Why was Nick so good?

[Calamity Panfan]

[QUOTE="Sonic 5, post: 1514951, member: 26922"]I liked CatDog. I even had a CatDog toy that talked.

Also, my local cable company didn't carry Cartoon Network when I was younger. In my area, you could only get it if you had satellite. So, I hung out with my friend that had satellite a lot.

Eventually, that cable company lost all Viacom channels (some big kerfuffle about the new SpikeTV being not up to their moral standards) and then they got CN. As I understood it, they didn't ever get Viacom channels back and eventually went out of business.

For real though, 10-11 year old me was devastated about not getting to watch SpongeBob and Fairly OddParents.[/QUOTE]

Viacom and my cable provider growing up had a few disagreements, but channels would only ever go out for a few days before they reached a new contract. those days sucked though.

[RinkuTheFirst]

[QUOTE="Wu-Tang Panfan, post: 1514953, member: 29448"]Viacom and my cable provider growing up had a few disagreements, but channels would only ever go out for a few days before they reached a new contract. those days sucked though.[/QUOTE]

The Viacom channels were gone for a month straight by the time we switched to satellite. I distinctly remember about two years later when watching TV at school (hooray for lazy teachers). There was no Nick, no MTV, no Spike, but there was Cartoon Network.

Like I said, as I understood it, they never got the channels back.

Sidenote, I realize how terribly I've dated myself by talking about when SpikeTV became a channel.

[Deepfake]

^ To be fair, I remember when cable became available where I lived for the first time.

[Kargath]

I only ever saw Nickelodeon when in hotels, and the mere existence of Nick at Night annoyed me. I wanted to see cartoons!

[ScottyMcGee]

I think it was Grace Helbig who put it very nicely. Something along the lines of Nickelodeon was like that one hick family who had birthday parties all the time and let the kids jump in a pool full of Kool-Aid. Disney Channel is like that snobby preppy school where everyone denies doing something wrong.

She didn't give any allegory for Cartoon Network, but if I would make one up it would be - Cartoon Network is like a hipster.

[Sim Kid]

A lot of you guys bring up a lto of good points - nostalgia, TV being more o a thing in the 90s, plus availability.

I mean, when I was a kid in the 90s, Nickelodeon was pretty much the only channel that aired designated kid's shows in the evening - we had WB as part of our basic cable package, but it only ran "Kid shows" in the mornings and afternoon. We didn't have Cartoon Network until later and Disney was part of satellite TV.

Now, there are way more channels. (90% of which we can't view though because our cable companies are JERKS!!!)

[ScottyMcGee]

I remember reading somewhere that there's actually some scientific numbers to support the idea that cartoons were better in the 90's than now. They just did an experiment testing audiences who have never really seen cartoons before or whatever. Something like that. Ultimately, in other words, they suggested "No, it's not just because you were born in the 90's that you feel 90's cartoons are better. They could actually have been better. Because science."

In my view, most of the old Nick shows had plots very relateable to life. They had real issues we worried about as kids, issues that are now more likely censored because parents bitch and moan too much these days.

[CaptHayfever]

^I did sort of an informal test of that in college, showing Pete & Pete episodes to fellow students who had seen the show when they were younger, fellow students who had never seen the show before, & then-current younger kids, & the consensus among each category was positive.

And remember, "I'm-a Luigi, number one!'