If you were a 90s kid, you probably get slightly triggered by the name Arnold. After all, who can forget the particularly loud and in-your-face yelling from one Helga G. Pataki from Nickelodeon's iconic Hey Arnold! series? From the intro sequence–which saw her screaming at the titular Arnold throughout parts of the neighborhood–through the many episodes focusing on her obsession of good ol’ Football Head, Helga is vital to the show.
So, consider real Arnold-heads shocked when the creator of the show, Craig Bartlett, confirmed recently in an interview with El Estímulo that Helga’s signature look–bow, attitude, and the prominent eyebrows–was inspired by old childhood photos of none other than Frida Kahlo. Although Bartlett gave Helga her iconic pigtails, you can see the similarities in an Instagram post that the creator shared back in August.
A post shared by Craig Bartlett (@craigbartlett) on
This isn’t the first revelation from Bartlett this year, as the show gears up to come back into your life with Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie, releasing on Thanksgiving. Earlier this summer, he revealed that a lot of the plot and atmosphere of the iconic cartoon was inspired by the magical realism employed by Gabriel García Márquez: “We were reading Gabriel García Márquez and 100 Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera,” Bartlett said to Great Big Story. “Those were big influences on us, because magic realism is the term coined about García Márquez’s writing. I wanted there to be a magical realism to Arnold’s house and his neighborhood.”
Hey Arnold! The Jungle Moviewill premiere on Friday, Nov. 24, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. (ET/PT) on Nickelodeon USA, as part of the networks Thanksgiving celebrations.
Viewers can visit the Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie page on Nick.com and the Nick App, along with the Hey Arnold!Facebook page and Instagram, to get a look at the TV movie. Fans can also watch full-length episodes on Nick.com and the Nick App.
NickSplat will celebrate Hey Arnold! throughout the month of November with fan-favorite episodes every night from 12:00 a.m.-1:00 a.m. (ET/PT). In addition, NickSplat will treat fans to a marathon of every single Hey Arnold! episode beginning Friday, Nov. 17, through Friday, Nov. 24, from 11:00 p.m.–6:00 a.m. (ET/PT). Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie encores Saturday, Nov. 25, and Friday, Dec. 1, at 12:00 a.m. (ET/PT) on TeenNick.
Original source: Remezcla.Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Nickelodeon and Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie News and Highlights!
Plenty of TV shows leave the air with story threads hanging and questions unanswered, but few have done so in the fashion of Hey Arnold! An animated fixture on Nickelodeon during the late ’90s and early ’00s, the series about football-headed fourth-grader Arnold and his exploits in the big city jumped to the big screen in 2002, in the first of what were proposed as two feature-length adventures. A follow-up, Hey Arnold: The Jungle Movie, was set to solve one of the show’s biggest mysteries—the whereabouts of Arnold’s parents, who’d left their infant son in the care of his boarding-house-proprietor grandparents, then disappeared in the fictional Central American nation of San Lorenzo—before factors commercial and creative led to its cancellation. For more than a decade, The Jungle Movie lived on in fan speculation and interview queries; when Nickelodeon began exploring its back catalog for potential reboots and revivals, Bartlett was finally granted the chance to realize his long, lost vision. With Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie now set to debut on Nick this Friday, November 24, The A.V. Club spoke with Bartlett about bringing Arnold and friends back to TV, the multi-generational talent that made The Jungle Movie possible, and the possibility of more Hey Arnold! in the future!
The A.V. Club: A renewed interest in Hey Arnold! cropped up online around the beginning of the 2010s—was that around the time that you became aware of this fan base that wanted closure with Hey Arnold! and had sustained the conversation about The Jungle Movie? Or was it earlier than that?
Craig Bartlett: As soon as the show got canceled, and all from 2002 until 2012, that decade, there was always some interest and people trying to form groups and make petitions, but it seemed to really happen after Facebook came into being. I would say around 2012, the time of those articles that The A.V. Club was doing, it seemed like at that point the real sea change was the fan art got really good. [Laughs.] People who’d grown up on the show and then become adults and gone to art school and become animators and become fine artists—I was seeing fan art that was so good, I was thinking “Geez, if we were still in production, I’d hire those people to work on my show.”
AVC: Did The Jungle Movie create the opportunity to do that?
CB: Yeah. A really cool part of this story is that we were really encouraged by Nickelodeon to mix it up and not only bring back the O.G. Arnold artists and writers from the old days, but bring in the next generation, and I hired artists and writers who loved the show when they were kids. And I think that combination of old-school and new-school really energized the whole project. I can think of so many examples in the finished Jungle Movie of stuff that was done by the next generation. They really brought a lot to it, and it was their love of the show—the love of a kid who loved it as a kid and grew up.
AVC: How did those two generations of creatives mesh?
CB: Really well. A little bit more than two years ago, we spent a long, three-day session breaking the story, and then from there I wrote the outline for the two-hour movie. There were, in that group, a couple writers who had grown up on the show, and I had Michelle Lamoreaux and Joe Purdy—who had been writers on the series—and then just a couple other writer friends that I’d met in between. And so we had a really cool age range from about 30 to 50—there were a whole range of points-of-view and a range of ages. And I think it really helped, and we got along great. I remember there were times when Michelle and I were joking about some really obscure moment in the series—we’re big fans of Helga episodes and Olga episodes—and we’d been telling a little joke, and the next generation writers knew exactly what we were talking about. Nothing escaped them, their knowledge of the series was encyclopedic.
AVC: You basically hired your own institutional knowledge.
CB: [Laughs.] I can’t even describe what a phenomenon it is. I’m sure this has happened elsewhere, but it seems almost like something brand new, where you get to build on this legacy of knowledge that all these people know. Our movie is definitely going to reflect that. When 30-year-olds watch it, they’ll be going, “Oh, that’s a reference to this!”
You know, the clip we showed at San Diego in July? That is so meta. The idea that Helga and Gerald make a video to win the contest so Arnold can go to San Lorenzo, and it’s about how Arnold’s always helping people? It’s basically what the series is, and so we showed in that three-minute clip, all these different examples that were from episodes of the series. And the gag that Helga had been surreptitiously video-taping his whole life: As you watch these clips, from scenes that you probably remember from the series, except the camera’s at a different angle, like now it’s up in a tree or behind a wall or under something. It comments on the series even as you watch a thing that’s hopefully entertaining and funny and good.
AVC: It’s also an efficient method of catch-up for anyone who missed the original series.
CB: Exactly. And that’s why we chose that piece to show in San Diego. It was meant to be all things—both a way to catch up and also to be, “Oh my god, they’re checking every box.”
AVC: Many of the voice actors returned for The Jungle Movie—Dan Castellaneta, Tress MacNeille, Francesca Marie Smith, Anndi McAfee, to name a few—but you did have to cast some replacements. What was it about the actors that you chose for Arnold and Gerald that captured the essence of those characters?
CB: Well, the Arnold character, you know we replaced over and over again, because we had to get a certain, before-puberty, husky, super-chill boy voice. And each of these kids turned into a teenager and their voice cracked and they just didn’t sound like Arnold anymore. And then Gerald is different: It’s such a unique style that Jamil Smith had in the first place, that we kept just trying to keep Jamil around and pitch his voice up. So I was really impressed when Benjamin Flores Jr. [who plays Gerald in the movie] came in—he clearly had watched many episodes and really absorbed the Geraldness. I was super-thrilled.
The same thing went with the other characters: Stinky is such a unique-sounding kid, and I didn’t think that could be imitated—but somehow we did. Eugene, Curly, Sid—those were all the boys we had to bring in. And I just appreciated what a great job the next-generation actors did at mimicking those sounds. Some of them you can’t believe—when you listen to Curly and Eugene in The Jungle Movie, you’ll swear it was the originals.
AVC: Alfred Molina is playing the villain of the piece, La Sombra. Was his casting a wink toward him being in Raiders Of The Lost Ark?
CB: Everybody remembers that scene from Raiders. It’s really funny to, because when everybody meets him, you can tell he’s been asked these questions over and over. The Raiders guy, Doc Ock from Spider-Man 2—I’ve seen him in all kinds of dramatic roles, and I just knew he had the dramatic chops. And you’re not expecting the English accent when he comes in.
AVC: He’s got such a quality of voice, too.
CB: He’s a perfect guy for voice-over. I hope we find a way to reprise his role or write him a new one and keep working with him, because he’s fantastic.
AVC: You say “reprise his role”—are you leaving the opportunity open for more Hey Arnold! after this?
CB: I’ve been saying this all along: The movie’s been made to act perfectly as closure so that everybody feels satisfied that all of the storylines got wrapped up. And also, at the end of the movie, they’re starting sixth grade, so season six is also my hope.
AVC: That’s a might big task to take on: An ending that’s also a beginning.
CB: [Laughs.] Yeah, no kidding. I thought the challenge of making a story that both had complete closure and also left the door open for more stuff—well, that’s TV. TV’s like that. There’s always another season, or you hope there’s another season.
AVC: If you hadn’t had this specific story to tell—the trip to the San Lorenzo, the search for Arnold’s parents—do you think you would’ve still wanted to revisit the series?
CB: It’s so funny—I can’t separate the two. I’ve been thinking about this unfinished business of The Jungle Movie for 15 years, and so it’s really hard to picture it any other way.
It’s funny too because that’s what was going on a few years ago at Nickelodeon. They were really looking at the ’90s properties and going, “Well, which of these would be able to be rebooted?” And as they looked at them, you know they were asking those kinds of questions. They were saying, “If we reboot this, will people think it was just a cash-grab? Just doing it because we can? And that’s not a good reason to reboot a show. We should leave well enough alone.” In my case, when I first came in and was talking to them, I’m like, “Oh yeah, I’ve got a Jungle Movie I need to make. I’ve got this cliffhanger that never got resolved. I’ve got millions of adult fans who were really mad that it got left in this cliffhanger. I would love to do a reboot.” So I just felt I was really lucky in that way. I had the perfect project for them.
AVC: How did The Jungle Movie evolve from its original conception, and this idea you’d kept in the back of your mind while you were working on other projects, to the final product?
CB: When I think about what we were trying to do 15 years ago, and what we ended up doing now, we really benefited from the passage of time. I feel like when we got this chance to do it, clearly the quality of broadcast TV had improved—we’ve got this hi-def, 16:9 big screen that you could show in a theater and it’d look great—I mean, compared to our first movie, which we made for TV and then we blew up to film, and it kind of suffered from that process. I know that if we put The Jungle Movie on a movie screen, it’d look terrific.
We went, “We know we’re going to have to redesign everything because of this new higher-definition format—let’s change it a little bit, let’s make it that a year or so has passed, and that they’re in the fifth grade so that they can all be a year or so older. We can redesign everybody and making them [Laughs.] a little taller, adjust their outfits a little bit.” And I thought, “Fine, we’ll make it so the change doesn’t upset anybody, but you can tell that some time has passed.” We really benefited from that and the story benefited from it, too, because I’d had a decade to think about it, so when I went to write the movie again, I was able to take all the hopes and dreams of the fans into consideration.
AVC: The Jungle Movie is the first of these Nick reboots to debut. What does it mean to you that Hey Arnold! was picked to lead that charge?
CB: I was so happy. I got to tell you: When we were making the show here 20 years ago, I always felt like we were just one of many shows that were being made at Nickelodeon, and I didn’t think we were better or worse than any other show. And so, to be at this point in the history of the whole legacy of Nickelodeon, and have it held in such high esteem, is really great, really flattering. It makes me really happy about the work we did. We knew we were making a good show in the first place, but we didn’t realize it would be so beloved. So that’s nice.
Nickelodeon UK & Ireland will premiere a special holiday-themed episode of Lip Sync Battle Shorties on Monday 11th December 2017 at 5:00pm!
In Nickelodeon's Lip Sync Battle Shorties: Holiday Special, three kids will lip sync to their favourite Christmas songs with themed costumes, dancing, and performances to try to take home the Iced Out Mic! Lip Sync Battle Shorties: Holiday Special will be full of energy, entertainment and holiday spirit. Hosted by Nick Cannon and his sidekick, the kid-favourite, singing, dancing, social media sensation JoJo Siwa, Lip Sync Battle Shorties will celebrate kids' top artists. JoJo Siwa will provide commentary on each performance, and the episode will also feature the Shorties Dance Crew, a 10-person backup crew that has mastered all styles of dance from break-dancing to ballroom.
“On Lip Sync Battle Shorties the kids are in charge, the performances come straight from their imagination. They’re so much cooler than we are!,” said executive producers Casey Patterson and Jay Peterson.
Lip Sync Battle Shorties lets three talented real-life kid participants personalize their performances, allowing them to make decisions on all creative elements, from song and costume selection, to choreography and staging, so that they can perform on-stage like their favourite artists.
Based on the pop culture phenomenon of lip-sync battling, the original Spike Lip Sync Battle series features celebrities going head to head--lip-syncing the song of their choice--battling for the coolest bragging rights on the planet. The series is a ratings and multiplatform superstar for Spike and is the most-watched original series in the network’s history. Lip Sync Battle Shorties and the award-winning and Emmy-nominated series, Lip Sync Battle, are executive produced by Casey Patterson of Casey Patterson Entertainment, Jay Peterson of Matador Content, James Sunderland, John Krasinski, Stephen Merchant, Rick Schwartz and Eight Million Plus Productions.
Nick Cannon has entertained audiences in film, on television, on record, onstage and online for nearly 20 years. The talented artist continues to dominate all facets of entertainment as a comedian, host, actor, writer, director, executive producer, deejay, philanthropist and children’s book author.
The two-time Emmy®-nominated Lip Sync Battle on Spike TV and Channel 5 is a global multiplatform powerhouse that can be seen in over 140 countries worldwide. The critically-acclaimed series has delivered over one billion cross-platform views since launch, over two million YouTube Channel subscribers, over two million fans on Facebook, and is the most watched original series in Spike history.
JoJo Siwa is a true teen sensation with over 4 million subscribers on YouTube and a hugely popular range of JoJo Bows. After quickly realising she had a love for dance at age two, JoJo Siwa began taking classes in Tap, Jazz, Hip Hop and Ballet and featured in the number one Lifetime show, Dance Moms. Off screen, Siwa connects with her fans in several different ways: through social media, where she currently has over 6.3 million followers on Instagram, 11.4 million followers on Musical.ly, 308,000 Twitter followers and 654 million views on her YouTube channel; through her SIWANATOR club which stands against negativity and bullying; through her varied line of consumer products; and with her single, “Boomerang,” which has been viewed more than 290 million times.
Lip Sync Battle Shorties: Holiday Special will make its world debut on Nickelodeon USA on Sunday 3rd December 2017 at 7:00pm ET/PT, and will then roll out on Nickelodeon channels and programming blocks globally.
Following its debut, Nick UK & Eire will encore Lip Sync Battle Shorties: Holiday Special in the lead up to Christmas.
About Nickelodeon
The home of SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, PAW Patrol and Nella the Princess Knight, Nickelodeon UK & Ireland Network is available in over 13 million cable and satellite homes and now reaches more than 10 million viewers a month. Launched in 1993, the top-performing Nickelodeon network comprises seven dedicated entertainment channels for kids aged 4-15 and their families: Nickelodeon, Nickelodeon HD, Nickelodeon +1, Nicktoons, Nick Jr., Nick Jr. +1 and Nick Jr. Too.
The entertainment company has built a diverse multi-platform business by putting kids first in everything it does – Kids Rule! Content is at the core of the business with critically-acclaimed and hugely-popular television programming from the UK and around the world. In addition to the quality television programmes, Nickelodeon also produces bespoke content available online at nick.co.uk, nicktoons.co.uk, nickjr.co.uk and on Nick Play, as well as consumer product and recreation opportunities such as the UK’s first-ever Nick theme park, Nickelodeon Land.
Original source: Digiguide.Follow NickALive! on Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, via RSS, on Instagram, and/or Facebook for the latest Christmas on Nickelodeon UK and Lip Sync Battle Shorties News and Highlights!
Nicktoons UK & Ireland will start to premiere and show the brand-new animated comedy series ToonMarty every Saturday and Sunday at 6:30am and 8:30am from Saturday 9th December 2017!
In the middle of Toonville, where all cartoons live, sits the ToonMart, where all cartoons hang out. As the Number One (read "only") employee there, Marty believes his job is to stick his nose in everyone else's business... And there’s no business Marty likes better than somebody else's business, except maybe show business! With every bend, bounce, flip and spin, Marty makes a great big cartoony adventure out of everything, and includes everyone in his Marty Party! Joining Marty in Toonville are Bernie and Hollie, Burnatron, Super Simon, Chef and Chicken, Hobo Jim, Suki, Griselda, Punchy McKnuckle, Carly, Lenny, Dr. Smarty Pants, and Jack.
Toon Marty (40×11’) is produced by Montreal's Sardine Productions. Originally commissioned by Corus Entertainment for its French and English Teletoon networks, the series premiered on both in Canada on Monday 1st May 2017 at 5:00pm ET/PT.
Nickelodeon acquired the broadcast rights to ToonMarty from GoldBee in February 2017, and is currently airing the series on its channels and digital platforms internationally (excluding North America, China, and Japan). The property is supported by The Bell Fund, The Canadian Media Fund and The Shaw Rocket Fund.
Online at nicktoons.co.uk, fans can find out more about the series and watch exclusive video clips.
Below is a list of currently announced brand-new ToonMarty episodes set to premiere on Nicktoons UK & Eire in December 2017:
Saturday 9th December 2017:
6:31am - Moonlighting Marty: Marty is good at being Burnatron's evil sidekick, so good that he alienates his best friend Burnie. His solution to bring father and son back together is explosive!
6:45am - Awful Waffle: When Marty plugs in an old waffle iron, he unleashes Waffle Man, a maniac who wants to turn everything and everyone into waffles. Marty fights back with everything he has!
8:30am - Billboard Boy: After an open call to find the New Face of the Toonmart, Burnie becomes the new mascot, and Marty his mentor, until Burnie gets bored and overworked and sabotages himself.
8:45am - Marty's Zit: Marty befriends his first pimple: From childhood, through adolescence, into parenthood, and finally into old age, Zitty proves to be a great companion and a true friend.
Sunday 10th December 2017:
6:30am - Where There's Smoke There's Marty: Marty's overworked cartoon exit-smoke trail leaves in a huff, so he borrows Burnie's smoke trail to compete for the Employee of the Month award.
6:45am - The Suit Makes the Super Hero: Marty and Burnie agree to dry-clean Super Simon's suit, but get stuck in it. The boys create chaos with their superhero antics, but can't get out of the suit!
8:30am - Chicken Fricassee: Marty, out to prove all Toonmart gizmos work perfectly, helps Chef catch Chicken. When he roasts him, the toons ostracize him and he learns that everyone has their place.
8:45am - Toonsgiving Day Parade: The trio fights over building a float for the Toonsgiving Day Parade, and ends up getting snagged on the moon. They must work together to make it back to Toonville.
Saturday 16th December 2017:
6:30am - The Barber of Toonville: When Burnie gets the worst (and only) haircut ever in the history of Toonville, Burnie's hair clippings go on a cultural crime spree.
6:45am - Rest in Pieces: Missing a fourth for their quartet, Marty makes Blub from various parts. Blub is a great singer but an extremely annoying toon who pushes everyone's limits.
8:30am - Minutes to Save the World: Marty notices that Toonville always resets. The trio goes nuts, leaving Toonville in ruins. When Jack dies and Toonville doesn't reset, Marty has to put it back.
8:45am - Batteries Included: A universal remote allows the trio to control everything, leading to pranks. When they get stuck on slo-mo, they have to face their victims or stay stuck forever.
Sunday 17th December 2017:
6:30am - You're it!: When Marty gets tagged he thinks it's a great honour. When he finds that "it" is a life-threatening disease, he and Burnie find the Wise Tree to work out how to get rid of it.
6:45am - The No-Toon Bro Zone: Marty and Burnie find Robogirl's "chill space", a blank area devoid of toons, and turn it into a Bro Zone. She's furious until they invite her to "bro out" with them.
Arnold finally gets answers about the whereabouts of his missing parents in the highly anticipated, brand-new Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie, debuting this Friday, Nov. 24, from 7:00-9:00 p.m. (ET/PT) on Nickelodeon. Featuring a storyline picking up where the original TV series ended in 2004, Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie follows the kids on the field trip of a lifetime, where Arnold and his friends embark on a quest to achieve his dream of finding his missing parents. Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie will premiere as a simulcast on Nickelodeon, TeenNick and Nicktoons.
Co-written and executive produced by the TV series’ original creator Craig Bartlett, Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie features original voice cast members Francesca Marie Smith (The Prince of Egypt) as Helga and Anndi McAfee (Tom and Jerry: The Movie) as Phoebe, alongside dynamic new voice talent Mason Vale Cotton (Mad Men) as Arnold and Benjamin “Lil’ P-Nut” Flores, Jr. (Game Shakers) as Gerald.
Lane Toran (original voice of Arnold) and Jamil Walker Smith (original voice of Gerald) are also amongst the returning cast members, lending their voices as Che and Paulo, two members of the boat crew in San Lorenzo. Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2) stars as resident villain, Lasombra.
NickSplat, TeenNick’s programming block dedicated to Nickelodeon’s legendary library of hits from the ‘90s and 2000s, continues its Hey Arnold! celebration with a nightly marathon of every single Hey Arnold! episode through Friday, Nov. 24, from 11:00 p.m.–6:00 a.m. (ET/PT). Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie encores Saturday, Nov. 25, and Friday, Dec. 1, at 12:00 a.m. (ET/PT) on TeenNick.
Viewers can visit the Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie page on Nick.com and the Nick App, along with the Hey Arnold!Facebook page and Instagram, to get a look at the TV movie. Fans can also celebrate the premiere by turning themselves into their favorite Hillwood characters at NickSplat’s interactive “Hey Arnold! Yourself” website NickSplat.com/heyarnoldyourself.
