30 Times Nickelodeon Ruined Your Childhood

Nickelodeon has given us some of the best cartoons out there from Rugrats to Sponge Bob and everything in between Nicktoons defined our childhoods at least until we went back as adults and realized that some seriously disturbing stuff was going on the whole time hang on to your childhood memories tight because these Nickelodeon moments are dark okay so Ren and Stimpy was decidedly adult but that doesn't mean we didn't convince our parents it was a kids show and they believed us because it was a cartoon and they just let us watch it anyway well the show was always strange and dark one episode in particular really stuck out we're talking about man's best friend the episode were Ren and Stimpy get adopted by a terrible owner who treats them so badly that Ren is forced to enact some pretty violent revenge so much so that the creator of the show was actually fired because of it avatar the last airbender was an awesome show for the middle school aged kids and a great way to slowly develop an obsession with anime like so many of us did but in one episode they pulled no punches when it came to getting down to some real drama almost never in any movie or TV show do we see our protagonist die but that's exactly what the people behind avatar decided to do remember when Jett actually dies when he was only a teenager after his long struggle for redemption come on children's shows can actually be a great way to introduce difficult topics to kids and help them understand tough situations that everybody goes through and while this is great for parents it makes for some pretty upsetting TV that's for sure like the episode of hey Arnold where Sid is so ashamed by his room and his parents financial situation that he lies to the rich kid Lorenzo at school about it and asks Arnold to borrow his room Sid goes through some real anguish in the episode and it's pretty tough to watch as a grown-up for all the ways that Rugrats was amazing we can't forget that that show was seriously weird most of the time - like seriously weird but for this first mention we're going to talk about an incident that no person let alone child should experience when Tommy winds up in the back room of the post office he casually stumbles across a dead body a skeleton hidden deep within the dark basement bin of the post office Tommy almost joined the bones before a quick lever pulls saved the infant from uncertain death Rocko's Modern Life was a show that was never afraid to get gross and adult so it's hard to narrow down which moments in particular are the darkest but we have to say the explanation for how heifer wound up living with a family of wolves as you might remember heifer tells Rocko that his adoptive mother and father were actually planning to eat him before winding up caring about him instead they even sectioned off parts of his body to consume which are still there on his back the show Doug went out of its way to tackle difficult subjects in a pretty adult fashion more than once and one of the tough subjects they took on was bullying when a rumor spreads around the school about Skeeter being a vampire it seems harmless enough but then Skeeter is totally ostracized by the entire school and it gets really sad at one point he hosts a Halloween party and not one of his classmates show up not even Doug that's cold Doug if you were wondering when we were ever gonna get around to everyone's favorite under the sea sponge and all the strange dark things that happened to him well you can stop wondering now because we've got Sponge Bob for you and no we're not talking about how Krabby Patties are definitely made of crab we have another video about that whole thing you should definitely check out we want to address the episode that is a literal horror movie and how we still remember how creepy the hash-slinging slasher episode was a rusty spatula severed hand and glowing red ice was enough to keep any eight-year-old up for most of the night another totally trippy Rugrats moment that will forever haunt our dreams is one from the episode Angelica's nightmare when faced with the reality that her parents are going to have another baby Angelica doesn't take the news very easily in fact she has a nightmare about a terrifyingly giant baby that any grown person would be equally disturbed by not only that but at the end of the episode her mom tells her that she actually isn't pregnant anymore ren and stimpy x' relationship was always complicated and we were always prepared for ren to fly off the handle at any given moment but this was possibly the scariest in the episode where Stimpy's cousin comes to visit rena of course finds Stimpy's cousin unbearably annoying and after a while he totally loses it not only does he flip out on the two of them but he winds up burning their house down and sending all three of them to hell the whole thing is just wild from start to finish it's a really important lesson to learn when you're young that the best thing you can be is yourself but the way spongebob went about trying to impart that wisdom is just creepy mostly because of how terrifying normal spongebob is after he changes to be more like everyone else he gets a shiny round body and head a permanent smile that looks like the work of a demented plastic surgeon and speaks in a monotone that is the thing that nightmares are made of Nicktoons don't tend to go too over-the-top when it comes to religion but one episode of Rocco's Modern Life actually went into it in a big way and it is pretty disturbing in the process in it heifer chokes on a chicken bone and dice winding up in heaven but not for long I just quickly sent down to heck for the sin of gluttony he then goes through a whole Christmas Carol type trial in which he's forced to witness all the ways his gluttony hurt those around him remember invaders him the short-lived Knicks series about a little green alien invader named well Zim it sounds like a great premise for a kids TV show and the show was funny and popular but one episode is pretty creepy when you look back on it in it we sees him trying to hide the fact that he's an alien from the school nurse so what does he do he decides to harvest the organs of his classmates and replace his own with them you know you'd hope that when you go off to summer camp for a week or two that your parents could remember to keep your pet alive but as Timmy from The Fairly OddParents learns that is not always the case Timmy comes back from camp to find out that his dad forgot to feed his gerbil accidentally killing it but that's not the end of this gerbil because it comes back to life as some sort of nightmarish zombie gerbil with half of its skull missing and its brain poking out for all to see most children of Saturday morning cartoon watching age probably haven't sat down and watched the horror classic The Shining but that didn't stop the people behind Rocko's Modern Life from parroting the movie in a totally great way but one that you probably didn't even realize it happened until you got way older when heifer becomes a nighttime security guard at the mall he goes through the entire Jack Torrance from The Shining rigmarole from the creepy twins to the ghost bartender to losing his mind entirely Hey Arnold really went in deep with the tough subjects especially when it came to family dynamics and no one had it worse at home than poor Helga who seems just like a bully until we come to learn of how hard she actually has it not only does she live in the shadow of her older overachieving sister but Helga is also essentially ignored by her parents entirely they won't even go out of her way to buy her a winter jacket for the harsh snowy conditions is there anything creepier than the idea of a robot wearing a human skin suit we don't think so but apparently the folks behind the Nickelodeon cartoon my life as a teenage robot thought it was the perfect story arc to build an episode around the robot wants to go hang out at a cool spot in town but the place has a no robot policy so it creates a human skin to wear in order to sneak in but that's not all no then the skin actually develops a mind of its own and rebels against its maker when you're dealing with an alien like Zim from invaders him it's a given that things are gonna get a little weird from time to time as he figures out how to blend in with the humans this became terrifyingly real in the episode where he tries to get a friend in order to seem more normal but his friend winds up basically stalking Zim until the alien feels that the only reasonable thing to do is pull out its eyeballs and replace them with mechanical ones you know like friends do we'll just say it outright Ren was never a well-adjusted guy and we all know he was prone to flying off the handle at a moment's notice but sometimes his rage turned into full-on psychosis in a way that was a lot even for him in one episode where Ren and Stimpy end up sharing a space shuttle Ren completely loses his mind and the whole thing is pretty uncomfortable he goes so nuts that he starts thinking a bar of soap an ice cream bar and guards it with manic obsession from Stimpy we've all experienced nightmares in our time but it's less common for them to be so vivid and terrifying that they seep into our waking life but at a very disturbing episode of Rugrats that is exactly what happened in in the dream time we see Chucky regularly getting super creepy nightmares but because he's a toddler he can't tell the difference between his dreams and reality and the way the babies he hangs out with start actually reciting the wines from his dreams is super unsettling there is nothing scarier to kids than the idea of being stranded somewhere strange and unfamiliar with no idea where you are and no one to turn to for help so when this exact thing happened to spongebob it was just as scary in the episode rock bottom he winds up alone and isolated in a very creepy town but he isn't totally alone as he has repeated run-ins with a random and off-putting fish who also can't find his way out the whole thing is just a very uncomfortable experience [Music] illness is something that is really hard to explain to young children which is why cartoons try to gently broach the subject every now and again but the episode of Rugrats where we find out what happened to Chucky's mom is so so much more heartbreaking than we ever expected in the episode Mother's Day Chaz tells Chucky that her name was Melinda and that she died from a mysterious terminal illness and then he reads a poem that she wrote just destroying viewers everywhere this moment goes by pretty pretty quickly but looking back on it is seriously one of the weirdest and most inappropriate moments to ever grace a Nickelodeon cartoon in one episode Ren and Stimpy are sawing a pile of wood which might seem totally innocent except for literally everything about the moment itself first of all Ren has his saw tied to his belt in a very questionable place and secondly Stimpy has a log strapped to his back so the whole thing looks extremely well you get it the old TV and movie trope of an older person winding up back in school has been used in a ton of TV shows and movies to great effect and is always good for some laughs but in the case of Hey Arnold it was just a little disturbing while it's fun that Arnold's grandpa winds up back in school with his grandson and suddenly becomes super popular it all goes a little too far when Arnold's grandpa actually starts taking out Arnold's female classmates on dates remember these girls are in sixth grade [Music] Squidward was never the happiest fellow but sometimes spongebob took his mental health issues pretty far for a kids TV show sometimes it feels like the creator's are trying to teach lessons about dealing with these issues but sometimes it feels a little bit over-the-top like the episode in which he's clearly suffering greatly from depression the entire time and how does he react to it by putting his head in the oven and trying to end his life thankfully he doesn't go through with it spongebob is many things one of which is a murderer apparently in the episode nasty patty we learn more about his and mr. Krabs true nature than we ever needed to know when a health inspector shows up at the Krusty Krab they think that he is only pretending to be who he says he is so to get back at him they make the most disgusting krabby patty they can which appears to kill him while it turns out that he isn't dead they go to extreme lengths to dispose of the body before Hank [Music] who could forget one of the most devastating episodes of a cartoon TV show ever and that happens to be the origin story of whatever happened to Arnold's parents in Hey Arnold the mystery of why he lives with his grandparents floated around for a while until they finally revealed that they had actually gone missing on a humanitarian mission to Africa after promising his grandparents that they would return for their son their plane disappeared and they were never seen again [Music] Rocko's Modern Life was one of those shows that was just packed with suggestive innuendo and double entendre so much so that we're actually surprised we didn't catch on sooner but one episode got a little more mrs. Robinson than the rest when Bev the Frog who lives next door to Rocko actually tries to seduce him by inviting him over to do chores and she's not subtle about it either letting him know in all sorts of ways that she isn't getting what she needs from her husband another time spongebob was super dark and creepy was an episode all about Squidward in the episodes Squidward in clarinet land we learned how truly obsessive and terrifying our squid pal can be and how this is especially true when his precious clarinet is in the mix when he thinks spongebob is stolen it Squidward totally loses his grip on reality and has long elaborate and totally dark fantasies about chasing spongebob and getting it back while we'd say it's only a clarinet clearly it means a whole lot more to Squidward you'd think that a kid's cartoon wouldn't go out of their way to address the horrors of war but that's exactly what hey Arnold decided to do in one seriously sad episode in it Arnold and Gerald want to help mr. hoon find out where his daughter is who he was separated from when she was a baby as it turns out mr. houin lost her trying to flee the vietnam war when a rescue helicopter only had one spot left he did the brave thing and sent his daughter to safety by herself just because these cartoons were for kids doesn't mean that they couldn't get super super real take for instance the episode of Rugrats where Tommy is literally kidnapped straight-up kidnapped out of his front yard which is every parent's worst nightmare the kidnappers mistakenly think Tommy is the child of a rich family and intend to hold him for ransom but when Tommy can't stop crying they get annoyed and bring him back home everything about that storyline is horrifying and yet somehow the network thought hilarious if these moments don't make you rethink some serious stuff from your childhood we don't know what will what did you think of these cartoon creep outs did they go too far or were they all in good fun let us know down below and we hope you enjoyed this video [Music]

Channel: Screen Rant

Views: 267,726

Rating: 4.6281095 out of 5

Keywords: Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, cartoon, hey arnold, spongebob, spongebob squarepants, rugrats, ren and stimpy, the fairlyodd parents, avatar, Rocko’s Modern Life, invader zim, Screen Rant, ScreenRant

Id: hCPPVPSl7EI

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2019