Nickelodeon Discussion

[NostradamusTheSeer]

I'd like to see the uncut, unedited episodes, but between the networks' qualms about certain content and Kricfalusi being known for editing things he didn't like out of episodes (usu. from latter-day episodes where he had reduced to no creative control), that may not be possible. I'm not even sure where the master tapes are or who who controls the rights these days.

[FoxTail]

I know very little, but i would assume Nickelodeon owns the rights (or the parent company) of the original Nick R&S show.  But then when they did that Adult Party thing, wasn't that with Comedy Central?  Maybe they own the rights to those episodes.

But who owns the rights to the characters and merchandising?

[NostradamusTheSeer]

That was Spike TV, which is now defunct (don't even know what it's called now).  I figure, much like its fellow adult animated comedies Gary the Rat and Stripperella, they've been happily swept under the rug and forgotten by fans.  Kricfalusi didn't help matters, admittedly, with his pervtastic DVD commentary alongside Katie Rice (now working as a director on Hulu's Animaniacs reboot, which perhaps not coincidentally features a baddie with a design very reminiscent of Kricfalusi's work).

[RainySunshine]

Spike TV became the Paramount Network.  Pretty big shift from a "guys network" to what it is now. 

The channel is owned by ViacomCBS.

So the same people who own Nickelodeon.  So it's all in Nickelodeon's hands... or Viacoms.

[NostradamusTheSeer]

I have to say: I think it's a mistake.  John K. casts a pretty long shadow over the industry, and his stink is indelibly on these characters.  They've tried to do the show without Kricfalusi, and the quality suffered... of course, it suffered when he got total, unchecked creative reign without guys like Bob Camp to reign in his hedonism and his indulgent bloat, as well. I see a reboot quickly turning into an abortive fiasco.

If you wanted to create whole new characters, in the vein of Ren and Stimpy, sure, I could get behind that. However, be prepared to get compared unfavorably to the glut of Spumco knockoffs that have been showing up for more than 20 years, like the short-lived misfire Schnookums and Meat, or even latter-day SpongeBob. Of course, Kricfalusi won't see a nickel on the reboot, and I expect he's got some pretty choice thoughts on that.

It's telling, though, that even one of his victims pretty much said, "Hey, it was the nineties. Everyone was doing it. A lot of execs had a young piece of ass on the side"-- the same defense I've been using since that #MeToo mess broke. The difference was, these men knew how to treat their gals, with a modicum of decorum. That's what got John K. in trouble, not the banging.  Have as many barely-legal side-pieces as you want, but be an adult about it. Show some class. I bet even the other guys in John's social circle thought his behavior was immature and skeezy.  Treat her like a lady, not a prize thoroughbred. Don't pass around naked pics of them at parties and leer over them to your buddies. Do well by 'em. Buy 'em a house. Marry them when they're of age (or at least promise to).  Respect them, damn it.

[RainySunshine]

I agree, people need to be respected.  But there should never be any underage gal on the side... or anyone.  That is flat out wrong.  Not to mention the number of affairs going on.  If they treated them with respect, they wouldn't have an underage woman on the side.

[NostradamusTheSeer]

I've defended John K. in the past using the "separate the art from the artist" and "he paved the way for you" arguments, but, really, this is beyond the pale.  Kricfalusi contacted one of his former proteges with an idea for R&S:APC  he seemed to envision as some sort of syrupy, nostalgic love letter to their time together, but which comes off even more depraved that "Ren Seeks Help" (self-abuse? nightmare imagery? calling her, essentially, "trailer trash"? You have to wonder about him....) 

Also, a cereal that tastes like cigarette butts? .... Yech.   (holds a box of "Nut & Hore" prominently in front of the camera and munches from it)   

[Anyponedrawn]

It's good you realize though his actions were wrong.  It's tough sometimes to swallow when you realize something you once defended is now undefendable when more info comes out.

[NostradamusTheSeer]

All the same, does anyone agree with Robin Byrd's petition to get the reboot cancelled?  A lot of people, from storyboard artists to voice actors, will find themselves screwed out of a well-paying gig--many of which had nothing to do with John K.'s shenanigans 25-30 years ago (not unlike when Harvey Weinstein was caught: when he went to jail, his company was dissolved, dozens of films were shelved, and many promising actors' careers unfairly suffered in the backlash).

 Byrd fears a reboot would be Kricfalusi's foot in the door to begin his campaign of perverse sexual terror anew with a new generation of starry-eyed young girls... but, c'mon. Are her worries really grounded in reality? I think young people are a bit smarter than that. As are their parents, I wager. I realize her experiences were pretty awful, and I do sincerely hate to blame the victim here, but someone should really question the wisdom of Byrd's mother and father, letting a man well into this thirties "mentor" a girl half his age and even move in with him. They were classic enablers who all but sold her into prostitution with a pencil in her hand.

 Today, with the presence of social media and numerous documentaries, blogs, web videos on Kricfalusi and his ilk available, folks are well-warned--a lot more than they were then, certainly. In the age of #MeToo, young artists, parents, and guardians know what to look for, should some new wunderkind rise to prominence in the industry and, citing Kricfalusi as his inspiration but determined to do what he did but do 'im one better, begin looking to groom new talent....

[MasterXtreme]

This is a weird one. Nickelodeon for the first time ever is showing a live NFL game, a playoff game no less, between the Saints and the Bears.  They will be using their own hosts at the stadium.  Noah Eagle -- son of CBS Sports NFL play-by-play broadcaster Ian Eagle -- will be on the call and he will be joined by analyst Nate Burleson who is also a former pro NFL player.

During the game they will also be showing a sneak peek of the new Spongebob spinoff - Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years.  From what we've seen, the CGI looks truly awful.  As if it came from the early 2000s. 

[Silverwing]

Kamp Koral graphically looks horrible.  It looks like a poorly rendered cutscene in an old video game.  Wow.... Why would Nick do that?

[Blurr]

Because they are trying desperately to keep Spongebob alive instead of letting him die with dignity.

[RainySunshine]

He should have ended many years ago.

[TheBeesSneeze]

This is a weird one. Nickelodeon for the first time ever is showing a live NFL game, a playoff game no less, between the Saints and the Bears.  They will be using their own hosts at the stadium.  Noah Eagle -- son of CBS Sports NFL play-by-play broadcaster Ian Eagle -- will be on the call and he will be joined by analyst Nate Burleson who is also a former pro NFL player.

During the game they will also be showing a sneak peek of the new Spongebob spinoff - Kamp Koral: SpongeBob's Under Years.  From what we've seen, the CGI looks truly awful.  As if it came from the early 2000s.

Lol!  So this is related.

Article

Grown-Ups Loved the N.F.L. on Nickelodeon. But What About Children?

The cable channel aired a slime-filled version of the Bears-Saints wild-card game on Sunday, to the delight of many adults. But the goal was to convert children into football fans.

When Michael Thomas scored the first touchdown of Sunday’s wild-card game between the Chicago Bears and the New Orleans Saints, fans watching the game on CBS saw a close angle of him spiking the football. Fans watching on Nickelodeon, the children’s channel, saw something much more exciting: digital slime cannons spewing Nickelodeon’s signature green goo all over the end zone.

“There we go with the slime cannons. Ayyy, that is epic!” said Gabrielle Nevaeh Green, a 15-year-old Nickelodeon star and one of the game’s commentators.

It takes more work than you might expect to get the slime cannons right. “Getting the slime consistency in the cameras, to the Nick team, was a big thing,” said Shawn Robbins, the coordinating producer for the game. “I was on a lot of emails where it was ‘tweak this a little more.’”

Nickelodeon has long featured various sports and athletes on its television shows — and has also had a robust presence at the Super Bowl in recent years — but broadcasting a full N.F.L. playoff game is a first. It went all out on something it thought the children and teenagers, who are its core audience, would enjoy.

The score display and digital information superimposed on the field were done so in bright orange, lime green and purple. A giant image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants appeared on the nets behind the field-goal posts. Players were given googly eyes and hamburger hats. The Saints quarterbacks Drew Brees and Taysom Hill were compared to an even more famous duo: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick Star.

The differences were not limited to digital ephemera. Rules that adult football fans are assumed to understand were instead explained. An analyst, former N.F.L. wide receiver Nate Burleson, made frequent use of (sometimes tortured) analogies, at one point explaining that driving down the field was like studying, and that snaps in the red zone were the test. Noah Eagle, the play-by-play announcer, said excitedly at one point that New Orleans receiver Deonte Harris was “hotter than a Peruvian puff pepper.”

That is a reference to an episode of the Nickelodeon show “Drake and Josh” from 2005, when Eagle, who is 24, was just 8.

Green, who was attending her first N.F.L. game, wasn’t asked to understand football like Burleson, who played in the league for 11 years. But Robbins still wanted to get her a one-page cheat sheet for each team. Instead, a production assistant accidentally included her on the same distribution list for the game notes that went to Tony Romo.
Editors’ Picks

Chris Rock Re-edits a Special, and the Result Is Fascinating
Continue reading the main story

“Her mom sent me an email that said, ‘Um, hey Shawn, what do we need to know from this 800-page packet?’” Robbins said.

Until recently, it was hard to imagine Nickelodeon showing an entire N.F.L. game. “We are not encouraging anybody to play or not play. We are there as fans, and we are celebrating as fans,” Cyma Zarghami, then Nickelodeon’s president, told The New York Times nearly three years ago in response to questions about associating a channel for children with a violent sport that can cause head trauma.

“The actual sport doesn’t ever actually get to Nickelodeon,” she said.

But the sports media landscape has changed since then. Nickelodeon has a new president, Brian Robbins. It is also part of a new corporate structure, which brings with it different imperatives. In 2019, Viacom — which owned cable channels like Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central — remerged with CBS, which pays the N.F.L. a billion dollars annually to show its games.

“This is sort of a dream come true for kids to get their version, sports their way, on the network they like to watch it on,” Brian Robbins said in an interview. “What changed is Viacom and CBS merged and made it a lot easier to make it happen.”

He was unequivocal about how he viewed the broadcast. “Nickelodeon’s broadcast of the wild card game was one of the greatest moments in the history of Nickelodeon,” he said.

All of the N.F.L.’s television contracts expire in 2021 and 2022. CBS may still be thought of as the Tiffany Network at league headquarters, but in some ways it has a weaker hand to play than its rivals. ViacomCBS is much smaller than competitors like the Walt Disney Company (ABC and ESPN), Comcast (NBC) and AT&T (DirecTV and Warner Media), and it has more than twice as much debt on its balance sheet as the similarly sized Fox Corp.

Putting Sunday’s game on Nickelodeon in addition to CBS was one way to potentially impress the league ahead of negotiations. Viewership for the N.F.L. would increase, along with the opportunity to capture a new generation of football fans.

“This came out of conversations with the CBS Sports team and the N.F.L. when there was going to be another wild card game,” Brian Robbins said. “They were negotiating to get the rights and somebody suggested a broadcast simulcast on Nick. I think the N.F.L. really was enthused by that opportunity, which kind of sealed the deal for us, for CBS to get the rights to broadcast an extra wild card game.”

ESPN, albeit without a children’s channel, has pursued a similar strategy, bringing its “MegaCast” production — typically used for the college football national championship game — to its Sunday wild-card game. The Baltimore Ravens’ victory over the Tennessee Titans was shown on six different ESPN channels: ABC and ESPN (traditional), Freeform (fun), ESPN2 (coaches’ room), ESPN+ (analytics-focused) and a Spanish-language broadcast on ESPN Deportes.

Television networks have long used big football games to advertise their other offerings, and Nickelodeon’s wild-card game was no different. There were commercials for other Nickelodeon shows and a section in players’ bios that included their favorite Nickelodeon show. Members of the reboot of the teen sketch show “All That” did impressions throughout the game; in an awkward moment, an impression of the rapper Cardi B segued into a referee calling a personal conduct foul and a microphone in the nearly empty stadium picking up a player yelling an expletive.

Shawn Robbins, who normally works on sports studio shows for CBS, was assigned the playoff game back in August. Most of the cameras and video feeds were borrowed from the CBS broadcast, but a test game in December showed that the Nickelodeon broadcast needed to control at least a few of its own cameras. On a typical broadcast, the cameraman will zoom in on whoever scores the touchdown. But Nickelodeon needed touchdown shots to stay wide, in order to fully showcase the slime cannons.

Oh, and the hamburger hats. “There are certain kinds of shots we needed. We needed a little extra headroom to put a hamburger on their head,” Shawn Robbins said.

The broadcast seemed like a hit, at least according to the reaction of mostly older millennial and middle-aged sportswriters. “To have the game stripped of all its self-importance and hubris was an absolute delight,” wrote Sports Illustrated.

But the excitement of sportswriters who have seen hundreds of N.F.L. games is not the same thing as success. They are not the target audience — children are.

Most important for Nickelodeon is how many of them watched, data that will be available Tuesday, though Brian Robbins said the early numbers are good, and that the N.F.L. was “thrilled.” Most important for the N.F.L. is whether this alternative broadcast helps turn more children into the kinds of football fans who will ask their parents to take them to games or to buy jerseys, and who eventually pay for their own tickets to games when they become adults.

That’ll take a lot longer to figure out.

Article 2]

Nickelodeon’s game draws 2 million viewers

Sunday’s CBS airing between the New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears attracted roughly 30 million viewers, and its kids’ version on Nickelodeon drew approximately 2 million, becoming the Nickelodeon’s “most-watched program among total viewers in nearly four years,” the network said.

[Rainberry]

This is strange.  An iCarly revival is happening...

It won't be on Nickelodeon.

I hate how all these revivals are not on their original networks and moving to streaming services.