The 90s Are All That

[Daikun]

NickRewind is as good as dead. It's soon going to be nothing but iCarly. It might as well just be regular TeenNick at that point.

[Rynnec]

It was nice while it lasted.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Judging from their recent past schedules, they tried to aim for recent nostalgia by airing Zoey 101 and D&J despite already airing those shows whenever, and completely neglected to foresee the negative PR the lead actors in both shows would experience. Whatever. TeenNick was a dumping ground network for ages.

[Avaitor]

It's kind of weird to see people say that Boomerang should shut down, when TeenNick's schedule is just as poorly ran, and no one bats an eye.

But whatever, the block has been useless for a long time, and a lot of these shows are on Paramount+ and/or DVD at this point.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Because from what I've seen, the CN fandom is more hardcore, so they put more value into things like Boomerang or Toonami. While everyone's used to Nick's other channels/blocks being shit.

[Daxdiv]

Yeah, maybe it is the circles I've been in throughout the years, but CN's fanbase feels more hardcore than Nick even though ratings & other things would tell me the opposite. Maybe it's that Nick's main demographic doesn't care much for social media or maybe because people know how much Nick screws the pooch on scheduling other shows & not giving them time to grow.

[Daikun]

TeenNick has removed the NickRewind branding. Buh bye.

EDIT: NickRewind has acknowledged it themselves on their own Twitter.

[Avaitor]

Unfortunate, but it's not like the block has been of much use over the past few years anyway. Who even has TeenNick?

[Dr. Insomniac]

Nickelodeon's got a problem where they want to pander hard to nostalgia audiences, but there's at least three different decades of nostalgic adults with conflicting opinions on what "their" Nick is, so there's no way to appeal to them all since there's no evergreen Nick show that 80s, 90s, and 00s kids all grew up on besides maybe Double Dare. The Nickelodeon fandom is too fragmented, with various generations pointing to whenever as the time Nickelodeon died for them. And some speedbumps like the Hey Arnold movie not doing as well as they hoped or some planned revivals of TV shows getting thrown out because one of the lead actors became embroiled in controversy must have confused their strategy. So of course, that leads to sections like NickRewind eroding and losing focus of what they are, turning into glorified promotion for iCarly.

One of the clearest examples of their confusion was that new All That reboot they were pushing hard all across their social media for like a year before they apparently cancelled it without any fanfare. Like it was obvious how much they were pandering to people who grew up on All That by bringing back Kenan, Kel, and Lori Beth Denberg. But then the reality sets in, kids watching won't get why they're supposed to act like Coach Kreeton or the Loud Librarian are any important, and most of the adults aren't interested in watching preteens do sketch shows.

Anyway, PopArena's now in the 90s part of Nick Knacks. And I thought here was as good a place as any to mention it.

[Avaitor]

It's funny to see how time can rehabilitate seemingly anything. I remember when iCarly and Victorious were new and 90's kids who were nostalgic for Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Angry Beavers bemoaned their existence. Now that's all I'm seeing on here.

It's funny how the cartoons from this era are all but forgotten, but this is around the time when Nick instated their policy that if it doesn't match SpongeBob's ratings, it's trash. So it's pretty much their fault. Obviously Avatar has done well for itself, but sometimes I'll see them try to push something out of the Mighty B, which no one cared about at the time, so they go back to Schneider shows or the 90's stuff.

[Dr. Insomniac]

The Schneider fandom's especially strange to me. I figured all the pedo memes and rumors and the eventual allegations from a few of the actors that he was at least an asshole to work with would make those shows fade in time, but it seems they've only gotten bigger. Which I should get since I was a kid when half of Schneider's shows were big deals, but I don't, so... I don't know. It's always mind-boggling when I see a video essay for one of these shows, skim through it, and the narrator's like "Here's how this show changed the TV landscape and became a huge influence" as if they're talking about The Sopranos or Seinfeld and not fucking Zoey 101.

Vaguely reminds me how I keep seeing YouTubers react to Buffy despite all the shit surrounding Whedon. Even guys who I know are fully aware of all of Whedon's controversies are like "Yeah, I can't wait to start Buffy!"

And that adds to how confused Nick's strategy in pandering to older fans is, because they obviously can't do sequels to some of Schneider's shows due to Drake Bell and Jamie Lynn Spears. There's a whole decade of Nickelodeon that was seemingly very successful but also where they only have 3 or so IPs worth mining for spinoffs and cinematic universes or whatever without getting cries of "Why did you hire that guy again?", "Didn't this show inspire a shooting at a supermarket?" or "You know what they did to that kid, right?".

Nick's never been a network interested in the long-term and always focused on immediate success, and when a network goes on long enough that suddenly people outside of their demographic are interested in their network again because they grew up with it, surprise, the majority of what you have to offer them is reminders of some random forgotten cartoon or a sitcom where a quarter of the cast are on a watchlist. It sorta makes sense why after making a Hey Arnold, Rocko, and Zim movie respectively, they ceased on that specific angle because what else can they really do? Nobody's really clamoring for a Wild Thornberries or Rocket Power movie.

[Avaitor]

It IS weird that the Schneider shows are still prevalent, yeah. But that's kind of all Nick really had durign that era, or at least the most recognizable. You'd think that they would try to push Scott Fellow's stuff more, especially because on the odd chance that Ned's Declassified does appear on social media, it does alright. Hell, Pop Arena said that it got the second most requests for his Kickstarter samples after AYAOTD?

And the Schneider stuff is even different from the Buffyverse, who you can largely attribute to being more than just his works. Schneider prided himself on being a workhorse similar to Tyler Perry and seemingly never let another crew member get a slither of attention that could go to him. There's no Greenwalt, Espenson or Noxon to fall back on.

But yeah, it's probably time to back off on the nostalgia and focus on their current library. I honestly couldn't tell you what they have besides SpongeBob and its spin-offs and Loud House, which is probably a problem already.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Yeah, there are other live-action Nick creators Nick's social media could push instead of Schneider all the time. Like Thomas Lynch. He didn't make anything I liked all that much either, never really took to Alex Mack, Allen Strange, or Caitlin's Way beyond surface-level "I kinda remember this" nostalgia, and I barely know anything about his later work for the channel like The Troop or The Other Kingdom, but he's worked on the network long enough at the same time span as Schneider that it's hard to imagine why nobody at Nick's PR is going "Okay, let's promote the works of a prolific Nick creator who isn't a rumored pedophile so we don't look bad if it becomes more than just 'rumored'". But I suppose Nick Adults rewatch the Schneider sitcoms enough on streaming that maybe it does financially benefit Nick to shill his shows all the time instead of literally anybody else. Like I said, immediate success over long-term plans.

And while they should focus more on their newer work instead of milking old franchises, are they in a position to? Each year, streaming and YouTube sap more of their kid audiences away, and they're desperate enough that they air live football on the network now. And let's not forget how hungry they were for some big success in the early 2010s that they made over half a dozen projects with Fred in them. They probably wouldn't have done 90s Are All That and this whole nostalgia push in the first place if they weren't running out of avenues, while forgetting one obvious thing: These are kids shows. Sure, they'll satisfy the nostalgia audience, but for the 90s Nick kids who grew up and found something else to watch, there's nothing there beyond an "Oh, that's neat". It becomes cult TV, and Nick is rarely good at making the most out of cult TV. They don't have that Criterion/Arrow mindset that allows other companies who handle cult media to flourish, or even how other networks like HBO handle cult media (like if you told everybody 20 years ago that one of HBO's flagship shows would be a remake of a 1970s film featuring robot cowboys, no one would believe you), so they don't have any real tactics here besides make some more Spongebob spin-offs and Avatar movies and hope for the best.

[Dr. Insomniac]

So I wasn't expecting Poparena to think of Catdog as a show that tackled complex themes, but here we are.

[Daxdiv]

I'm more surprised he didn't do the obvious racism parallel with Cat being beaten by the Greasers due to the fact of him just being a cat, while they were kinda fine with Dog.