'Hey Arnold!' Worked as a Show That Never Talked Down to Kids (original) (raw)

Published Oct 4, 2023, 10:00 AM EDT

Pierce enjoys having the TV on during most times of the day. It feels weird for him not to have something playing while he's home. Due to the television screen constantly being on, he's constantly developing opinions and insights about movies and shows. He enjoys anything nostalgic. For films, he enjoys dramas and comedies. If the film has superheroes, chances are that he will avoid it. For shows, he enjoys anything goofy, stupid--but a good kind of stupid, and off-beat. His motto for writing about entertainment is "Look closer."

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Summary

• Hey Arnold! is a children's show that recognizes kids' intelligence and perception, treating them with respect rather than dumbing things down.
• The show embraced a realistic and diverse world, featuring characters from different backgrounds and tackling heavy subjects like homelessness and addiction.
• Hey Arnold! didn't shy away from dark humor, showing that children can understand and appreciate it, while also addressing the challenges of childhood.

“Arnold! Hey, Arnold!” We see a boy with a football-shaped head open a door, releasing a swarm of animals. A girl with a piercing voice keeps calling his name, almost menacingly, “Arnold. Arnold. Arnold!” The boys and girls face off in an alleyway. The girl, Helga G. Pataki (Francesca Marie Smith), ends the standoff with a “Move it, football head,” with Arnold (voiced by J.D. Daniels, Lane Toran, Phillip Van Dyke, and Spencer Klein), chivalrously letting her pass by and flashing viewers a grin. First airing in 1996, Hey Arnold! was a kids’ show that realized that kids aren’t stupid. Anyone who has spent enough time around children realizes that they are often more perceptive and savvy than they are given credit for, and _Hey Arnold!_’s creator, Craig Bartlett, implemented this knowledge into the show’s creation. Many kids’ shows focus on being boisterous as a means to procure laughs from children. But being loud and exaggerated, as so many kids’ programming is, doesn’t mean it is quality humor; in a way, it laughs down at children, treating children as if they don’t have to work as hard for their adulation.

But Hey Arnold! is different. From the first episode, it was a show whose kid characters weren’t oblivious to the hard edges of the world around them. Its urban setting, inspired by Bartlett’s hometown of Seattle, his time spent in Portland, Oregon, and Brooklyn, made it grittier than many kids’ shows, especially compared to suburban settings that usually serve as the backdrop for the genre. Nickelodeon in the '90s pushed the edge for children’s programming. The network was releasing more daring shows such as The Ren & Stimpy Show and Rocko’s Modern Life due to the network's philosophy of giving its executives space to be creative and unconventional with programming. Arnold and his best friend Gerald (Jamil Walker Smith) show comfort with city life that’s a far cry from that of the typical nine-year-old: they take the bus, spend time downtown unaccompanied by adults, take the subway, and become mixed up with criminals in the first episode. While much of the series hones in on typical coming-of-age issues, the cartoon also understood that children were capable of understanding society’s dingier, less palatable aspects.

'Hey Arnold' Didn't Shy Away From Portraying a Realistic and Diverse World

Many of _Hey Arnold!_’s episodes involve people who are homeless or, at least, don’t have comfortable living situations, like one episode where Arnold befriends the local urban legend, Pigeon Man, discovering that he’s just a lonely person who has taken solace in pigeons. Arnold’s city was brimming with unusual characters in unusual situations. There’s Stoop Kid who lived his entire life on a stoop and was afraid to leave said stoop. Another episode features the “Sewer King” who, yes, lives–more so created a kingdom–in the city’s sewer system. City life was the perfect backdrop for the show’s setting. Children who grow up in urban environments are more privy to different types of people and different walks of life than those who grew up in rural and mostly homogeneous communities. Diversity, particularly in children’s television was starting to be embraced in the ‘90s. An example is Nickelodeon’s sketch comedy All That which had a far more diverse cast compared to its adult counterpart Saturday Night Live.

Hey Arnold! was a continuation of embracing different kinds of people. P.S.118, Arnold’s fictional elementary school, brought students together from different socioeconomic backgrounds. There were wealthy students like Rhonda (Olivia Hack) in the same classroom as low-income students like Stinky (Christopher Walberg). In one episode, the girls are jealous of the amiable new student Lila (Ashley Buccille). After picking on her, they come to realize that she’s living in poverty in a dilapidated apartment. But diversity wasn’t limited to just Arnold’s peers; the boarding house where Arnold lives with his grandparents has immigrant residents such as the Czech Oskar Kokoshka (Steve Viksten) and the Vietnamese Mr. Hyunh (Baoan Coleman).

Instead of sticking to the realm of typical preteen topics for plots, Hey Arnold! waded into heavy subject matter. In the episode, “Arnold’s Christmas,” Arnold learns that Mr. Hyunh has a daughter but lost contact with her during the war, though the show didn’t directly state which war, with Mr. Hyunh’s heritage and flashbacks to his younger years, it’s clear that war that separated him from his daughter is the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Oskar and his wife Suzie (Mary Scheer) constantly have spousal conflicts with Oskar being an unemployed gambler who lives off of Suzie. Hey Arnold! even has an episode dedicated to addiction in the form of Chocolate Boy’s (Jordan Warkol) addiction to chocolate which has him hitting rock bottom and having to confront his dependency on chocolate.

And he isn’t the only reference to substance abuse in the series. Helag’s mom, Miriam (Kath Soucie), has subtle and not-so-subtle hints of being a functioning alcoholic: she’s constantly drinking “smoothies,” sometimes slurs her speech, falls asleep in random areas of the house, has to perform community service, and is referenced to having her license suspended. But despite the real-life seriousness of addiction, Hey Arnold! used Miriam’s inferred alcoholism as a running joke, which may not age well today but speaks to a larger theme of the series.

'Hey Arnold!' Never Shied Away From Dark Humor

While dark humor is an enjoyable aspect of many comedies geared towards adults, Hey Arnold! Was cognizant that not only could kids understand dark humor but that they could also appreciate it. Children are much more aware of the world around them than many adults realize. Hey Arnold! was privy to kids’ priviness. In the episode, “Curly Snaps,” Curly (Adam Wylie) finally reaches his breaking point and locks himself in the principal’s office, and takes Arnold as a hostage. He even pelts his classmates and staff with balls while making a reference to The Shining – “Here’s Curly!” Adults’ unpleasant realities weren’t kept secret from children.

In a Valentine's episode, the children are instructed to make Valentine's cards for someone they care about. When one student asks what if they’ve never cared for anyone or experienced love the teacher responds with, “Then, you’d be me.” Further pushing the edge of children’s humor, Arnold’s grandpa, Phil (Dan Castellaneta), tells Arnold about losing too many brain cells in Woodstock. In some of the darkest humor, in an episode, Arnold and his peers have a new drill sergeant teacher who's a nightmare. Under his rule, school becomes miserable instead of just boring like it was with their previous teachers. After the students have had it with the disciplinarian teacher, they devise a plan to use his likely PTSD against him by bombarding him with questions until he has a nervous breakdown. Not exactly traditional Nickelodeon content.

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Helga Was One of the Best 'Hey Arnold!' Characters

Helga looking annoyed in the Hey Arnold episode, "Helga on the Couch"

Image via Nickelodeon

But perhaps some of the best humor of the series comes from Helga. Helga, who pines for Arnold in private but admonishes him in public, in many ways is his opposite: she’s brash, he’s patient; he’s kind, she’s mean; she’s a pessimist, he’s an optimist. But her mean-spirited, insolent behavior is also hilarious. The episodes that center on Helga are usually some of the funniest. Like the show, she’s a kid who displays a deeper understanding of the world around her than many of the adults, including her parents, give her credit for. She’s sharply intelligent with an acerbic mouth. And her character serves the show’s brand of humor well.

Helga is the hilarious reminder that life is hard and sometimes miserable and that you're often faced with circumstances that you have to push through. In fact, Helga often finds herself on the threshold of misery; hiding her love for Arnold is exhausting. Helga’s feelings are expressed through poetry and a shrine of Arnold in her closet. But her secret is always at risk of being exposed — many episodes are about her having to go to great lengths to keep her feelings for Arnold, who she picks on in public to hide her true feelings, in the dark. But dark humor, again, intervenes.

One episode has Helga chasing down a parrot that’s memorized a poem of hers expressing her love for Arnold. Unfortunately for Helga, the parrot escapes and ends up in the care of the last person she’d want to have the parrot recite the poem: Arnold. When Arnold brings the parrot to class, it begins to entertain the students with the poem, but just as it’s about to reveal Helga’s anime, which would signal her as the poem’s author, a monitor lizard swoops in and swallows the parrot. While her peers are mortified, Helga is relieved that her feathered foe died with her secret.

'Hey Arnold!' Understood What It Meant To Be a Kid

Helga, Arnold, and Gerald walking confidently and smiling in Hey, Arnold!

Image via Nickelodeon

Hey Arnold! also deals with the absence of parents, both physically and emotionally. Arnold lives with his grandparents because his parents disappeared when he was a baby. Though not a major focus, it’s clear that Arnold is affected by his parents’ disappearance. Although Helga’s parents aren’t gone, they are emotionally distant. A running joke of the series is the blatant favoritism that Helga’s parents show her older sister Olga (Nika Futterman) while nullifying Helga. Hey Arnold! Shows many parents and authority figures that fail to understand children. While childhood is idealized, it’s also a stressful time because kids don’t have much agency and don’t have much control of their circumstances. Being an adult is hard, but so is being a kid. Adults can forget how difficult the younger years are and not be able to relate to children even though they’ve been through adolescence themselves. Hey Arnold! understands that sometimes kids have to be their own advocates.

Even though the series first aired decades ago and being a kid looks different today than it did in the ‘90s, Hey Arnold! is still golden after all these years to the Millennials who grew up watching it. It saw us where we were as kids–learning that life is hard–and it sees us now as adults. It’s a show that understands us. Much of adulthood is realizing that we’re still kids that just happen to be inhabiting mature bodies, and the kids that we are inside can still see ourselves reflected in a football-headed kid and his rambunctious peers. In the time since Hey Arnold! we can see just how much and how little things have changed.