Word: showing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Young contestants on the game show Double Dare compete for prizes by tossing clumps of mashed potatoes at one another, rummaging through huge pizzas and plunging down a sundae slide into a vat of whipped cream. Underage comics on You Can't Do That on Television assault one another with gag lines rather than food, but get drenched with a bucket of green slime every time they utter the phrase "I don't know." The action on Kids' Court is only slightly more decorous. On one show a youngster stood accused of taking his brother's water pistol and hiding...
...address in children's TV. Launched in 1979, the cable channel for children is now seen in 41 million homes, double the number of five years ago. Ratings, among the highest of all basic-cable services, are up 12% from last year. Along with its long-running show for preschoolers, Pinwheel, and a diet of cartoons and vintage reruns (Lassie, Dennis the Menace), the channel is steadily boosting its slate of original programming aimed at older youngsters. The most successful, Double Dare, has become a hit in syndication and has spawned several imitators. Nickelodeon's success with live-action children...
What Nickelodeon has recognized, first of all, is that much of what makes kids kids is television. Nearly all the shows Nickelodeon has created are junior versions of adult programs. You Can't Do That on Television is a Laugh- In-like potpourri of sketches, blackouts and one-liners. Nick Rocks is a little-league MTV, and Don't Just Sit There is a talk show geared to and hosted by youngsters. The opening of Kids' Court slyly satirizes TV courtroom shows: two young "litigants" face the camera in dramatic closeup and state their beefs, then whirl and burst into...
This hip, TV-savvy attitude is also a major feature of Nick at Nite, the three-year-old companion service aimed primarily at adults, which takes over in the evenings when Nickelodeon signs off. The channel offers mostly old reruns, from The Donna Reed Show to Saturday Night Live, but the retreads are given a self-parodying spin with tongue-in-cheek promos (a "How to Be Donna Reed" home-study course) and special events like a "Do-It-Yourself Sitcom" contest. In that one, viewers were asked why their life ought to be a comedy series. Three families were...
...programming is on the way. This week Nick at Nite offers Tattertown, a cartoon pilot from raffish animator Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat) about a world where discarded objects come to life. Nickelodeon, meanwhile, is developing a sitcom about kids at a dude ranch, as well as a new show for preschoolers, Eureka's Castle, that will use animation, puppets and live action to explore problems like being afraid of the dark...