Video: Letting Kids Just Be Kids Nickelodeon

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 it in the oven, where it melted. To help re-create the crime, the TV defendant grabbed a replica of the gun and raced around the studio squirting the audience.

We are a long way from Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood here, but antics like these have helped make Nickelodeon the hot 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’s fare has even encouraged the networks to try out some new formats this fall in the Saturday-morning cartoon ghetto.

But Nickelodeon has done more than just come up with a winning formula; it has found a distinctive voice. Nickelodeon shows are high-spirited without being silly, intelligent but not patronizing. They respect both kids’ sophistication and their sense of fun. “We’re not here to change kids or increase their reading scores,” says Geraldine Laybourne, a former grade- , school teacher who is Nickelodeon’s general manager. “We think it’s pretty tough being a kid today. They’re growing up in households where most have a single parent or both parents work. We ought to be a place where they can just relax, where kids can just be kids.”

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 the courtroom-studio to the cheers of an audience. Take that, Judge Wapner.

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 then chosen to act out their own mini-sitcoms, with the help of guest stars like Eve Plumb of The Brady Bunch.

More original 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.

Not all adults are enthralled by Nickelodeon. Double Dare and another game show called Finders Keepers (now off the air) have been denounced for encouraging exhibitionism and greed — the sort of schoolmarmish complaint that deserves a dousing with green slime. Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television, praises the channel as a healthy alternative to network fare but is worried that some of its newer shows “may have gone a little overboard taking a Mad magazine approach.”

Charren is also concerned about the channel’s expanding commercial ventures. Nickelodeon did not even run commercials before 1984; now it has entered the syndication market and is licensing its name for products ranging from shampoo to sneakers. “We are a channel for kids and an advocate for kids first,” says Laybourne. “The licensing is only an afterthought.” Such ventures, moreover, enable the channel to prosper and expand its programming — a fact of TV life that Nickelodeon’s savvy young viewers would certainly understand. Call it: Why You Can Do That on Television.