The Wild & Weird Universe of Nickelodeon Idents

[Music] Nickelodeon is one of the most personality driven brands in American television that personality being very easy to pin down get Missy have fun be a kid whenever you tune in that's the message they're most often trying to sell you it's reflected in their programming their advertising their promotions and the subject of this video their on air identity a few years ago I went over a long period of their bumper history and and how it changed over time I didn't offer any thesis on how Nickelodeon evolved across this time it was just an excuse to review the Aesthetics of the bumpers but today's topic is the ident bumpers the little shorts they'll play between commercials to remind you what channel you're watching at the height of the Channel's popularity on kids TV they made up likely the Missi most disjointed and inconsistent identity for any TV station ever and it was amazing so why did some of them look like this and others look like [Music] this the early history of Nickelodeon the late 7s and early ' 80s provides some answers introducing Nickelodeon children's programming let's fit for children when Nickelodeon launched in 1979 it was boring most of the programming was whatever shows parents thought kids wouldn't get enough of but were really just kids shows for the sake of being kids shows and this was reflected in the bumpers for the first year they had a mime they shouldn't have had the mime then in 1981 came the silver Ball created by Lou dorfsman and Bob Klein there was more energy and color in these ones leaning into the vibe of a weekend out see the sights go to a carnival that kind of [Music] mood so why didn't this work I can't be sure but the emphasis still seem to be on telling the target audience what they should consider fun instead of naturally being fun offering them a caded experience you can't do that on television with was the only show they had at this time that was getting any attention and it was sloppy junk food so when management and graphic designers changed in 1984 they deemphasized the traditional this is fun you should like this mood and sort to lure viewers in with real [Music] [Music] creativity on October 1st 198 before the network got a makeover a new on air look directed by Fred cybert and Ellen Goodman who had recently launched MTV into the stratosphere a new sound with doop group The Jive 5 providing tons of Jingles for the next era and a new logo created by Scott Nash and Cory mcferson Nash the word Nickelodeon white in the balloon font on an orange object what orange object anything you can think of so that gave TV graphic Studios plenty of free in how the bumpers should look and feel the only rules were it has to feature the new logo and it has to appeal to kids so these companies went wildon nion Nickelodeon and that's why Nickelodeon's items from the mid 80s through the '90s were like this they made watching Nickelodeon a constant surprise coming next would be an ID you really liked or really hated and that's not even counting the entertainment you're getting out of the shows because there was always a large variety of programming on neck that meant if one of the bumpers could be considered too creepy or out of pocket it's not like it broke away from their identity if anything it made it stronger and more attractive but who made these things well the name that stuck around the longest was colossal pictures a North American media Studio that did everything for everyone in the ' 80s and '90s look at their list of clients and tell me they didn't rule the world here are some folks you might be familiar [Music] [Applause] [Music] with this thing is dripping with charm huge thanks to illustrator Joey album for most of these his art style is the right blend of innocent without looking too babyish if Nickelodeon had any sort of definitive animation style pre NK Tunes it was this later on they produced bumpers that showed off what it would look like half complete and they're still somehow pretty at the start colossal were good with the hand drain animation but with noise and laborn you didn't know what you were going to get you could get a man finding something in the floor in trouble ensuing I made three of these you could get stop motion visual lyricss rotoscoping anything they could think of ell noise and kit labor had already made some bumpers for MTV and applied their same energy to their Nickelodeon bumpers for other specific kinds of Animation like stop motion or computer animation they sort companies like Olive jar animation and animators like Edward B and look we're talking very early days for computer animation where else could the beinging come from already these bumpers are raising some questions try to make sense of this [Music] one so kids become other kids then they become a dog and parrot who then become a parrot and dog and break apart because the person ripping them up forgot to do it properly thanks for that charlex some of the earliest bumpers liken the orange color of the logo to cheese like this one of my scale a mountain of Nickelodeon or this one with a cheese toasty that makes a mess want to have more fun with your food the head looks like too much fun that doesn't look fun enough can someone shut that thank you it took me a while to learn this was a reference to something Teeny Little Super Guy a sigment on Sesame Street that happened to be animated by the animator of this bumper Paul finger as far as I know know Sesame Street has never AED on Nickelodeon in any capacity so this is just that much stranger not as much as the ones you can tell were made to scare the viewer at least a little here's a standard mini golf bumper that ends with a quite uncanny clown here's some worms watch Danger Mouse please the ones where it's just some creatures taking a bite out of a Nickelodeon screener also weird for all the wrong reasons the lizard one especially it's too hard to make out the face I always thought it was like a weird alien kid or the lizard was a burn victim but now it looks more like a wrestling mask but I like this one L the nielan just Bros helping Bros perhaps the bumper you were most likely to see in the80s was the top of the hour bumper there are two versions the second featuring this Beetle Man controlling a TV signal and the first just being a bunch of random things the Persistence of memory the calendar the year a racetrack the future all while and announcer tells you what's airing next at the top of the hour every hour oh it's still going and if you hate roller coasters and clowns you may never want to see it again that can't be too negative on any bumper with a Jive Five jingle this doop group founded by Eugene pet was hired to give the Channel a new audio identity and had a sound that was simultaneously cool and soft just like the characters singing their Tunes including Michigan J frog at home but especially Michigan J frog at home would have been easy for them to Coast on the first Nickelodeon jingle but they kept supplying doop goodness except for this one Fred cyber wasn't impressed by and didn't let get used but still posted online years later for our Amusement people people come on in the Nickelodeon people people come on in watch the niod these were the bumpers played throughout the mid to late 80s but there was always room for more in 1988 there was a camp Nickelodeon project where producer Howard Hoffman worked with a bunch of kids away at an animation Workshop to film new bumpers they look more homemade but that's the fun of [Music] it another big commission was a SE of arts and craft theme bumpers made by 181 Productions in 1991 also popping up in 1991 were the first bumpers to feature the nict tunes but funnily enough these weren't specifically made by the animation teams behind the shows at the time the Rugrats bumper uses footage from the uneed pilot and the Doug and Ren and Stimpy bumpers were animated by JJ settle meire Productions this this is all still quite early right Nickelodeon's still just a little baby corrupt media Empire these bumpers have done their job in giving the channel a wild identity but in 1993 the on air Graphics were given their most major shakeup since 1984 they're using CGI full time now so you know they're serious spring 1993 would see the introduction of a new generation of Nickelodeon bumpers and the start of a gradual phasing out of the old generation they' still be there for a couple of years but not it as frequently they were a symbol of a network that was building itself up so now it's time to see what that all built up [Music] to has reached critical level watch Pete and Pete please it's great that the 1993 set is just as bizarre as they'd ever been but they're a little more uniform in ways that get easier to notice when you sit through all of them at once most of them use the standard Nickelodeon jingle avoiding all the other ones the GI 5 composed and remixed it in different genres by different genres I mean I guarantee you there's a ree version of it another commonality is a shared slogan Nick is kids Nick is kids [Music] Nick now this had been used before in this one that's best remembered for being unusually tense Nick is kit so they were clearly trying to make it a thing a slogan that'll be used on the playground but I don't know it's not really catchy who can worm Nick's kids into a conversation I kind of like how this set shares an indicator like this and it cuts down on padding when this can take up to 1 and a half seconds to say one I've never seen any praise for is is this one with the clamation kids their designs are weirdly rendered and the music is unfittingly chill and the setting is less fittingly them watching a Nickelodeon Splat on floating chairs in the sky high enough for planes to be flying near them I guess in this business you have to use what materials you can but the most infamous bumper from this time has to be this one pinch [Music] face I see what they're trying to do here convey the sort of Sugar Rush of a party but look around and you can still barely tell what's going on the centerpiece has these floating facial features singing Nickelodeon while pulsing like their very existence is horrible pain then the Nickelodeon logo flashes quickly a few times every time this came on there was A Rush of confusion and Dread in most any viewer you really have to wonder if there was any sort of FOC test for the bumpers that a percentage of kids were like this is good another notorious one is this little [Music] dream okay so a kid's head is in a chair watching Nickelodeon then Nickelodeon has the audacity to destroy his home but the kid the generous pacifist in this tale doesn't mind for whatever reason oh but the face bumpers don't stop there here's another one that's just a bunch of facial features floating in a box I don't think this was meant to scare the viewer it comes off as another early CGI experiment that came off a bit more uncanny than intended despite the set first being used pretty deep into Nickelodeon's widely agreed upon golden age they never really had the same iconic status as the80s bumpers that could be because they're easier to recognize and we're all remixed together for the opening of Nickelodeon videos until 1999 and on albums and such which is an indicator that they're the ones a sizable portion of people are always going to associate with neck I'm not saying the channel was already losing its luster just that the 1993 set hits upon a less all-encompassing and more specific kind of nostalgia for the channel but something that is all-encompassing is the holiday spirit which is why Nickelodeon also produced a ton of holiday themed bumpers one for New Year's right action New Year from Nickelodeon one for Valentine's Day a couple for Halloween a couple for Thanksgiving some generic season themed ones and no doubt a couple for Christmas The Gingerbread bumper was rarely used from what I've gathered which is a rotten shame because it's very cute but my favorite of the Fist of bumpers would have to be the snow globe [Music] one animator Edward Bex has the storyboards for his bumpers on his website as well as detailed blurs on what they mean they sound overly explanatory for something that looks like this but this really is how articulate you have to be to get some Executives to approve your ideas I'm happy he saved these either way while the 1993 sit was a big wave of new bumpers others from other companies would still pop up at a less predictable Pace these winter bumpers produced by curious in 1994 are gorgeous some of my very favorites and in 1995 we got these theater bumpers co-produced by Dr Motion Pictures often played before and after AC quiet animated shows like tiny tune adventures and Garfield and Friends I'm glad they see it my way put this on a cinema screen and see what magic transpires Dr emotion pictures was also a co-producer for the next big wave of bumpers rolled out in the spring of 1996 but these new bumpers would be a maximum of of 5 Seconds each now most American Film is shot at 24 frames a second so that means these new bumper animators had 120 frames to tell their story only 120 [Music] frames ain't it beautiful ain't it Cinema the best filmmakers can take their biggest limitations and make them their greatest strengths and no mistaking a time limit is a limitation the set has more memorable characters than in a while there's the cuckoo clock who quickly leaves an impression loud jarring accordion clown rotoscoped Surfer Dude a mosquito sacrifice to the gods of brand recognition a lizard at a disco club he always the life of the party you could catch that my favorite of these is the turtle poking the cactus while lukar Racha plays what's his story why does he like the cactus so much if only the people who animated a could have given him his own show not a big defender of ugly caterpillar get off my screen oh you want a Kid's Choice Award sorry they're magnetized to SpongeBob after the 1996 set the bumpers would return to mostly being 10 to 15 seconds each so I don't know if the 5-second format was a budgetary restraint or they wanted to save time for ads or what but they still had some creativity in the late '90s depending on who you ask maybe too much creativity watch Ellen strange please these fabric based bumpers by pitch Productions are really huge especially this one with the [Music] dog how can you hate that but in 1999 we see an omen for the beginning of the end of the old school Nickelodeon bumper a new sit featuring neun's characters was rolled out across the year featuring them doing things on a white background which create the Nickelodeon logo they're fun and I've used them in videos before but the Inception of these ones made it seem like the old bumpers had outlived their usefulness now Nick had enough nict Tunes to play it safe and have them EST Lish characters between shows and that's what the networ branding would do in the 2000s play it safer I'm not saying this is worse but it takes some of the suspense out of watching The Channel all the 80s and '90s bumpers were retired by the start of 2002 and even the white Nune bumpers would then be used sparingly before leaving in early 2004 so why did the Nickelodeon bumper die a big reason is the introduction of a screen bug to all the channels programming in 1998 when you get cable installed it's good to have a quick indicator of what channel you're watching before the regular use of screen bugs bumpers and promotions were the fast and easy indicator that you were watching neck but after the screen bug they weren't so necessary and tragically for the higher ups cut into precious ad time that's not to say Nick stopped putting effort into their on air brand the abstract era of the early 2000s has a minimalist appeal to it the nice way of putting it is that it makes the programming surrounding it look more exciting in comparison now despite gaining sentience as the US feed was retiring the bumpers I still remember them why because the austral Asian feed still played them regularly until around 2006 yes these still played while we were getting Avatar and Zoe 101 dinosaur on submarine belonged to us 2000s kids just as much as it belonged to you oldtimers that remember Harriet the Spy but the international branches not wanting to retire them so quickly isn't the only example of the long Legacy these leave behind Nickelodeon has tried to recapture the magic of these in sporadic intervals they used them again for the Nick rewind Block in 2006 and for their more elaborate throwback blocks on Teen Nick in the 2010s the '90s are all that and the splat by this time Teen Nick had rebranded to the current word font which was seen as a massive bummer by a lot of fans so there was a silver lining to this they recognized the creativity of these bumpers and still played them knowing that they had no functional use being on the wrong Channel and using an obsolete logo their primary use was Nostalgia and they did that well there's some stuff to say about these blocks but if anyone were to do a nostalgic throwback to a nostalgic throwback aliens would never want to contact us every once in an indigo moon on Friday the 33rd Nick will produce more bumpers like this like the old days but they only here for a little while before disappearing and mostly for the start and ends of the and breaks which are a different breed I've already been over the hardest they went with them in recent memory was last year in celebration of the Splat returning there was a new badge featuring kids sticking their heads somewhere and finding Nickelodeon fun not a problem excuse me going through all right not a problem a problem not a problem it gets more difficult and unwarranted to praise Nickelodeon as a company over time but it's fair to praise the artists and teams Behind These bumpers they having some idea of what made the channel so enticing at its peak in cultural [Music] relevance it was a good sign when the neun's network took some influence from its Parent Channel at the start its first 3 years years of service had a ton of random ideas that you're glad got approved plus a hardcore jungle soundtrack I'm SpongeBob I'm Timmy Turner who wrote this even Nickelodeon's competitors have taken influence from them in some ways for a while in the mid '90s Ki Network took a similar approach to its bumpers letting the companies it worked with make whatever they wanted as long as it had the cartoon network logo at the end this phase didn't last long as they went back to what made their channel so appealing the characters Disney channel has taken influence from Nick's marketing strategies in a lot of different ways and that may extend to how they've handled their bumpers for a while their Mickey and Donald POV bumpers from the early years have the same wild unhinged energy as Nick's old stop motion bumpers and when it rebranded into a tween oriented Channel across the late '90s and early 2000s you can tell they were trying to mimic that kids first weird visuals awesome things Vibe of Nickelodeon with their own Disney spin on it of course you can't oversell the influence of these things unless you say they rewrote the constitution in which case that's a maybe do I have least favorites oh yeah there are ones I personally find to be ugly and off-putting and I skip in compilations pinch face the caterpillar the S duck in the j five lineage of what look like hipster Mighty beans la TW TW because of the song I hereby nickname them the twey dees this one with the ants is also a bit gross but what's funny is they reuse the audio for a completely unrelated bumper about a girl throwing a dog a [Music] bone a choice of Music there but it works my very least favorite though would probably be the Opera woman not many kids like oppra Anyway the logo being her hair is the only thing that piques my interest here but I do have some favorites a lot of the ones with joy album's distinctive art style the robot getting put together and showing off the logo while its buddies dance in the distance disco dogs is a cool one disco pattern could have been easier on the eyes but look at them go the paper chase featuring a little Nickelodeon man running around a disc while the composers have the right idea some more subdued ones are nice to put on like the Curious Winters the journey across the world in one long tracking shot the snow globe bumper and the gingerbread man Village played on only one or two Decembers I almost forgot to mention the 3D bumpers produced by International rocket ship for Nogle Vision don't know what Nogle vision is well it was an event in 1997 where new episodes would air using a chrome dip 3d effect meaning red objects would appear closer than colder colored objects the point is these bumpers still look snazzy even without that higher knowledge and without the effect but my very favorite Nickelodeon bumper will always be that Turtle Nick has to do more with him tell his story for me to put a verdict on all of this the Nickelodeon bumpers are always going to be a fun corner of the Channel's output to revisit there really was this energy that they could put anything on screen and that was part of the magic Nick really was for any kind of kid and what they could be interested in dinosaurs robots lizards camping patty cake on the moon there's a lot out there in the world to see do and learn and N found a way to make it look like tons of fun this is to The Underdogs of the Nickelodeon Story the characters we thought were wasting our time when in truth they were there for us as long as they could be their contribution to the flavor of Nickelodeon will never be forgotten no matter how much changes no matter how much we grow up the song Never [Music] Ends [Music] ni [Music] [Music] yeah [Music] n

Channel: EmployeeAMillion

Views: 4,831

Keywords: Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, 80s, 90s, 2000s

Id: gifKDJsIzC4

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024