreme, uncontested.
A laundry list of latter-day Hollywood luminaries, from Steven Spielberg to George Lucas to J.J. Abrams, cited the childhood influence of television as an impetus for turning them into filmmakers. When Warner Brothers took the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon shorts that ran theatrically in the Forties and re-purposed them for the small screen, it sent similar shockwaves into the minds and souls of the artistically inclined. Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett became household names and guiding lights to a new generation of cartoonists, while bringing up the rear came Hanna-Barbera and Jay Ward, fresh and ready-made cartoons for the new medium, like a three-course TV dinner.
A few generations later, long after the likes of The Flintstones went into syndication, that’s where I come in.
As I became aware of the wider world of TV outside my collection of VHS tapes, there was only one cable network on the tubes that catered to giving kids what kids wanted instead of what parent focus groups thought kids wanted, and who practically owned my consumer loyalty pretty much for life.
“The first and only network for kids,” Nickelodeon started life as a pretty-forgettable Columbus, Ohio cable station that had one caveat: shows that could allow users to interact with the broadcast through the use of a primitive remote and interface called QUBE. Other than that, it was mostly a rerun mill of licensed kids’ fare, and their “original programming” consisted of their own attempt at a Sesame Street clone.
Hardly innovative.
The cable network was in dire straits and in desperate need of some marketing TLC to boost their audience numbers. Enter a couple of ad guys responsible for the iconic look of MTV, the most punk rock of all cable channels (I want my MTV!) and soon, you had the ingredients for a winning brand: the orange splat, the green slime, the “Nick-Nick-Nick” jingle, the reputation of being a place where kids could be kids.
It was marketing genius.
With a fresh new public image, Nickelodeon gained the courage to invest in new shows kids would enjoy: obstacle challenge shows, live-action sitcom-type deals; all this stuff helped them climb from the absolute bottom to the top of the ratings.
So in 1990, as they were scaling the peak of success, the Nick executives took a look around at the summit and thought, “Hmm, where else can we go with this? What else can we find that kids like?”
Cartoons! That was it!
Through the tireless efforts of development executive Vanessa Coffey and others, Nickelodeon jumped on the bandwagon and launched the Nicktoons programming block on August 11, 1991…a date which will live in joviality…
Of the many original show pilots submitted for Vanessa’s perusal, only three got the greenlight: Rugrats, Doug, and The Ren and Stimpy Show. Of those three cartoons, one in particular would go on to revolutionize not just television animation, but the animation industry in general.
Who knew a psychotic Chihuahua and an idiot cat could make that big of a splash?
Even though I was barely a year old by the time The Ren and Stimpy Show went off the air in 1995, the cartoon’s legacy compelled Nickelodeon, and the entire industry by relation, to dive further into championing what became known amongst my crowd as “creator-driven” animation.
I became a by-product of that legacy.
In Stimpy’s wake, a slew of timeless cartoons like Rocko’s Modern Life, Rugrats, Hey Arnold, ChalkZone, My Life as a Teenage Robot and others paved the way for kids like me, with a dollar and a dream, to dream big enough; to one day get their nutty ideas on screens worldwide. I paid more attention to the credits that followed each cartoon, seeing the disparate names of whacked-out adults that got to act like kids for a living — and get paid handsomely for it, might I add. I followed along with pencil and paper, copying what I saw on screen and practicing how to design and sketch characters. Seeing each show’s “created by” credit in each intro inspired me to imagine seeing my own name up there.
Fully inspired by all these madcap cartoon hijinks, I experimented with animations of my own with what technology was at my fingertips. Before the days of using Adobe Flash, I’d draw frame-by-frame in Microsoft Paint — with a mouse — compile each image into GIF sequences, import all the sequences into my video editing software, and chroma key the green screen animation to fit over drawn backgrounds.
I also recorded all the voice acting parts using Windows’ basic sound recorder plug-in, with the scant amount of audio effects it had, and this godawful five-dollar microphone.
Unfortunately, most of those mini-cartoons haven’t survived the years — or the hard drives — and are lost to time, but the tinkering left its mark.
While teaching myself the fundamentals of the craft, I seriously began looking into animation as a career. I also harbored dreams of pitching my ideas to Nickelodeon and developing them to air on their network. That was my animation Holy Grail in the beginning: to get a show broadcast on Nickelodeon. Even during the rise of independent animation that opened the floodgates to every freelancer who couldn’t get the studios to pass gas in their direction, Nickelodeon Animation was still on my periphery, just by the prestige and rich history a name like theirs carried.
Of course, while a career at Nick Studios sounded nice, as I thought more about it, I had bigger plans.
Why work for someone else when I can work for me? I needed to have an outfit I could call my own. My own studio.
The animation bug had bit me, and my in-road into the business of show was set for life.
Stay ‘tooned…
