>>17549 Then Rugrats would've taken its place like before.

>>17549 CatDog would have probably gotten another season, Hey Arnold and Rugrats would be the current longest running, The Wild Thornberrys and Rocket Power would have possibly made it to 2015, and Jimmy Neutron would be in its current season.

>>17570 Let's not go too far here. What would have really happened is apart from most shows, yes, getting one or two more seasons but not becoming that long running, would have been shows like Harvey Beaks and El Tigre not getting canned. Network tv has a very very bad complex where if a show reaches new heights the executives will immediately choose to hold all new shows to it's standard. If a show fails to be financially as successful, then it gets canned. This isn't Spongebob's fault though, it's mostly the fact that TV EXECUTIVES ARE THE BIGGEST RETARDS ON PLANET EARTH.

>>17576 I'm not blaming Spongebob for the various flubs by Nick's executives.Because those that really know are aware that Hillenburg, along with quite a few crew members, worked on Rocko's Modern Life before that got cancelled. Having watched that show when it was new, I doubt that it would have made it to mid 2000s, and it honestly shouldn't have. >getting one or two more seasons but not becoming that long running Well, my previous statements about Hey Arnold and Rugrats can be taken with a Plebbit /s. Though, it's possible that The Wild Thornberrys, Rocket Power, Invader Zim, and Jimmy Neutron would have gotten more seasons if Spongebob didn't exist. CatDog really didn't need a post-movie season. As the movie could be taken as the finale. But, due to the way the movie ended, there was no harm in a final season to see how events had changed the characters. Harvey Beaks I've never seen. EL Tigre... It's still surprising how they didn't push that one more. Another two are Angry Beavers and Cat Scratch.

>>17576 Stop yelling retard.

>>17578 I don't think it's fair to name shows cancelled before the Sponge's post-s3 curse. Some of those shows were cancelled because of incompetent production managers and art teams. Invader Zim for example had a crew consisting almost entirely of industry first timers, a lot of them being buddies with Vasquez and fans of horror, which is why the show is what it is. And then you have the crew members that were already in the industry for a number of years, like Steve Ressel. Since he's already pretty infamous on /co/, I don't think I have to explain his backstory

>>17581 >steve resel I heard that name before but Can't remenber why /co/ hates him.

>>17581 >I don't think it's fair to name shows cancelled before the Sponge's post-s3 curse. Thinking in terms of what the other children's cable television networks (mainly CN) had at the time it is. Because they all had a role to play in what networks pushed to be their ratings puller. Before Spongebob, what did Nick have to compete with Cartoon Network and Disney? Rugrats was good. But the Klasky Csupo were starting to run together. > Invader Zim and Steve Ressel Invader Zim was trying to out do Courage on a network that's a stickler about what its cartoons do. Which is why most people say that Invader Zim would have been suited on a network such as the Sci-Fi channel. But the Sci-Fi wasn't airing any cartoons for kids at that time. I don't know the beef /co/ has with Steve Ressel. Care to explain? The Adult Swim Message Boards is the last cartoon oriented MB I frequented. After the webmaster stop paying the bill for the one prior.

>>17582 >>17585 First, infamy != hate necessarily. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/infamous Anyway, something something the guy is supposedly a cunt with a bad ego problem. From what I remember the Invader Zim team didn't really like him because he was constantly fighting over creative decisions, but whether this is objectively good or bad is hard to tell, because frankly I don't trust most people, but from what has been claimed, it seems as though he didn't always have the better idea. Also, the Rugrats storyboard jam, which to my understanding has been re-discovered by normalfags a little while ago, because normalfags love digging up and tarnishing silver. I hope his livejournal is archived somewhere. I know he posted a rant about his time on Invader Zim but had to take it down.

>>17585 >>17590 Steve Ressel used to hang out on One Piece forums back in the day. He was well-known for his crazy rants. That said, nobody hated the guy. He was well-loved. Roleplayed as a Jap stereotype once, which was hilarious. From what I can tell, he was right to fight a lot of creative decisions. Unfortunately, sometimes two creators fighting over the soul of a project are what make it great. I didn't mind the Zim movie but I feel like it was missing a certain touch from Steve. At the end of the day, he's a shitposter and he knows quality. I've heard more about his fights with Nick over the show than with the rest of the crew, although I'm sure he was stubborn in general. But not without good reason. I hope he comes out of retirement someday.

>>17590 >>17592 I see. Thanks for the explanations. >Also, the Rugrats storyboard jam, which to my understanding has been re-discovered by normalfags a little while ago, because normalfags love digging up and tarnishing silver. No, they just want to be in-the-know about stuff they chose to pass over in their childhood, as well teen-years, in their quest to be older. These were the tweens and teens that said cartoons were for children. So watched shows like Charmed, Angel, Buffy, Friends, and Dawson's Creek. These are the "aspiring writers" writing movie adaptions for comics they never read, and rehashing original cartoon character to what they consider appropriate. I've seen them quote from it. But the book, 'Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age', doesn't even cover all the inappropriate shenanigans that happened behind the scenes of Nick's "golden age" cartoons. It can't.

>>17549 Modern humor would have been completely different, to be honest. Cartoons wold have gone the way of the dinosaur way earlier that when it happened (which in my opinion is around 2015-16), as in, the only people actively watching them are young children and toddlers, with manchild-specific shows coming out way earlier as people got nostalgic for the 90s. Spongebob also helped shape a large portion of late internet humor, but to be honest anything that came out after the first "batch" of memes is just trash that we can do without. In my completely biased and uninformed opinion, deleting from history Tom & Jerry, The Critic and Courage The Cowardly dog would also basically destroy the way cartoons evolved on a fundamental level. I'm not picking the Simpsons as I'm fairly sure that everyone in Cally was fucking sick of the culture of the 50s and 80s and plenty of other media was tearing it down already, it just got the right mix of people to produce a reference fest. >>17576 Also this, the most popular or most genre breaking thing will always kill off decent but comparatively more generic stuff. Suits are retards, though necessary retards.

>>17590 >I know he posted a rant about his time on Invader Zim but had to take it down. His (now mostly lost) audio commentary of the series is one giant rant on Invader Zim and all of the issues it ran into with the staff/network executives. I don't hate Ressel though, as he was clearly passionate about the series and said something along the lines of "it really was a special show, I wish we could've done even greater things with it" in the commentary. If anything, Jhonen was hindering the show with stupid ideas, such as "what if we just turned IZ into the brady bunch lol" or "what if humans found out Zim was an alien but just didn't care cuz he sucks, lololol??" And it's not like the Invader Zim product Steve didn't direct (Florpus) was an example of how good Zim was without his direction.

>>17598 >Spongebob also helped shape a large portion of late internet humor Did it really? If early spongebob writing had an influence on current internet humor, I think it'd actually be funny >but to be honest anything that came out after the first "batch" of memes is just trash that we can do without. Nick loves the fact that the sponge has so many "memes", but I think there's a difference between image macros/.gifs quoting the show and actual memes. The only spongememes I'm aware of is the spongebob niggerpants spam from almost two decades ago (fuck), the squidward ytp fad and the deformed spongebobs people would draw in oekaki.

>>17598 Spongebob may have brought something new to the table in terms of concept. But the show didn't have that much of an influence on humor itself. That's like saying MAD magazine influenced all of the humor and frat house magazines before it.

>>17549 I'm more surprised how Hillenburg learned the mistakes from John K. and Murray: >Adding a strong independent female character so the executives would shut the fuck up >Turning down an adult spinoff. What he didn't count on is how a corporation react if they struck gold and start beating the shit out his dead horse. >>17570 Didn't insiders at Nick confirm that CatDog was planned to be the never ending cartoon if Spongebob flopped?

How about if this show ended in 2004 with the Spongebob movie, then the episodes that Spongebob fans hate never had made?

>>20945 Then you’d have lots of talking heads fellating it to hell and back as the “perfect series that knew when it was getting stale and bowed out gracefully with one last hurrah movie” basically in your scenario Spongebob is Nickelodeon’s Ed, Edd, & Eddy

>>17636 what did the "Mind" in MAD mean? Reading between the lines?

>>17585 >Before Spongebob, what did Nick have to compete with Cartoon Network and Disney? Rugrats was good. But the Klasky Csupo were starting to run together. Rugrats was the cash cow, but there were plenty of other successful shows that were still on the air at the time, and getting plenty of seasons.

>>17649 >Didn't insiders at Nick confirm that CatDog was planned to be the never ending cartoon if Spongebob flopped? Yes. Or at least I've heard the same somewhere but I can never manage to find a source for it. >>20945 Then we wouldn't be living in the hellscape we've found ourselves in right now.

>>17558 I am always perplexed that Rugrats was that popular in the US. I don't recall Rugrats being anything special when I was growing up. Yeah, we watched it like we watched any other cartoon as stupid children, but I don't recall anyone actually being a fan of the show. It was a show about babies for fuck's sake, you have to try really hard to be lamer than that.

>>21019 It might not have been anyone's favorite, but it had broad appeal. It was well made and everyone liked it, even if they didnt love it. Also it probably fared well with execs because it was "cute", and people who actually cared about the industry could respect it as actually being well made, at least in the first three seasons. It was legitimately well written and had good art design and animation. The weirdness worked for the concepts. Also having Jewish stuff shoehorned in sometimes might have helped. Until the ADL turned on them later.

>>17579 >Stop yelling retard. At no point did he yell "Retard."

>>17549 >What if Spongebob never existed?

>>21054 And the comic fleshed them out even more.

>>30036 The Mother's Day special is pretty much the last really good episode. And that's surprising, because it's the third of three holiday specials they used to bring back the series, and the other two aren't good. Nothing else after the series came back is very good (season 4 is watchable, I guess). But that Mother's Day special is great. Because that guy above who said the show is lame because it's about babies doesn't get it. It's about babies but it isn't aimed at babies. Young children can watch it, but it's very much aimed at the same all-ages, "your parents can actually enjoy this, too" audience that Ren & Stimpy and Rocko's Modern Life appealed to. The Mother's Day special isn't really about Chuckie, it's about his dad. And a lot of the earlier episodes work like that. The parents are frequently almost half of the actual story, and the remainder is still basically about seeing the world through the eyes of a child, and seeing how confusing and bizarre it is, seeing them try to act grown up despite missing some key bits of info and context. It's honestly a pretty realistic take on how kids see things and how they act, compared to other shows where they're just short adults, or shows where they're just mindless animals. Also, Klasky-Csupo's bizarre, frankly ugly animation style worked well here, because the show was supposed to be about how weird the world is when looking at things for the first time. It works here and it works in things like Ahh! Real Monsters! and a few others. Not so much in As Told By Ginger. Which is why it's so bizarre that they thought it would work in All Grown Up. What a horrible show that was. On every level.

>>30043 >All Grown Up I don't remember much about that show, but tell me more, anon. What'd you think of the special that acted as the pilot?

>>30088 >What'd you think of the special that acted as the pilot? Rugrats was already very shitty by that point. >Seasons 1-3 Excellent. One of the best cartoons ever. >Season 4 Came back after a long haitus and not all of the people involved returned. Producers brought it back after realizing it was a cash cow, and thus put more of their influence on it, watering it down. But they seemed to have some scripts, and at least some creators, left over from the previous seasons, so it's still pretty good. >The Movie and episodes after it I hear that the wiki separates episodes into "Pre-Dil" and "Post-Dil." They are right to do so, mostly. But Dil is a symptom, not a cause. Really it was the same trends that started with season four that simply continued here, and the inclusion of a new main character made it easier to identify. I do still think there are watchable episodes here, but each season is worse than the last starting with Season 4. >Second movie and stuff after it It's all just been getting worse, but the second movie adds like four new regularly recurring characters, making it very easy to recognize. And even moreso than Dil, they throw off the character dynamics. Not that any of the writers left seemed to care about the character dynamics by the time Rugrats was on the air for nine years. The original All Growed Up special was for the 10th anniversary, and it's a clever idea for a special, imagining what it would be like if the characters actually aged. The framing device of it being imaginary also helps, because so much of the series was already imaginary. Also, note the difference in the title here and the title of the eventual spinoff. It somehow managed to get even worse from there when they got a new main character, a babysitter played by Amanda Bynes. But I must admit I wasn't even aware of this at the time, and was surprised to see it in reruns like ten years later. I must also admit I remember little of All Grown Up except for being disturbed and confused by the fact that the characters wouldn't even remember the original show, making them barely like the previous characters anyway. It calls to mind many existential questions that could be interesting to deal with, but of course I understand it's ridiculous to ask that of this show. Then again, the Mother's Day special discussed above does a good job at delving into Rugrats Lore. (TM) The closest I recall All Grown Up getting to that is an episode where Chuckie didn't remember that Kimi wasn't his biological sister and was surprised to find out. First of all, this again makes that Mother's Day episode even sadder, because Chuckie forgot his mom ever existed. On the other hand, it could be a hilarious episode if Chuckie was portrayed as a massive weeb, but then they revealed it's only because he thought he was actually half-Japanese, but I don't think they did that. Also, I'm pretty sure I remember an episode where Phil wanted to fuck Lil. They should have merged these episodes so Chuckie wanted to fuck Kimi, only to, at the end, find out it's okay after all. I should note that I haven't watched this show since it came out and I was like 12. I'm pretty sure broad ideas of what I'm saying here are correct, but they did not do anything as explicitly as I'm saying. But I'm pretty sure there was an episode about Phil he and Lil were going through puberty and thus feeling awkward, or something like that. Also, for some reason the one bit of lore All Grown Up did work with was that it included Angelica's red-headed simp, who was actually introduced in the terribly failed spinoff, Pre-Skool Daze, which also had a backdoor pilot in the main series, but failed so hard that only a like two episodes were aired on schedule, and the rest were burned off in dead timeslots over the next few years. But All Grown Up was being developed around that time, I guess, so they worked that character into the series.