Nickelodeon | ||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
This era got slimed in the worst way possible!
| ||||||||||||
|
Nickelodeon is an American pay television channel and television show and film studio that was first formed in 1977. While it was originally good from 70s to 90s and especially 2000s including 2010, they have gone downhill since 2011 as they started to mostly focus on live-action sitcoms instead of animated shows, started to act hip and cool for modern kids, multiple bad shows released in those eras, and the downfall of The Fairly OddParents.
Why It Got Slimed (In A Bad Way)
- Their other network "Nicktoons" (formerly Nicktoons Network) is nothing more but just punishment for shows that didn't get the same audience as SpongeBob SquarePants and The Loud House, resulting in the unfair cancellation of other shows.
- Back at the Barnyard, Robot and Monster, T.U.F.F. Puppy, Harvey Beaks (the most infamous example), Welcome to the Wayne, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and It's Pony! are prime examples of shows that got this punishment.
- When it's not moved to NickToons, it might be moved to Netflix like Pinky Malinky and Glitch Techs, or Amazon Prime like all 26 episodes of Zokie of Planet Ruby[4], or it's shown exclusively on the Nickelodeon website like the last episodes of The Legend of Korra which is just stupid.
- This doesn't make sense because you can't compete with a cultural phenomenon that is on your own network when it comes to something like SpongeBob, and it's obvious that a show on the schedule will have less audience than SpongeBob.
- They milk every franchise they own until one dies out, with SpongeBob SquarePants, The Loud House and The Fairly OddParents being the worst offenders of this.
- They also milk PAW Patrol as well, even though Nick Jr. mostly does the milking.
- As of 2024, it became clear they seem to have more interest in popular IPs rather than having original ideas, by removing some of their shows from Paramount+. Ironically, some shows, like Blue's Clues & You!, were actually successful and also based on previous IP, and yet, they removed those shows for not having "mass-appeal".
- Since 2013, they started to mostly focus alot on nickcoms more than animated shows.
- The Kids' Choice Awards from 2013 onward weren't that well received by fans and some kids (including teens) due to snubs and awards that are well-winning.
- Most of their good shows have gone downhill:
- They severely ruined SpongeBob SquarePants and made it go downhill since Season 6 and would continue in the eighth season (even if the show redeemed itself since season 9 thankfully, as not many people actually cared about it).
- The Fairly OddParents also went severely downhill since Season 6, but it was still decent until Season 9.
- Season 9 introduced Sparky, a completely pointless character. He's nothing but a carbon copy of Dukey from Johnny Test and Jake from Adventure Time. This season also has the most rehashes.
- Season 10 (the final season) is even worse. Sparky received so much hate that he was removed completely. He got replaced by Chloe Carmichael (Timmy's new neighbor), who's an even worse character. She's a flawless Mary Sue, and Timmy has to share his Fairies with her. It resulted in the show getting cancelled after that.
- Other criticisms also focus on the Flanderization of the characters, lack of original writers, characters being down to extras and others completely removed, the sudden switch from hand-drawn animation to awful flash animation in the second half of Season 10 which would later be used in Bunsen is a Beast, etc.
- The series then got even worse after the sitcom reboot The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder aired, although it thankfully got better with the release of the CGI reboot The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish.
- The Loud House also went downhill since Season 4, and even more with the fifth season premiere "Schooled!".
- Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn also went downhill in the last two seasons.
- They made lots of bad and average shows during this era such as:
- Bucket & Skinner's Epic Adventures
- Winx Club (2011 revival)
- How To Rock
- Marvin Marvin, an alien sitcom starring the Fred Figglehorn star Lucas Cruikshank that happened to rely on unfunny jokes and humor and was made as a followup to when Fred: The Show was cancelled after just one season.
- Sam & Cat, which is a bad spin-off of both iCarly and Victorious, and also heavily accelerated the downfall for both Nickelodeon itself and nickcoms.
- Breadwinners, which has eyesore animation and heavily relies on gross-out and toilet humor.
- Pig Goat Banana Cricket, which has a failed interwoven stories concept and much like Fanboy & Chum Chum, it overuses toilet humor.
- School of Rock (TV series), which is a bad TV show based on the classic 2003 movie of the same name and not a good revival.
- Danger Force, which is a bad spin-off of Henry Danger.
- The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder, an awful sitcom reboot of The Fairly OddParents.
- Alvin and the Chipmunks (2015), an awful CGI reboot of the 60s property.
- The first three seasons of Henry Danger.
- The Adventures of Kid Danger, which is an awful animated spin-off to the live-action sitcom series.
- The Thundermans.
- The Loud House since season 4.
- The last two seasons of Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn.
- Game Shakers.
- The Patrick Star Show (though not as bad as Sam and Cat and Planet Sheen)
- Side Hustle.
- The Haunted Hathaways.
- Make It Pop.
- Tyler Perry's Young Dylan.
- Erin & Aaron.
- Unfiltered.
- Cousins for Life.
- Star Falls.
- Awesomeness TV.
- The last two seasons of The Fairly OddParents.
- The seventh to eight seasons of "SpongeBob SquarePants"
- Sanjay and Craig.
- Bella and the Bulldogs.
- Max and Shred.
- Knight Squad.
- Every Witch Way.
- WITS Academy.
- Talia in The Kitchen.
- Bunsen is a Beast.
- That Girl Lay Lay and more.
- They've also made terrible films such as the Fred films, Fun Size, The Last Airbender, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles duology, Playing With Fire, and Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie.
- Shows like Victorious, Planet Sheen, Sam & Cat and Game Shakers (despite the former being good) either have gotten bad finales or have ended on cliffhangers, which are not good examples to end a show.
- They occasionally produce a show that's actually good or has great potential, only for the show to get cancelled before it gets a proper finale or conclusion with Victorious, The Other Kingdom, I Am Frankie, Ride, Drama Club, and Warped! being infamous examples of good shows that were cancelled in favor of another programming.
- As mentioned before, they are nowadays milking SpongeBob SquarePants and The Loud House to death without taking a break from it for a while, due to those shows being the channel's cash cow, as it continues to take up almost the entire time slot, while other shows get little to no airtime. The same goes for the Nick Jr. block where they milk PAW Patrol and Rubble & Crew to death, especially the former, to the point where the Nick Jr. block is just PAW Patrol reruns only. They also air the latter on the regular Nickelodeon as well, up until 2:00 PM.
- Speaking of Nick Jr. (2014-present), they have made/aired lots of toyetic shows from 2013-2019 which do not teach kids much. Sunny Day and Ricky Zoom are two examples of this.
- Just like the modern Cartoon Network, they stopped caring about older shows from 90s, 2000s and even some of the 2010s shows, or franchises in general such as: Doug (although this one can be excusable since the rights are now owned by Disney), CatDog, T.U.F.F. Puppy, Robot & Monster, Danny Phantom, My Life as a Teenage Robot, The Wild Thornberrys, Barnyard, Hey Arnold!, The Legend of Korra, As Told by Ginger, ChalkZone, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Rocket Power, etc. Outside of video game cameos, none of it got a revival/reboot.
- With the exception of The Casagrandes and It's Pony, practically none of the current cartoons have any female main protagonists, while there are female leads in the modern Nickcoms, most of them comes off as stereotypical, unlikable jerkasses and clichéd. This is a huge step down as Nickelodeon in the past used to have a handful of influential, lovable and iconic female protagonists that anyone would fall in love with such as Jenny Wakeman/XJ-9 from My Life as a Teenage Robot, Korra/Janet Varrney from The Legend of Korra and Kitty Katswell from T.U.F.F. Puppy.
- Ever since 2013, they try way too hard to be cool, modern and hip for kids, whether it's to get a cheap laugh from the audience, or to earn reviews and money with it. This results in moments that let the joke or the episode itself dated after years or even months and turns out to be nothing but very cringeworthy moments. Here are some examples of this:
- Adding references to current affairs and dead memes in shows and episodes such as:
- The modern Loud House episode "Grub Snub" (which is a GrubHub reference).
- The slang school in "Young Dylan".
- Also Rebecca and Charile adding outdated pop culture references in this show.
- The entirety of Unfiltered.
- The Fortnite dances in Cousins for Life and The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder.
- The TikTok reference (Clickclock called in these shows) in The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder and Danger Force.
- The jokes in Season 10 of The Fairly OddParents.
- The K-Pop cameos in The Casagrandes.
- The Bottle Flip Challenge subplot in The Thundermans.
- The cringy K-Pop gag, quarantine episode and four episodes of Danger Force featuring Among Us in the title.
- The Floss Dance seen in most of the nickcoms series.
- The Floor is Lava reference in The Loud House.
- The overuse of rap music in most of the nickcoms series.
- The overuse of smartphones, selfies, memes, slangs or anything related to the internet pantheon in general in most of the mid-late 2010s shows onwards.
- The Dabbing episode in The Thundermans.
- The Walrus Dance scene in the Side Hustle episode "Yard Sale".
- Putting celebrities and YouTubers as special roles, half of which not many people even know them, use them in various pointless scenes and then being thrown to sergeant or neglect in the middle of an episode, with that being common in Nickcoms such as:
- Most of the characters in the modern Nickcoms are highly unlikable and act like jerks most of the time.
- Adding references to current affairs and dead memes in shows and episodes such as:
- Unlike Cartoon Network and Disney Channel cartoons, aside from SpongeBob SquarePants and it's spin-off The Patrick Star Show both of which uses traditional hand-drawn Rough Draft Studios animation, most of the shows since 2017 uses only flash animation or CGI instead of being animated in traditional hand-drawn or digital ink and paint.
- Just like the modern Cartoon Network, their bumpers and promos from 2017-2023 are a huge downgrade from their 1981-2016 ones as it went from creative and unique to outright dull and boring.
- They used to support NFTs which used to be hazardous for the environment, and it may be true that companies now start to make eco-friendly NFTs, but even then, it's still not safe due to them being prone to scams.
- Unlike Disney as a company who despite going downhill since 2016, they are still a very beloved company/network as they often listen to criticism and are still capable of producing good quality stuff, Nickelodeon on the other hand, barely listens to any sort of criticism which proves that they can be way worse than modern Disney, they also rarely create any good shows outside of a few ones, and some that are good gets cancelled very quickly and lasts about only 1 or 2 seasons.
- They have worked with many terrible people such as Dan Schneider (although thankfully fired in 2018 thanks to the MeToo movement) and Brian Robbins. Thanks to them, Jennette McCurdy's experience on "Sam & Cat" was nothing short of controversial and would cause the show to get cancelled after only one season.
- Their schedule since 2023 has became extremely repetitive as whenever they're not airing movies, they mostly air SpongeBob SquarePants (especially heavily on Sundays), The Loud House and The Patrick Star Show and nothing else aside from one-off premieres of their series. Nickelodeon hardly ever shows any other new or old sitcoms and cartoons unless it’s to promote something new. Their schedule from 2018-2023 is even worse than this since they had a wide variety of shows before Nickelodeon cancelled them for no good reason.
- With the exceptions of the two live-action Monster High films, Blue's Big City Adventure and Good Burger 2, which both only premiered exclusively on Paramount+, and the latter has never even aired on Nickelodeon, Paramount doesn't seem to bother putting their Paramount+ original movies that are associated with Nickelodeon onto physical media (at least here in the United States) for some reason.
- Examples of films that were never released onto physical media include A Loud House Christmas, A Really Haunted Loud House, Baby Shark's Big Movie, The Thundermans Return, The Casagrandes Movie and No Time to Spy: A Loud House Movie.
- Nick@Nite's programming consists of, while good, only five shows, which are Friends, Mom, SpongeBob SquarePants, Young Sheldon, and the Neighborhood.
- Overall, this era ruined a previous amazing network from 1977-2010 and has suffered an even way worse decline than Cartoon Network and Disney itself, and has no chance of redeeming itself anytime soon as their reputation has gone even worse in 2020s.
Qualities That Are Still Fun
- Their former logo from 2009 is still passable, and the network did a nice touch of adding back in the iconic orange splat in 2023, which is a nice touch, even if it can be seen as nostalgia-baiting.
- The nickcoms were good before 2011.
- There are still a handful of good or decent shows in the dark age, in addition, some shows that started off bad got good later on, although not as often as before, such as:
- The 2021 reboot of Rugrats.
- SpongeBob SquarePants (during seasons 9-present)
- The first three seasons of The Loud House and its spin-off The Casagrandes
- Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years
- The 2021 reboot of The Smurfs
- Middlemost Post (The best show to come out of this dark age)
- Big Nate (Also counts as the best show during the dark age)
- Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
- Harvey Beaks (Which sadly lasted only two seasons)
- The first two seasons of Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn.
- Glitch Techs.
- Oggy and the Cockroaches season 4 (despite the controversy with "(Un)happy Camper")
- I Am Frankie.
- Are You Afraid of the Dark (2019 revival).
- All That (2019 revival).
- ICarly (2021 revival).
- Hunter Street.
- The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish
- The Bureau of Magical Things.
- Warped!
- Drama Club.
- It's Pony.
- The Other Kingdom.
- 100 Things to Do Before High School.
- Life With Boys.
- How To Be Indie.
- Supah Ninjas.
- House Of Anubis.
- Instant Mom.
- Deadtime Stories.
- Ride.
- Legendary Dudas.
- Transformers Earthspark.
- Monster High (2022), an awesome CGI reboot of the original series from 2010
- Rock Paper Scissors. (also known as the best show to come out of this era)
- The last two seasons of Henry Danger.
- Knuckles.
- By 2019, Nickelodeon's parent company, ViacomCBS acquired Paws, Inc. Since then, many Nickelodeon fans began hoping that Garfield will become the new possible official mascot of Nickelodeon, as well as the soon-to-be Nickelodeon icon. In fact, the character of Garfield has yet to be better than SpongeBob. Likewise, Nickelodeon Animation Studio is currently developing a new Garfield series, alongside Paws, Inc.
- Aside from The Fred trilogy, The Last Airbender, Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, Wonder Park, Fun Size and Playing With Fire, most of their films are still great to watch.
- Speaking of, since the 2020s, Nickelodeon started returning to traditionally-animated feature films, with the release of The Loud House Movie.
- They actually had the rights to air Oggy and the Cockroaches in the USA from February-March 2015 despite the controversy with "(Un)happy Camper" as it stopped airing on Nickelodeon after "High-Rise Nightmare" because of that controversy.
- Their international versions are still good, with some exceptions such as Nickelodeon India and Nickelodeon Brazil.
- The Nickelodeon's Ho-Ho Holiday Special, Nickelodeon's Not So Valentine's Special, & Nickelodeon's Sizzling Summer Camp Special live-action crossover films are pretty creative & interesting, despite being executed poorly.
- Their in-house animation studio is still great, and has spawned a title referring to shows that were produced by them, the Nicktoons (not to be confused with the TV channel).
- They actually had the guts to roast Skibidi Toilet during the Nick News Rewind 2023![5]
- The channel used to be amazing before 2011.
- Despite mentioned that they no longer care about their older series, they do however did a great job reviving a few ones such as: iCarly, The Smurfs and Rugrats (2021 revivals and reboots), All That and Are You Afraid of the Dark (2019 revivals).
- Their video games and DVDs of series are still good, even if their menus are lazily designed.
- As mentioned before, they at least fired Dan Schneider as soon as the first allegations about him came out, even if the damage by him had already been done.
Reception
Since 2011, Nickelodeon has faced significant backlash due to a series of issues that have tarnished its reputation. Viewers have criticized the network for bland sitcoms, plagued by repetitive storylines and lackluster humor. The departure of Dan Schneider in 2018 amid allegations of inappropriate behavior has left a lingering negative impact. Poor scheduling decisions and the premature cancellation of promising shows after just one season have frustrated fans. Additionally, the perceived decline in the quality of animated shows, controversial reboots, and intense competition from streaming services have further eroded Nickelodeon's standing in the entertainment industry.
Videos
References
- ↑ https://books.google.com.au/books?id=C-N2CQAAQBAJ&pg=PT105&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
- ↑ Hendershot, Heather, ed. (2004). Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics, and Economics of America's Only TV Channel for Kids. pp. 15-16. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-3562-1.
- ↑ http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-23112505.html
- ↑ https://twitter.com/nickandmore/status/1741451417678651887
- ↑ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wu3tCIYffCE&pp=ygUaU2tpYmlkaSB0b2lsZXQgbmlja2Vsb2Rlb24%3D
Comments
- Animation
- Creator regrets
- Cartoons
- "It's made for kids"
- Companies against criticism
- Companies that used to be good
- Companies that went downhill
- Bad shows
- Boring shows
- Overrated shows
- Controversial shows
- Greedy companies
- 1970s programs
- 1980s programs
- 1990s programs
- 2000s programs
- 2010s programs
- 2020s programs
- 1970s media
- 1980s media
- 1990s media
- 2000s media
- 2010s media
- 2020s media
- Networks
- Western shows
- Bad eras of good networks
- Long-running shows
- Shows with bad morals
- Bad media
- Shovelware companies
- Nickelodeon's downfall
- Quantity over quality
- Internet memes
- Flash animated shows