Monday, October 08, 2018
Acceleration 🚗💨 Official Music Video | Blaze and the Monster Machines | Nick Jr. Global
"Acceleration! The speeding up and going faster!” Blaze and the Monster Machines know all about acceleration! Join these racing trucks and sing along as we all learn a little more about what makes us speed up!
ICYMI | Nickelodeon News Round-Up | Week 40
Welcome to ICYMI, a round-up of all the Nickelodeon News announced during the past week!
On This Day | Hey Arnold! Premieres | Nickelodeon
On this day 22 YEARS AGO, Hey Arnold! premiered on Nickelodeon!
Nicktoons facts: Hey Arnold! was created by Craig Bartlett and premiered on October 7, 1996. It ran for 100 episodes over 8 years, and spawned the feature film Hey Arnold!: The Movie in 2002 and the TV movie "The Jungle Movie" in 2017.
More Hey Arnold!:
-- Nickelodeon Magazine speaks to the very animated Craig Bartlett, creator of Hey Arnold!!
-- Learn how to Arnold Shortman!
Check out Nickelodeon's On This Day and Remember When Facebook pages to find out awesome Nick moments from every era throughout Nickelodeon history!
Watch all your '90s Nickelodeon favorites on NickSplat, your late-night destination for your favorite childhood Nickelodeon cartoons and live-action shows! NickSplat doesn't question football-shaped heads, but embrace them - along with Reptar bars, a Big Ear of Corn, orange soda, and even slime for Pete (and Pete's) sake. Make your slime-covered Nickelodeon childhood dreams come true every night at 11 PM ET/PT on TeenNick USA, and anytime you want on NickSplat on VRV! #NickSplat!
More Nick: DK Partners with Nickelodeon to Release Two Adult Humour Titles Inspired by 'Rugrats' and 'Hey Arnold!'!
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon and Hey Arnold! News and Highlights!
Nicktoons facts: Hey Arnold! was created by Craig Bartlett and premiered on October 7, 1996. It ran for 100 episodes over 8 years, and spawned the feature film Hey Arnold!: The Movie in 2002 and the TV movie "The Jungle Movie" in 2017.
More Hey Arnold!:
-- Nickelodeon Magazine speaks to the very animated Craig Bartlett, creator of Hey Arnold!!
-- Learn how to Arnold Shortman!
Can you believe it's been 22 years since we met this football head?!! 💛🏈 pic.twitter.com/XL1s7ybBib
— NickSplat (@NickSplat) October 7, 2018
Check out Nickelodeon's On This Day and Remember When Facebook pages to find out awesome Nick moments from every era throughout Nickelodeon history!
Watch all your '90s Nickelodeon favorites on NickSplat, your late-night destination for your favorite childhood Nickelodeon cartoons and live-action shows! NickSplat doesn't question football-shaped heads, but embrace them - along with Reptar bars, a Big Ear of Corn, orange soda, and even slime for Pete (and Pete's) sake. Make your slime-covered Nickelodeon childhood dreams come true every night at 11 PM ET/PT on TeenNick USA, and anytime you want on NickSplat on VRV! #NickSplat!
More Nick: DK Partners with Nickelodeon to Release Two Adult Humour Titles Inspired by 'Rugrats' and 'Hey Arnold!'!
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon and Hey Arnold! News and Highlights!
EXCLUSIVE Bloopers, Fashion & School Tips w/ Jace Norman, JoJo Siwa & More! | #WinYourWeek | Nickelodeon
Get ready to be spooked, because this week’s episode of Win Your Hallo-Week will give you ALL the Halloween feels! Featuring brand new bloopers from Nick stars, some of our most legendary butt-kicking moments, Kira Kosarin challenges and an awesome game of Guess the Ghost! Also featuring sweet pumpkin carving videos from YouTubers Smileyquanta and the LOVELY LOGANS. Catch more Henry Danger, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Loud House, The Thundermans, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Knight Squad, School of Rock and Danny Phantom on Nickelodeon!
Let Nick know your favorite fall activity to do with your friends in the comments on YouTube for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode of WIN YOUR WEEK!
More Nick: Nickelodeon USA's October 2018 Premiere Highlights | Halloween | Nick Or Treat!
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Halloween on Nickelodeon News and Highlights!
Let Nick know your favorite fall activity to do with your friends in the comments on YouTube for a chance to be featured in an upcoming episode of WIN YOUR WEEK!
More Nick: Nickelodeon USA's October 2018 Premiere Highlights | Halloween | Nick Or Treat!
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Halloween on Nickelodeon News and Highlights!
Invader ZIM: Inside the Alien's Return to Nickelodeon
Cult classic Invader Zim makes an unlikely return to Nickelodeon for a TV movie.
It’s been over a decade, but the groundbreaking animated sci-fi comedy series, Invader Zim, is finally returning to television with an hour-long TV movie. The brainchild of comic book artist and writer Jhonen Vasquez, the series premiered on Nickelodeon in 2001, but was canceled during production of the second season due to low ratings. Though an ongoing comic materialized in 2015, fans of the cult hit have long hoped for Zim’s return to the small screen.
The original series follows Zim, an incompetent alien with delusions of grandeur who screams a lot, as he repeatedly fails to conquer planet Earth. He’s been sent there along with GIR, his incompetent robot assistant who also screams a lot, by their alien overlords, The Almighty Tallest, who just want Zim as far away as possible from “Operation Impending Doom II,” their second try at taking over the universe (Zim ruined the first attempt). In an effort to gather information about Earthlings, Zim disguises himself as a human child and attends school, where he finds an archnemesis in Dib Membrane, the only kid in class who questions Zim’s green skin.
Den of Geek got the chance to sit down with Jhonen and some of the cast: Richard Horvitz (Zim), Rikki Simons (GIR), Kevin McDonald (Almighty Tallest Purple), and Wally Wingert (Almighty Tallest Red). They asked them a bunch of stupid questions and a couple of sincere ones about Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus! and they kindly put up with it.
Den of Geek didn’t expect to get too many story details out of them, but they figured they’d ask if they’d spoil the entire plot for them anyway.
“Luke dies,” says Jhonen.
“They all die,” Richard adds.
“Tell him about the dinosaurs!” Wally shouts.
So maybe they didn’t get much revealed about the plot or learn what a “florpus” is, but the teaser Nickelodeon released offers some clues. In some shots, Dib looks as though he’s really let himself go. The Zim comic series begins with an unhealthy Dib getting back in shape and into the business of exposing Zim’s alien identity, so it looks like Enter the Florpus! may share some plot elements with the comic.
Taking a further page from the comic series, Vasquez explains how the bulk of the character development in the movie will come from Dib and his family.
“Character-wise, Zim, you can’t change him, he’s incredibly shallow,” Vasquez says. “There’s no introspection whatsoever. GIR, you can’t change him. He’s just an idiot and he’s insane. The only place there was a focus on developing stuff was with the Membrane family. I started with the comics, focusing on having Gaz and Dib feel more like a brother and sister as opposed to just people that hate each other. And their dad is more of a dad as opposed to this incredibly neglectful guy who just seems to have kids in his house.”
The pacing and comedy had to evolve for Florpus as well. Most episodes of the original series were divided into two stories at a little over 10 minutes each, but a feature-length Zim plot requires a different approach.
“There’s more time to develop a joke in 66 minutes,” Jhonen explains. “One of the first things that I thought was at that length we can’t just make a normal episode where they’re screaming all the time. You’ve got to have some changes in tone, and there has to be a little more of a story.”
Zim himself might be incapable of change, but there’s been a lot of technological advancements since series production ceased in 2002. Has any of that made it into the new movie? Does Zim have a smartphone now? Is he on Instagram? Snapchat?
“Technologically, some of the stuff is a little closer to what we use now,” Vasquez admits, “but Zim always existed in this sort of alternate reality, so it didn’t really need to be updated. It was already semi-futuristic. So everybody’s got Fitbits.”
“It was originally going to be called Enter the Fitbit!, but we couldn’t get the rights,” adds Richard Horvitz. Switching to Zim’s voice, he screams, “GIR! What is my heartrate?”
Zim’s world may now be plentiful with Fitbits, but, happily, the animation and art in Florpus looks stunningly identical to the original series, probably because it’s being produced in much the same way.
Of the animation process, Vasquez remarks, “I think things have gotten a little slicker, but we’re kind of using the same stuff. The studio that we’re working with overseas is working on paper, so they’re pretty old school. But we’re still Photoshop. I think there’s just less paper in the studio.”
Though a comedy, Invader Zim is notorious for being a surprisingly dark and cynical kids’ show. There are no real heroes as nearly every character is some variety of self-absorbed jerk and there are quite a lot of disturbing concepts and imagery.
“Like we pulled a kid’s eyes out,” says Jhonen, recalling an episode. Nickelodeon would give them notes on “weird stuff” they never expected.
“My favorite one was we couldn’t say ‘the underworld,’” Horvitz remembers. “So this was actually one of my favorite lines because it forced us to come up with, I think, a funnier one.” Slipping into Zim’s voice, he continues, “We had to say, ‘You’re from the place beneath the overworld!’”
As for the new movie, Vasquez hasn’t run into any issues with Nickelodeon’s standards department.
Says the creator, “This one story that we’re doing wasn’t designed to be more grotesque or shocking than what the series was. It’d be interesting to try to do some of the stories that we did back then now. I’ve seen way crazier stuff on other shows. You know, there’s some pretty intense stuff on Adventure Time.”
“You should note though,” interjects Wally Wingert, voice of Almighty Tallest Red, “that the reason other shows like Adventure Time are doing those things is because the trail was blazed by this man right here. When Invader Zim came out, that was the new barometer by which you could get away with something. Up until then, all the other cartoons were relatively tame, but now you’re seeing way darker stuff than we ever did on Zim.”
We don’t want to aim our hopes too high, but, hopefully, in these turbulent modern times, Zim will swoop in and make everything better. Or, alternatively, could he make America worse?
“There is no worsening,” says Jhonen. Everyone laughs. “Zim just doesn’t make sense anymore,” Vasquez continues. “I don’t know why we’re making this. It’d be like George Orwell writing Nineteen Eighty-Four after 1984 happened. You can’t laugh at people being horrible now. It’s sort of like, ‘Oh, everyone’s horrible now.’”
More Nick: Nickelodeon Reveals First-Look Footage of All-New 'INVADER ZIM: Enter the Florpus' TV Movie at San Diego Comic-Con 2018!
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon and Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus! News and Highlights!
It’s been over a decade, but the groundbreaking animated sci-fi comedy series, Invader Zim, is finally returning to television with an hour-long TV movie. The brainchild of comic book artist and writer Jhonen Vasquez, the series premiered on Nickelodeon in 2001, but was canceled during production of the second season due to low ratings. Though an ongoing comic materialized in 2015, fans of the cult hit have long hoped for Zim’s return to the small screen.
The original series follows Zim, an incompetent alien with delusions of grandeur who screams a lot, as he repeatedly fails to conquer planet Earth. He’s been sent there along with GIR, his incompetent robot assistant who also screams a lot, by their alien overlords, The Almighty Tallest, who just want Zim as far away as possible from “Operation Impending Doom II,” their second try at taking over the universe (Zim ruined the first attempt). In an effort to gather information about Earthlings, Zim disguises himself as a human child and attends school, where he finds an archnemesis in Dib Membrane, the only kid in class who questions Zim’s green skin.
Den of Geek got the chance to sit down with Jhonen and some of the cast: Richard Horvitz (Zim), Rikki Simons (GIR), Kevin McDonald (Almighty Tallest Purple), and Wally Wingert (Almighty Tallest Red). They asked them a bunch of stupid questions and a couple of sincere ones about Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus! and they kindly put up with it.
Den of Geek didn’t expect to get too many story details out of them, but they figured they’d ask if they’d spoil the entire plot for them anyway.
“Luke dies,” says Jhonen.
“They all die,” Richard adds.
“Tell him about the dinosaurs!” Wally shouts.
So maybe they didn’t get much revealed about the plot or learn what a “florpus” is, but the teaser Nickelodeon released offers some clues. In some shots, Dib looks as though he’s really let himself go. The Zim comic series begins with an unhealthy Dib getting back in shape and into the business of exposing Zim’s alien identity, so it looks like Enter the Florpus! may share some plot elements with the comic.
Taking a further page from the comic series, Vasquez explains how the bulk of the character development in the movie will come from Dib and his family.
“Character-wise, Zim, you can’t change him, he’s incredibly shallow,” Vasquez says. “There’s no introspection whatsoever. GIR, you can’t change him. He’s just an idiot and he’s insane. The only place there was a focus on developing stuff was with the Membrane family. I started with the comics, focusing on having Gaz and Dib feel more like a brother and sister as opposed to just people that hate each other. And their dad is more of a dad as opposed to this incredibly neglectful guy who just seems to have kids in his house.”
The pacing and comedy had to evolve for Florpus as well. Most episodes of the original series were divided into two stories at a little over 10 minutes each, but a feature-length Zim plot requires a different approach.
“There’s more time to develop a joke in 66 minutes,” Jhonen explains. “One of the first things that I thought was at that length we can’t just make a normal episode where they’re screaming all the time. You’ve got to have some changes in tone, and there has to be a little more of a story.”
Zim himself might be incapable of change, but there’s been a lot of technological advancements since series production ceased in 2002. Has any of that made it into the new movie? Does Zim have a smartphone now? Is he on Instagram? Snapchat?
“Technologically, some of the stuff is a little closer to what we use now,” Vasquez admits, “but Zim always existed in this sort of alternate reality, so it didn’t really need to be updated. It was already semi-futuristic. So everybody’s got Fitbits.”
“It was originally going to be called Enter the Fitbit!, but we couldn’t get the rights,” adds Richard Horvitz. Switching to Zim’s voice, he screams, “GIR! What is my heartrate?”
Zim’s world may now be plentiful with Fitbits, but, happily, the animation and art in Florpus looks stunningly identical to the original series, probably because it’s being produced in much the same way.
Of the animation process, Vasquez remarks, “I think things have gotten a little slicker, but we’re kind of using the same stuff. The studio that we’re working with overseas is working on paper, so they’re pretty old school. But we’re still Photoshop. I think there’s just less paper in the studio.”
Though a comedy, Invader Zim is notorious for being a surprisingly dark and cynical kids’ show. There are no real heroes as nearly every character is some variety of self-absorbed jerk and there are quite a lot of disturbing concepts and imagery.
“Like we pulled a kid’s eyes out,” says Jhonen, recalling an episode. Nickelodeon would give them notes on “weird stuff” they never expected.
“My favorite one was we couldn’t say ‘the underworld,’” Horvitz remembers. “So this was actually one of my favorite lines because it forced us to come up with, I think, a funnier one.” Slipping into Zim’s voice, he continues, “We had to say, ‘You’re from the place beneath the overworld!’”
As for the new movie, Vasquez hasn’t run into any issues with Nickelodeon’s standards department.
Says the creator, “This one story that we’re doing wasn’t designed to be more grotesque or shocking than what the series was. It’d be interesting to try to do some of the stories that we did back then now. I’ve seen way crazier stuff on other shows. You know, there’s some pretty intense stuff on Adventure Time.”
“You should note though,” interjects Wally Wingert, voice of Almighty Tallest Red, “that the reason other shows like Adventure Time are doing those things is because the trail was blazed by this man right here. When Invader Zim came out, that was the new barometer by which you could get away with something. Up until then, all the other cartoons were relatively tame, but now you’re seeing way darker stuff than we ever did on Zim.”
We don’t want to aim our hopes too high, but, hopefully, in these turbulent modern times, Zim will swoop in and make everything better. Or, alternatively, could he make America worse?
“There is no worsening,” says Jhonen. Everyone laughs. “Zim just doesn’t make sense anymore,” Vasquez continues. “I don’t know why we’re making this. It’d be like George Orwell writing Nineteen Eighty-Four after 1984 happened. You can’t laugh at people being horrible now. It’s sort of like, ‘Oh, everyone’s horrible now.’”
More Nick: Nickelodeon Reveals First-Look Footage of All-New 'INVADER ZIM: Enter the Florpus' TV Movie at San Diego Comic-Con 2018!
Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon and Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus! News and Highlights!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)