Former ‘90s kids are a pretty nostalgia-obsessed bunch. We put the cultural signifiers of our youth on pedestals, turn them into memes, Tweet them and reblog them in the hopes our peers will recognize them too. In particular, we recall with great fondness the bright colors of our youth: neon green slime, the big red SNiCK couch and, of course, orange soda. Which probably explains why last week, Nickelodeon launched “The ‘90s Are All That,” a late-night programming block aimed at the 18-to-35 demographic rebroadcasting the network’s most popular show from the ‘90s. Last Monday’s premiere, which featured episodes of Doug, All That, Kenan & Kel and Clarissa Explains It All, netted an average of 550,000 viewers according to the Hollywood Reporter, outperformed nearly all the network late-night shows among 18-to-24-year-olds and dominated social media. With one voice, the youth of America were rising up to ask that all-important question:
“Who loves orange soda?”
Even for mini-boomers who grew up without cable, ‘90s Nick references are a source of instant cultural capital in social situations — just ask any college student at a large Midwestern state school who dressed up as Quailman, Doug Funnie’s superhero alter-ego, belt-buckle headband and all.
Doug creator Jim Jinkins knows this as well as anyone. “I had a college-age friend who came up to me with the most sincere look on his face,” he recalls. “He’d just come back from college, so he’d been with a lot of other friends his age. He said, ‘Doug was the Citizen Kane of our generation.’’’
As nostalgic fans took to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr to express their enthusiasm, the shows’ actors and creators began getting involved in the hype as well. One of the most active participants in the social media frenzy surrounding “The ‘90s Are All That” has been actor Kel Mitchell, star of All That and Kenan & Kel. Since the start of the retro block, he has been engaging with fans on Twitter and even repeating a few of his classic catchphrases. “It feels good every time someone comes up to me and says, ‘Kel, you were part of my childhood growing up,’” he says. “I thank God for giving me that. It is a blessing. I always make sure to comment back or tweet back and sign as many autographs as I can when I can because I really do appreciate the kind words and love.”
Jason Zimbler, who played annoying kid brother Ferguson Darling on Clarissa Explains It All, said he was excited for the show to return to television and that he looked forward to watching with friends and “referring back to home movies from 20 years ago, but very well-produced home movies.”
“It feels like it was a different lifetime, a different person almost,” Zimbler says. “I think it wasn’t as much of a role — I have a younger sister and was her annoying brother, so I was just doing it for money. I was being an annoying brother for hire. It just comes naturally.”
Although the shows were meant primarily for a tween and teen audience, they managed to reach audiences outside their intended demographic — and still do. Part of what made the shows work was their ability to appeal to multiple generations without the cloying feel of “fun for the whole family” that plagued children’s and tween programming in the decades before. “I think the people who produced them and put them together were really trying to strive for the left-of-center children’s television market, not only to kids but their parents,” says Dan Tamberelli, best known for his role as Little Pete Wrigley on The Adventures of Pete and Pete and for various roles on All That. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say that Pete and Pete was a show they would sit down and watch with their parents and they would enjoy it as much as the kids. And that says something about the quality of programming that was going on. They were really trying to bring everybody together and bring good programs for people that weren’t just for kids.”
While the product had an impact on fans, the process had an impact on the actors whose careers Nickelodeon launched. The Nickelodeon lineup became a place for young actors — particularly those who wanted to do comedy — to learn the craft and how to create memorable characters. Dan Tamberelli says he was always treated like an adult while on set, and as such, the young actors were given some creative freedom to ad lib and try out new things. By the third season, he and fellow cast member Mark Saul (who went on to play Dr. Steve Mostow on Grey’s Anatomy) were able to sit in the writers’ room and get Writer’s Guild of America credit for their work, which was put on air.
All That in particular, as a sketch show, allowed for the actors and writers to try a lot of new things, from zany tween-friendly humor to satire and even celebrity impersonations (Katrina Johnson as Ross Perot; Kenan Thompson as Bill Cosby). Ed, Kel Mitchell’s character from the “Good Burger” sketch (and later feature film), began as a sketch called “Dream Remote.” The writers loved the spaced-out teen affectations and encouraged Mitchell to build his own character around the voice. “Something about the ‘90s Brandy wig or the Poetic Justice / Menace II Society wig I choose just worked and Ed was born,” he says.
Kel’s most iconic character, a wacky, orange soda-loving avatar for himself on Kenan & Kel, came out of a love of slapstick comedy legends. “Kel Kimble was a lot of fun to play because I got to do physical comedy and do the type of comedy I saw John Ritter do on Three’s Company, which was one of my all-time favorite shows,” he says. “Plus, Martin and Jerry Lewis were just all around classy and hilarious guys and I feel like we did that type of slapstick buddy comedy for our generation. We had great writers and Kenan and I just had great comedic timing together. It was truly just an all-out good time.”
While Nick’s live-action lineup entertained tweens late into the night, the network also made strides in animation with its distinctive, bar-raising “NickToons,” the first of which was Doug.
Jinkins says the character was born out of less noble intentions, as a way to vent his frustration while working as a freelance artist in New York. “Doug kept a journal,” Jinkins says. “I didn’t keep a journal. I doodled. And these little cartoons, this little character named Doug was not a little boy. It was not nearly as safe as what he turned out to be. It was heavy and expressed a lot of my deepest, darkest thoughts.” Eventually, out of those thoughts, came a 12-year-old boy named Doug Funnie, his dog Porkchop and the entire fictional town of Bluffington — Campbell described Jinkins’ neighborhood maps and plans for the show as being like “a map from World War II” and said for a long time, the Nickelodeon execs used Doug as a guideline for what a “show Bible” should look like.
The NickToons lineup expanded to include Rugrats and other shows from Klasky-Csupo, the animation house which also worked on the early days of The Simpsons. Shows like shorts compilation KaBlam! allowed animators to experiment and expose audiences to many different styles of animation, from cardboard and stop-motion to claymation and the more free-flowing style of Emily Hubley’s short “The Girl With Her Head Coming Off,” a project for Nickelodeon’s Creative Labs, later featured on KaBlam!
“When my son Max was 4 or 5, I gave him a stack of old pencil animation, I think it was from my film Enough, to play with,” Hubley says. “When I went to see how he was doing, he was annoyed that my characters’ heads were coming off. He was frantically drawing necks on all the pages… rescuing them.”
Rocko’s Modern Life creator Joe Murray, who writes about the history of animation in his book, Creating Animated Cartoons with Character: A Guide to Developing and Producing Your Own Series for TV, the Web, and Short Film, says the explosion of compelling, off-beat animated programming came out of a weariness with what he calls the “Dark Ages” of animation, the kid-friendly, toy-based franchises of the 1970s and ‘80s. “Suddenly there’s this appetite growing and growing for, ‘We want some decent cartoons to watch,’” Murray says. “And animation in the ‘80s started to break out because we had things like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? come out and people saying, ‘Hey, I remember those cartoons. What happened to those?’ And so when cable came around, here was this whole brand new canvas that not too many people were paying attention to. Fox was originally a cable channel. So The Simpsons comes out and then MTV starts doing this wacked-out animated stuff so these people at Nickelodeon had this really small channel, and they said, ‘Well, let’s try to break out in some fashion. Let’s give some people carte blanche to do whatever they want with animation because nobody’s paying attention to us anyway and do some really great stuff.’’
Murray says the idea for Rocko’s Modern Life came about after Nickelodeon wanted to adapt another one of his films, My Dog Zero, into a series. He didn’t think the concept would work as a full show, so he went back to films of his college years for inspiration and decided to create a satirical, slice-of-life show depicting “what’s a bad day doing our laundry, or a rough day at the beach and making that the core of the series.” His mild-mannered wallaby protagonist, who he calls the “eye of the hurricane,” came out of an instance where Murray saw a wallaby at a zoo in a cage surrounded by screeching monkeys, and, as we all do sometimes, found the experience highly relatable.
By using anthropomorphic, animal characters — Heffer, the steer with the overeating problem; Filburt, the bespectacled turtle with neuroses — Murray says he was able to “do a lot more things on a social level.” One episode in particular, which deals with Heffer’s relationship with his adoptive family (a pack of wolves who planned on eating him, but raised him as one of their own), resonated with viewers and the media.
“You were able to cross over from the animal world to the human world, which sometimes aren’t too far apart,” Murray says. “The L.A. Times did a whole write-up on the adoption episode because apparently no one had done something like that before in dealing with an issue like that and how it was dealt with. People were looking at it and studying it in this fashion, and it was just this cartoon of issues we all had in our life.”
Campbell recalls with particular fondness an episode of Doug that became a point of contention between him and Jinkins and the rest of the writing staff. In the episode, Doug finds a large wad of money and returns it to the police station so its rightful owner can claim it. Nobody does, so the money is legally his, but then a little old lady approaches him looking for it. Doug, as he always does, of course, ends up doing the right thing and returning the money. “Jim and I had such a fight with our writers because they said, ‘No kid would return the money to the police station and then, when the police told him the money was his, he would not give it to the little old lady,’” he says. “He is a lot more like a lot of kids than adults tend to think. There are a lot more kids who act that way and whose initial instincts are that way than we give kids credit for. And I guess those are some of the kids — that’s one of the differences with Doug, I think. We tried to stick to those instincts, what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’ And a lot of kids’ programming goes the other way, into more cynical things.”
Jinkins and Campbell describe Doug as being “pre-cynical,” with “hope” being an operative word in their mission statement. On the website for the duo’s production company, Cartoon Pizza, they cite creating programming that is entertaining and engaging for young people as well as having “a strong moral center,” citing the deeper themes of the fictional works that inspired them in their youth, such as Disney and Lord of the Rings.
“It’s hard to do that and not be sappy,” Campbell says. “You have to be realistic. You have to know how the world works. You can’t be My Little Pony or something for a 12-year-old kid. It’s harder to do that, and sometimes we can pull it off better than other times, but that’s what we try to do.”
In addition to its emotional resonance with college kids dressing up as Quailman, Doug provides an example of another Nickelodeon cultural legacy: the contributions to music, original and collaborated. Doug’s distinctive, beatbox-heavy score was the work of mouth sounds whiz Fred Newman (who now works on A Prairie Home Companion) and producer Dan Sawyer. “Fred would take a tuna fish can full of water and stomp it for a sound, but Dan could put it to legitimate music,” Jinkins says. “It was a spectacular collaboration that made it have a very unique sound.”
Alongside memorable, original in-universe music, the Nick lineup helped shape a generation’s musical tastes with the help of some big names from the worlds of rock, indie-pop, rap and R&B. The B-52s performed the theme tune for Rocko’s Modern Life. Devo frontman and longtime Wes Anderson collaborator Mark Mothersbaugh composed music for Rugrats. Swedish dance-pop star Robyn guest-starred on Action League Now! as fictional singer Blandi, and KISS guest-starred in another short as their action-figure counterparts. “It was right when they were making the KISS dolls, so it was a big deal to get the prototypes, and use them in the short,” Fain says.
The variety show format of All That allowed for influential hip-hop, rap and R&B stars to connect with young fans. In addition to TLC, who performed the show’s memorable theme song, performers on the show included Missy Elliott, Nas, Run-D.M.C. and OutKast.
Tamberelli, a musician touring now with his rock trio, Jounce, says working on All That and The Adventures of Pete and Pete had significant impacts on him musically. He says participating in the All That Music and More Festival in 1999 and doing 22 shows alongside 98 Degrees, Monica and a host of musicians taught him a lot about life on the road. And Pete and Pete, in particular, was known for its heavy-hitting musical guest stars, including recurring guest Iggy Pop, Kate Pierson of the B-52s, Michael Stipe, New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano, LL Cool J and Luscious Jackson.
“When Iggy Pop was on the set, we’d have lunch together every day and just hang out,” he says. “He taught me how to play a couple of Stooges songs on the bass. And I’m like 13 years old. It’s really a pretty cool experience. That specific episode, it was called ‘Dance Fever,’ Luscious Jackson performed at the school dance, so one of those days, we had a jam session. I was just learning how to play bass, and there was Luscious Jackson playing, I was playing and then Iggy Pop would come up and we’d mess around for a minute, hanging out during lunch and me being in 7th or 8th grade, it was the coolest thing in the world.”
For most of the young actors who grew up in front of Nickelodeon’s cameras, life went on after the final wrap. Although quite a few stuck with acting, and with some notable success stories (Amanda Bynes, Melissa Joan Hart, Kenan Thompson, etc.), many cast members ascended into adulthood quietly and without the tales of excess that typically stigmatize and reinforce stereotypes of “former child actors.” “There’s always a kind of stigma or an assumption about what it was like for kids who had a chance to do this kind of work when they were teenagers, that a lot of them come away from it somehow bruised psychologically or emotionally,” Zimbler says. “That experience was not mine, the frequently thought-of experience. Mine was great. I worked with great people, had a great time doing it, and I moved on to my next thing.”
Although most of the actors have moved on — and quite a few, like Zimbler, left acting altogether — they still keep in touch and recall their days as part of the network fondly. Mitchell says he and his frequent co-star Kenan Thompson, now a regular cast member on Saturday Night Live, still keep in contact but have not seen each other in about four years. “Our mothers talk to each other every now and then over the phone though,” he says. “Everything is good, we are just both busy guys. We have talked about collaborating on something together again before. so I don’t think that would be a problem, it’s just more of a scheduling thing. But it can happen, and it would be great to work with Kenan again.”
Tamberelli, who lives in New York like many of the former Nick stars, tries to keep in contact with his former castmates and collaborators from those years.“I still speak with the writers and creators of Pete and Pete,” he says. “I try to see them. I see Toby Huss, who played Artie. And the other Pete, Mike Maronna, I see all the time because we both live in Brooklyn. I gave Kenan [Thompson] guitar lessons, so I see Kenan all the time. I talk to Mark Saul from All That. I keep in touch with a few of them, but the people who live in New York, I try to see.”
What seemed to stick with the ‘90s Nickelodeon teams though — actors, animators and fans perhaps most of all — was the sense of fun. The shows were goofy and irreverent and could simultaneously involve green goo and talking boogers with some rather serious truths about growing up that still ring true for twentysomethings.
“I can’t stress enough what a great, fun time it was,” Fain says. “My wife came to visit the set one time. Originally we shot in people’s yards but by the end of it, we had actually rented stages and a house set like you would a TV sitcom. And came in to visit and she said, ‘I’ve never seen grown men talk so seriously how to drop a doll into a pot of creamed corn.’”
And speaking of creamed corn, there are also still vivid memories of another common sticky situation — the tween gross-out favorite that was “getting slimed.” Tamberelli described the experience as “cold and pudding-y and sometimes, depending on how much food coloring is put into the batch, you may or may not dye your skin that shade of green.”
Joe Murray, whose latest project is an online animation channel called KaboingTV, says he often finds himself reminiscing about the ‘90s with other animators, but that with the opening of new channels for animation and innovation, the best is yet to come. “I guess it’s like any nostalgia,” he says. “I collect old toys from the past. And you kind of get into a place. I like that a lot, but I’m also very optimistic about the future and where we could go, and sometimes I get a little frustrated at people saying, ‘It’s never gonna be this good.’ It’s going to get there. It could get better. It should get better.”
Even with a career of his own away from Nickelodeon though, Kel is ready to entertain as his old self again and reminisce with fans on the big red couch of the Internet. “I’m so happy that I can put a smile on their faces again during ‘The 90’s Are All That,’” Mitchell says, before launching into one of Kel-the-character’s signature lines. “I just love it… I do, I do, I do-oooooooo! You can retweet that.”