Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story’ On VOD, A Documentary About How Nickelodeon Dominated Kids’ TV

If you were a kid, preteen or teenager in the ’80s and ’90s, chances are you watched a lot of Nickelodeon. During its peak, it not only had over 50% of the kid audience share, but it was one of the most profitable cable networks out there. In the film The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story, filmmakers Scott Barber and Adam Sweeney (aided by the ever-nostalgic Adam F. Goldberg) examine the years when Nick dominated the kids TV scene, starting with its import of the Canadian sketch show You Can’t Do That On Television.

THE ORANGE YEARS: THE NICKELODEON STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Orange Years: The Nickelodeon Story, written and directed by Scott Barber and Adam Sweeney, takes a look at the beginnings of Nickelodeon, the first network with all kids’ programming, which debuted in 1979. As the title suggests, it concentrates on the time from the early-’80s when it started to import or create original programming, and the network really found its ethos, which was to give children shows that weren’t trying to educate them or be precious, but rather to show kids being kids, slime and all.

Every major figure in the channel’s history is interviewed. Geraldine Laybourne, the network’s longtime president who brought the “kids being kids” ethic to the channel, talks about how “condescending” the network’s multi-colored logo was when she arrived, which is why she helped develop the logo that was always surrounded by some orange shape, the logo that most people associate with Nick. Barber and Sweeney also talk to Marc Summers, host of Double Dare; Christine McGlade, “Moose” from the groundbreaking Canadian import You Can’t Do That On Television; Danny Cooksey from Salute Your Shorts; Melissa Joan Hart of Clarissa Explains It All; Kenan Thompson and Kel Mitchell from All That and Kenan & Kel; James Jinkins, creator of Doug; Angela Santomero, co-creator of Blue’s Clues, and many more.

The film goes through a wide swath of Nick’s existence, including the establishment of Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, the initial resistance to merchandise that turned into a merch explosion, the beginning of Nick Toons (Doug, Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy) and the SNICK schedule on Saturday nights. Almost every major series produced up until 2000 is given a little bit of time, pointing out just how long Nick’s dominance lasted.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Mainly because it was a corporate cousin, and much of its identity was patterned after MTV’s, The Orange Years reminded us of I Want My MTV!, the recent documentary about MTV’s origins and rise to dominance.

Performance Worth Watching: Marc Summers is such a genial curmudgeon that whenever he’s on screen, we enjoyed whatever he said, whether it’s about the first episode of Double Dare taking hours to film or the story that he took the guts out of the microphones in his dressing room so he could get a little privacy at Nick Studios.

Memorable Dialogue: The creator and actors from Who’s Afraid Of The Dark explain that the powder that the Midnight Society threw in the fire when telling their stories was actually Coffee-mate, because it’s oil-based and would ignite.

Our Take: Despite concentrating on Nick’s formative period from 1984-2000 and not its entire 41-year history, The Orange Years still clocks in at 102 minutes. It seems like it’s a lot of time to cover a relatively short period of time, and in the middle of the documentary it gets bogged down in trying to go from show to show to show. The narrative through line in that section of the film is “We created this, then we created this, then we created this,” and there’s little that links them together aside from the executives telling the directors how innovative the shows were.

For the most part, they’re right; there weren’t shows like You Can’t Do That On Television, Clarissa, Ren & Stimpy on kids TV in the past, but instead of talking about why they filled a demographic hole, or who came up with the various ideas and why, it seemed much of the narrative was, “It was time to get into animation, so we created Nick Toons.” Going over a few less shows might have given Barber and Sweeney more room to examine what led to each of the channel’s evolutions. There is some of that analysis, but much of it felt like an effort to get every show in.

Also, your enjoyment of The Orange Years really depends on when your nostalgia about Nickelodeon stops. I watched and loved You Can’t Do That On Television and Double Dare, but as the film moved along, the shows they went over got more of a nod of recognition from me than a nostalgia hit, because they came on when I was either in late high school, college or adulthood, out of even the network’s most extreme demographic. The nostalgia factor wasn’t there in those later sections (except for Ren & Stimpy, because of its crossover appeal… too bad no one from the show was interviewed), but we do recognize how powerful it will be for the 30 and up age group.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite our reservations, The Orange Years is an enjoyable, informative trip through Nickelodeon’s prominent years, and a huge nostalgia trip for a wide range of age groups.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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