Thursday, July 19, 2012

Lesson # 34 : Dear Nick you will be fondly remembered...

It was an age of the great and powerful. Warner Brothers had a foothold in India which no one could shake. Cartoon Network was the shit. With programming attracting ad revenue from the big and small. Tie ups with comic brands, cloth manufacturers and god knows what. Cartoon Network was here and it was here to stay.

But as I flipped through the channels one evening all of a sudden I discovered this huge blot on my tv set. It wasn't any blot it was a freaking orange blot and I stayed glued. I stayed glued to my tv set till my bed time that day. Cartoon Network seemed like shit then.


The programmes on Nickelodeon were some of the best. With cartoons ranging from Rugrats to Chalk zone to The Fairly Odd Parents to Hey Arnold to Rocket Power these were shows that brought you to a whole new world.


And then there was the live programming with stuff like Drake and Josh, Global Guts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, Double dare 2000, Kenan and Kel, All that, The Amanda Show, Cousin Skeeter. Basically stuff that would drive you crazy.
Kenan and Kel the show that made us fall in love with orange soda

And apart from this there was the annual Nickelodeon Teen awards broadcast simultaneously from the USA.

Couple this with minimal advertisements and a 24 hour entertainment channel. Yes this was around the same time that Cartoon Network had started 24 hours of programming but most of it was repeat or old telecasts.

Nick seemed to be headed towards becoming the market leader.

But for one fatal incident. That was Viacom separating into a separate entity in 2007. When Viacom India was established.

It dismantled everything that Nick stood for one piece at a time. First converting Nick into an 24 hour Hindi channel. Limiting programming and repeating the same season month after month. Then they did something even more stupid. They went about buying cheaper Japanese cartoons like Ninja Hattori and began broadcasting them in Hindi like crazy. Nick came to be associated with not Spongebob or the Orange that it had stood for but with a crazy eyed blue ninja.

Then all of a sudden all of the original nick programming stopped. Everything from Rugrats to Spongebob was done away with. Spongebob airs occasionally sometimes at 3 in the night.

None of the movies that Nick produces are aired in India neither are the newer television shows or teenage shows.
iCarly one of Nick's most famous shows in the US 

Nick has restarted with English as a language but it sucks more often than not. Who the hell want's to watch Hattori in english anyways? The dude's a retard.


Today Nick loses out to WB once again as Pogo and Cartoon Network have overtaken them. Viacom came up with a new channel called Sonic. It's even worse. The older generation has shifted onto animax the younger to Disney and Cartoon Network. Viacom you are killing  yourself and you are killing us.


In short and these words may come across as rather strongly and if Viacom you are listening

NICKELODEON YOU SUCK


- Doodle