Subject: Nickelodeon's Hip Fare Stretches the Bounds Of TV for Youngsters Date: Published: 7/13/92 (277 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. Can They Do That? Nickelodeon's Hip Fare Stretches the Bounds Of TV for Youngsters --- If a Star Is Getting Stuck-Up, Prepare the Green Slime: It Is Good for the Ratings --- Here Comes the Merchandise ---- By Richard Turner Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal In the middle of the executive committee meeting, somebody brings out the Gak. Before long, the head of marketing is stretching the viscous gunk into thin, rubbery strands. A senior vice president is meticulously creating and decorating a Gak pizza. On the speaker phone from London, the head of sales asks, "What color is it today?" Orange, he is informed, and the meeting proceeds. The top brass of Viacom Inc. 's Nickelodeon cable channel resumes its business in a conference room in a Manhattan skyscraper, matter-of-factly kneading the goop that has become a Nickelodeon trademark. At Nickelodeon, Gak is serious business. It symbolizes creative play, messiness and rebellion, all parts of the 13-year-old channel's let-kids-be-kids philosophy. After years of struggle, Nickelodeon now enters 57.4 million homes, and children ages two to 11 watch more of it than the children's programming on the four major networks combined. Nickelodeon's secret is partly its understanding of how children watch television. Nickelodeon, rather than being simply a collection of individual programs, is an overall look, style, rhythm and environment. Most important, Nickelodeon seems to have convinced its youthful viewers that this TV landscape belongs to them, not to the benevolent cultural despots. "The voice that comes from somewhere saying, `Drink your juice,' just isn't the way to communicate with kids," says Geraldine Laybourne, 45 years old, Nickelodeon's president and the person generally credited with its success. This philosophy has led to profitability since 1984. While Viacom doesn't break out the unit's results, Nickelodeon this year is expected to have operating income of $76 million on nearly $190 million in revenue, according to analyst Larry Gerbrandt of Paul Kagan Associates. Now that Nickelodeon appears to have won over a good measure of America's children, it finds itself on a tightrope. While the channel wants to keep children plugged into its programming, it also professes a commitment to quality and respect for its viewers. So Nickelodeon must decide: How much should they give children that's "good" for them? Certainly some: The channel recently produced a show about the Los Angeles riots and another about AIDS with Magic Johnson. Meanwhile, will expanding into other commercial arenas, such as toys, videos and books, cheapen Nickelodeon's image? Industry critics feel similar ambivalence. "It's one thing if the television viewing experience is Nickelodeon," warns Peggy Charren, president of Action for Children's Television and an enthusiastic supporter of the channel. "But it's another if your books and slacks and toothpaste all come from the same point of view, the same editorial policy." Nickelodeon was created by Warner Amex Cable in 1979 to serve one purpose: Cable operators wanted a respectable free children's channel on their systems. In its early years, it was strictly "green vegetables" -- it gave children what was supposed to be good for them, such as "Going Great," a show about teen-age role models like gymnasts aiming for the Olympics. Today, Nickelodeon presents irreverent, contemporary game shows, which often involve video games and physical challenges with children as contestants; comic soap operas with teen-agers; cartoons; and preschool shows including a Sesame Street alternative called "Eureka's Castle." The channel's only specifically educational programs are "Mr. Wizard's World," an update of the 1950s science show, and a news series with Linda Ellerbee. Liberally sprinkled among this programming is Nickelodeon's hip, arch self-promotion reminding children they are watching Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon's fare is aimed at children, not parents. Indeed, adult authority figures are often ridiculed -- "the kind of adults who find fun unbearably loathsome," says Ms. Laybourne. An old sourpuss will be deluged by green slime, or a show will command children to talk on the phone for five hours before doing their homework. Many grown-ups know Nickelodeon only through its "Nick at Night" block of old sitcoms geared for adults. But Nickelodeon's loyal subculture is, as they might put it, awesome. Take the scene in a Los Angeles auditorium, reminiscent of a 1964 Beatles concert. Some 4,000 children, mostly between nine and 12 years old, are screaming insanely and stamping their feet. The traveling "Super Sloppy Double Dare" show is in town, and between contestants covering themselves with various forms of messy stuff, the host quizzes the audience on Nickelodeon trivia. The children know every answer cold. "It's like CNN," says Garth Ancier, an independent producer who was programming chief at the Fox network and head of network TV for Walt Disney Co. "Ten years ago everyone said Nick who? Now it's taken for granted as part of the American television landscape." Amid generally positive reviews from parents, children and teachers, a few critics have been dubious about the channel. For one thing, it is television. And while Nickelodeon offers generally goodquality programming, that is a double-edged sword. "Abdicating the responsibility to one profit-making station is not enough," says Elizabeth Thoman, executive director of the Center for Media and Values in Los Angeles. "Is there any time when Nickelodeon encourages children just to turn off the TV and go outside and play? " Ms. Laybourne, as usual, has an answer: Nickelodeon did a show called "Don't Just Sit There," and it has run advertising urging children to turn off the set. George Gerbner, professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, says Nickelodeon primarily serves children from upscale, light-viewing households who otherwise might actually be reading or playing. Cable, in fact, may be lessening diversity by giving them "greater opportunity to select fewer things," says Dr. Gerbner. "Kids are ultimately getting their information not from parents or school or church or community, but from a handful of conglomerates that have something to sell." In its early years, Nickelodeon didn't make money. So in 1985, Warner Amex (which Viacom acquired control of that year) decided the channel would take advertising. "I came to peace with it very easily," says Ms. Laybourne, then its vice president of programming. "We needed a funding base, and we needed to own our properties." The advertisers -- toy, fast food and cereal companies, among others -- found that Nickelodeon delivered an elusive audience. "The advertising agencies couldn't figure out where all the kids had gone, then they looked at Nickelodeon's numbers and said, `Whoops, there they are,'" says Mike White, an executive vice president at DDB Needham. With the introduction of advertising on Nickelodeon, ACT's Ms. Charren felt the channel was on the road to perdition: "I thought they'd end up putting the needs of the advertisers first and serving the kids second," she says. "Well, they didn't do it." The channel also promoted Ms. Laybourne, who had been with Nickelodeon almost from the beginning. Today, she presides over offices that new Nick at Night spokesman Dick Van Dyke says "look like my grandson's kindergarten." Ms. Laybourne started her career teaching "media education" at posh Concord Academy outside Boston in the early 1970s; she also taught at a Philadelphia ghetto school and ran nonprofit organizations. She was providing independent films to the fledgling Nickelodeon when she was hired. Ms. Laybourne believes in team management, and she's big on handbooks and mission statements. Known to all as "Gerry," she is described as a good listener, and she is relaxed enough to begin a meeting of the entire staff with a report on a visit with her 20-year-old daughter. She has a teacher's way of looking pleasantly benign but equally capable of flinging a bolt of abrupt disapproval with a glance. At the same time Nickelodeon started taking advertising, it transformed its look, adding the hip graphics and self-promotion characteristic of its sister network, MTV, also part of Viacom. It also created "Double Dare," a show in which youngsters slide through obstacle courses filled with various forms of mud and slime. In the six months after launching "Double Dare" in 1986, Nickelodeon moved from being the lowest-rated channel on basic cable to the highest. (It remains among the top three.) Ms. Laybourne says one of the first things Nickelodeon discovered about modern children in its research was shocking. "We found that kids weren't happy about being kids," she says. "Their lives were full of pressures and demands, and they were terrified about AIDS, drugs, becoming teen-agers and growing up. So we created a home base for them." In recent years, Nickelodeon has created a valuable brand name in the children's market, like those of Disney and Sesame Street. Nickelodeon is giving birth to identifiable characters, such as Ren and Stimpy, the Chihuahua and cat heroes of a popular cartoon show, that could be licensed for other products. Yet some at Nickelodeon worry that if the channel becomes too commercial, it may lose its core values -- play, innovation and responsiveness to children. At the Gak-diddling meeting, Anne Kreamer, senior vice president of new business, leads a discussion of the company's mission statement for merchandise. Nickelodeon shouldn't pursue typical licensing, such as mass-market apparel, home furnishings and "flame-retardant Ren and Stimpy pajamas," Ms. Kreamer says. "We want to be true to the spirit of giving kids things with intrinsic play value." The new Nickelodeon toys due this Christmas season are "non-gender-specific," such as moon shoes, mini-trampolines that are strapped onto feet. "We don't want to be like yuppies, insisting on hand-tooled German toys," Ms. Kreamer continues, "but we can't betray the kids' trust." "And," adds Ms. Laybourne, "the hope is we'll make more money." A major competitor for Nickelodeon is the Disney Channel, a commercial-free service for which 6.3 million subscribers pay a monthly charge. The fastest-growing pay cable channel, it has also won a peck of awards. Perhaps that is why when Dick Van Dyke alluded to Disney during a recent Nickelodeon staff meeting, hisses broke out. Nick loyalists believe the Disney ethic sometimes talks down to children and makes them glide on proscribed tracks through a figurative theme-park world. "Jumping into giant vats of vanilla pudding -- that's just not Disneyesque," says Mr. Ancier, the producer. Despite the hisses, Nickelodeon is heading down Disney's path -- though in a more modern vein. Nickelodeon will market a Ren doll that, when a hairball is pulled out of its mouth, exclaims, "You bloated sac of protoplasm." The traveling Double Dare live show shamelessly blasts commercials for Nickelodeon during the breaks, and the channel licenses Ren and Stimpy T-shirts. Yet Ms. Kreamer decided the magazine Nickelodeon will begin publishing in March shouldn't serve as a cross-promotional vehicle for the channel's shows. Instead, it should be for magazines what Nickelodeon was to the airwaves. So the publication looks something like the irreverent, satirical Spy magazine (of which she was marketing director). Features include a package on halitosis, and "Schwarzenegger and Schwarzkopf -- Things They Share," including "they both like big guns" and "they're both married to women with brown hair." Nickelodeon shows aren't mentioned. In addition to the toy deal and the magazine prototype, there is a book deal, and there will soon be a home-video label, a record label and even a motion picture distribution deal. More touring shows are in the works. Nickelodeon's main production facilities are a major draw at MCA's Universal Studios Florida theme park in Orlando. Nickelodeon's key creative executive has been Geoffrey Darby, who developed "Double Dare." Although now 39, he is still regarded as something like the Tom Hanks character in "Big" -- a 12-year-old trapped in an adult's body. It was Mr. Darby (who recently announced he will be moving to Whittle Communications) and a partner who discovered the miraculous attributes of green slime while producing a show called, "You Can't Do That on Television." When some of the youngsters on the show started acting stuck-up, green slime was dumped on them. Young viewers demanded more. Sitting in a toy-filled office, Mr. Darby says he doesn't rely too heavily on his own instincts about what children will like. Nickelodeon does research obsessively, running more than 100 focus groups a year. Among some network producers, research means turning shows into a hodgepodge of safe likability. But Nickelodeon says children are so honest that testing works, and it won't put anything on the air that children haven't said they want. "We have a basic law here," says Karen Flischel, research vice president. "You can't do it based on what you remember as a kid." Of course, Nickelodeon has had its share of failures. In "Kid's Court," a youngster would complain about some injustice -- "I lent my Sony Walkman to my friend, and when she returned it, it didn't work" -- and a panel of children would rule. It bombed. "The show turned into a lot of whining," Mr. Darby recalls. And Nickelodeon's successful new cartoon shows will face a challenge when Turner Broadcasting System Inc. launches its all-cartoon cable network in October. One recent Nickelodeon project to "empower" children is its "Kids Pick the President" campaign. "I can't wait," says Ms. Laybourne, "for our first Nickelodeon-raised candidate." [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]