From Nickelodeon Animation in Burbank, California, this is the Nickelodeon Animation Podcast. Here we go, here we go! Hey animation lovers, welcome to the podcast. I'm your host, Hector Navarro. If you grew up in the 90s, there's a really good chance that you also grew up with the classic Nickelodeon show, Hey Arnold. If you love the show like I did, then you probably cannot wait for the brand new Hey Arnold.
So this week we're diving deep and looking back at what made Hey Arnold the series the quintessential Nicktoon that it was and what it's like for the creators to come back after all these years to such a beloved series and finish a story that was set up over 15 years ago.
If you watched Hey Arnold as a kid and you're revisiting it as an adult, you might be surprised to find how sophisticated the show actually was. It showed profound happiness and real sadness. And that balance was baked into what Hey Arnold was. from the very beginning.
Hi, I'm Craig Bartlett and I'm the creator of Hey Arnold. The show is aimed at kids that are right in the grade school years and trying to give them some tools. Some preparation. Yeah, like, you know what, why don't you just go ahead and just say what you really think and let people deal with it. It was in A.V. Club where Caroline Framke said that a major theme of Hey Arnold was disappointment. Because I wouldn't have dared say that. And yet I was like...
Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. Just nailed it. Real life kids deal with, you know, really heavy and difficult challenges every day. Stu Livingston, director of part one, Hey Arnold, the jungle movie. And I appreciated that.
hey Arnold the show and we try to you know do some of that in the film as well yeah not kind of sugarcoat things I guess as an adult watching the show again those things are super clear to me so they're not really a surprise anymore I guess but you know to reflect back on a kid and think No wonder I really enjoyed that show, or no wonder it really stuck with me, because it was...
different from everything else in that way and i gravitated towards arnold one of my favorites justin charlebois writer on the jungle movie only because i think it was just so different than what was out there at the time i mean you had this dynamic cast it wasn't a mother father
two-family household having an adventure. It was just this kid who, like Laura said, was sincere and earnest. In the setting of this very entertaining world, you're showing that kids have to deal with the fact that they're children and life is often disappointing.
I think watching it through an adult lens, you do notice a lot more of what's happening with the adults. Laura Srebny, writer for the Hey Arnold Jungle movie. There are a lot of tragic things there that you didn't think about as a kid, but like...
I don't know, Pigeon Man just running away from humanity? Or even Grandma and the way Arnold had to handle her with Alzheimer's or whatever it is. Like, if you think about that from an adult perspective, it's... How dark it really is. It's a very melancholy show. I remember talking a lot about the episode Field Trip.
where Arnold goes and rescues a sea turtle from a zoo. There's this whole sequence where he is just kind of feeling depressed and there's no dialogue. It's just kind of him laying around in his room and he can't stop thinking about... This turtle and I'll still watch that scene and think what an unusual thing to see in the kids cartoon of just like long runs of no dialogue with this like beautiful Somber kind of theme playing over it and it just kind of really immerses you and the very unique
emotions and feeling of the show. And I remember that really resonating with me strongly back then, and it still does. I can still pluck that memory out from my head. What Hey Arnold did for me as a kid watching the show was it let me sit in those feelings and have it be okay. Yeah, exactly. And it's beautiful. Permission to feel melancholy. That I did not get. I'm Francesca Marie Smith and I play Helga G. Pataki.
Olivia Hack and I play Rhonda Wellington Lloyd. I never got the gravity of the stuff we were doing. That's the interesting thing and I think that that's why the show is so... touch so many people, right? Because it's real. You've got an episode where Arnold gets mugged, right? Lila is poor. Helga's mother is a very thinly veiled alcoholic, which maybe as a child...
I certainly didn't get that at the time. But maybe if you're a kid and your parents are struggling with addiction or whatever, and you see this character on TV that does always have a drink in their hand and is slurring their speech and is passing.
sat on a couch that resonates with you and suddenly as a child you have a voice and that's major that's a big deal absolutely you know because someone's speaking to you Part of what was so great about Hey Arnold was the many wonderful and unique characters that populated the neighborhood.
But in order to get to know any of them, you first had to identify with the show's namesake and main character. Arnold was the doorway into the world of Hey Arnold, and pretty much every kid could relate to him in some way. I mean, I always felt like an Arnold. I don't know if that's... presumptuous to say, but I think I liked that he was just a quiet kid and he had really interesting tastes and...
didn't seem worried about what people thought of him. I'm a middle child and so in my family dynamic I was often the one sort of like trying to make sure everyone's like kind of doing okay and settling fights and stuff like that and so... I identified with this kind of quiet kid who seemed kind of stuck in the middle of everything and was just trying to help people out and just calm everything down a little bit. I don't know, those sort of aspects of Arnold I consider universal.
And I deeply identify with him in that way. That's woven in the cloth of what Arnold is. I'm Ramey Mooskies, a supervising producer. He is the sanest... most centered person in his universe. When I pitched it, I said, he lives in a boarding house with a bunch of eccentric boarders and his crazy grandparents. And so I thought, from the start, what if he's like the wise little Buddha?
the one who really knows what's going on, and then the borders in Grandma and Grandpa can be kooks. Despite Arnold's Buddha-like disposition, we learned throughout the series that there was some darkness in Arnold's past. An early episode, I'd say the third one in Arnold's Hat. Arnold's Hat's a really important one because Helga's obsession, you see her shrine in the bubblegum, shrine in the closet. I'll never get it. Never, never, never. No matter what I do, I'll never get Arnold's Hat.
time. Oh, Arnold, my love. And... Why does he care about the hat? It's a weird hat. He's got his giant wide head and his teeny hat. Just get another hat, dude. What's up? Get another hat. No, his parents gave him the hat. Here's your very own hat, Arnold. Oh, look at the little man. You in that hat, Arnold. You're perfect. Just like that. What a guy. No, I'm not coming out without my hat. Ever. For the rest of my life. Okay. More ice cream for me.
Although Arnold was our doorway into the series, once you were in there, there was an even more complicated character at the heart of the show.
Helga G. Pataki was the wrench in the gears, the fire in the ice, the protagonist and the antagonist that created much of the conflict and drama of the show. As a favorite character, I think mine would be Helga. She is just... out there in her own world and sees the world that she wants to see it i always found that helga was the most interesting i can't say that i'd ever encountered a character that could be so that have like that
that duality to her like she'd be so you know angry and violent and brusque you know and yet you know have that tender side and i thought that was just just capturing that the turn you call it the turn i thought that was just made for animation helga's monologues tell us a lot So unlike others where it's like you simply show it and let it speak for itself, Helga exhaustively tells us what's going on, which people appreciate. They're like, man, I know where she's at.
Arnold, what a dope, what a dimwit, what a deluded little do-goody dreamer. How I despise him. And yet, I love him. The way he's always thinking of others before himself. The way he feels and cares so deeply. The way those adorably unruly yellow tufts of hair stick out all willy-nilly from that wine. and wonderfully weird football head of his. Let's just give credit to Francesca Smith. Brilliant. So funny.
We would write for her. I would just go, oh, man, I can't wait to write this for Franny and hear her blast this out. Helga... gave me a place to be all of my extremes and for that to be okay and interesting. For her to feel so... so deeply and so strongly and to riff, you know, these Shakespearean soliloquies, right, to just sort of go off to the deepest.
possible parts of her mind and her feelings and everything else. I'll be honest, when that talk came to USC about portrayals of bullying it gave me pause it gave me a moment to really reflect on whether the the worst parts of helga were worth her best parts yeah i don't know i guess where i've landed with it
is that I still struggle with her very acidic sense of humor. It's absolutely part of me, and I find myself going to that place because I know it makes people laugh, and I know it's sort of my need.
jerk reaction to a lot of things. And I get that maybe sometimes you do need to put a check on that and put a filter on it. But the larger sort of holistic... person that Helga is the fact that she's been dealt all this really really difficult stuff the fact that she is really smart and that she does feel very deeply I think if you look at all of those pieces and the way they work together
it makes sense. You get why she's so mean. And that doesn't excuse it, but I think it helps make sense of it and hopefully find a path forward, right? I don't think Helga's still going to be acting that way. you know, three or five or ten years.
So much of the drama that came from the series revolved around the sort of will-they-won't-they relationship between Helga and her beloved Arnold. The Thanksgiving one is the one I'm thinking of because it's one of those rare moments where Helga and Arnold share.
kind of a real moment where she's not you know ragging on him and it's just they're both having a terrible thanksgiving and they kind of find solace in each other and those are always like really intimate moments where you can kind of see like what the relationship could be She made herself vulnerable to Arnold in Saves the Neighborhood. And he didn't reciprocate. It's just sort of like...
there was too much going on or something. So there was a doubt, a lingering doubt. That's a pretty amazing thing to do for someone you claim to hate. Yeah, well, I'm a pretty amazing person, football head. But I thought you were on your dad's side. I thought you were going to get rich off the whole deal.
Come on, what's the real reason? Oh, because I guess maybe I don't hate you as much as I thought, okay? I guess maybe I even kind of like you a little. Heck, I guess you might even kind of say that I like you a lot. You do? You did this for me? That's right, hair boy. I mean, cr- What else are you supposed to do when someone you love is in trouble? Love? You heard me, pal! I love you! Love you! Oh, Arnold, just hold me. I...
I need to think. Yes, I suppose you have to do the thinking for both of us now, darling. I think for me, the thing I learned about Phoebe the most that I... really took to heart as a kid was her relationship with Helga. I'm Andy McAfee and I play Phoebe Heyerdahl. She didn't have a whole lot of character when I first started playing her. They didn't really quite know who she was. She was just the nerd and she was the sidekick. But there are episodes where she and
Helga have these challenges in their friendship, mostly due to Helga. But at the end of the day, Helga is so loyal to Phoebe, and she's so protective, and Phoebe accepts her for who she is. And to have that kind of a friendship when you're that age, and it's so difficult to navigate. Who you are and who your friends are and what they're supposed to be and all that kind of stuff. Their relationship is my favorite part of the show.
Phoebe just loves the crap out of Helga. And she will protect her. She knows all her secrets. She will never spill them. She constantly reminds her that she's a great person and that she has all these emotions that matter. And Helga... is terrible to her. But then at the end of the day, at the end of the day, you see how much she really appreciates and loves Phoebe way down in there. She's just not great at expressing those types of emotions. Helga, just one question. What are you implying?
that I have some sort of ulterior motive? That I'm after this Ruth person because she happens to be the object of some other kid's affections? Some certain young man that I may have my own obsessive affection for? Is that your question? Is that your question? No, actually, I was going to ask you which way to the bathroom. Oh, they're right over there next to the wiener stand. And Phoebe? Yes? This conversation never happened.
Phoebe and Gerald are hashtag relationship goals before that was even a thing. Before hashtags were even a thing, that's who they were, you know? It was hashtag relationship goals. I like that, the fact that we've said a total of...
zero words about it in the series. It's simply shown. Phoebe and Gerald are always the ones that kind of know what's actually going on and the ones that know when it's a bad idea. I don't know, they just seem like the reasonable ones and they had some flirtations in the show, which was cool to see, like...
character like phoebe get you know somebody was into that her brain they're they're like an effortless couple yeah which is meant to be a perfect contrast to helga's mass she can't be in a relationship because she's too messed up and too angry and and phoebe and gerald are like i like you you like me Gerald was a character who was effortlessly cool. Yeah, he just was born cool. Since he was going to be cool and effortlessly cool, we wanted to give him a couple things that could be...
Beyond cool, kind of real. One was the intense loyalty. From the very start, Jameel knew. Oh, well, he's a friend. He's the best kind of friend. He's so loyal to his friends, so loyal to Arnold. He helps with the Helga stuff. I think he's the one that can see. the sparks there when nobody else can he's smart too he's got a lot of history in his mind he knows the history of the city he knows kind of what's what's underneath everything making everything go and and so that
That gave him more stuff than simply being cool because, again, you don't want to be a one-dimensional cool guy. Part of what made the world of Hey Arnold so rich and realistic was the truly diverse cast of characters that inhabited the neighborhood. each with their own set of complicated motivations.
the best thing is the opportunity to make a hundred half hours of hey arnold is 211 minute stories these characters all get to have multiple episodes that dig deeper into who they are harold in particular was we sat down as soon as we started season one and the writers all sat and went, what can we do with this guy? I think, I think one dimensional bullies.
We've had enough of that. Yeah. He's the big kind of alpha bully in, well, Helga's first. Helga can even beat up Harold. But then among the boys, Harold's the scariest, strongest boy. How about if Arnold slowly, slowly wins him over? And then we just show Harold to be a guy with a short tamper, a short fuse, who could be provoked to pound you, but...
he becomes, truly becomes Arnold's friend. I mean, my characters are horrible persons. You know, she's super fun to play, right, because of that. It's always fun to be, not that she's a villain, but, you know, about. bad person but fun as hell to play awesome i mean for sure she'll figure it out she'll figure it out she's got stuff to figure out she'll figure it out yeah she'll be okay or run a fortune 500 company and you know they're all sociopaths anyway right exactly yeah stinky
We wrote a backstory for him. We had his whole story about how they came and they towed their little shack to the city. And that was a favorite metaphor of mine, like a little shack with big buildings all around it. So, you know, Stinky, just instantly funny as like this. country fried kid. Dan Butler then played Simmons. You know, he is a gay man. He's an actor. Cast him as a, it was unabashed. And we did several episodes with him and his boyfriend.
Which we still can't believe that they just let us do. And it's always interesting that now, it's like when there's an episode that centers on, you know, anyone that is gay or, so it's like, we didn't want to say it, but we did tons of those back in the day and no one blinked. Which I must say, they didn't get, which I don't think so, or, you know, good for them at Nick. Sid, Sammy Givaldi, could break down and cry.
funnier than anyone else and so we just ended up writing a whole series of sid falls apart episodes the monkey man one where the The thugs beat him up and take his beetle boots. Arnold's room where he borrows the room and pretends to Lorenzo that it's his room. And the one with Big Gino where he's caught up in the kid mob and he owes money. Those are...
all meant to be at a certain point. They're going to all catch him and he's going to fall on the ground in a puddle of tears. Mr. Wynn, probably. The story of... him escaping from the heavily inferred Vietnam War as it goes over in the Christmas episode. My father was a Navy sailor at the time, and so... That story has a lot of resonance for me hearing about his experiences during those days. Grandpa Phil, Grandma Gertrude are...
They're so crazy, I worry about them. As a kid, I was like, I don't know if she's okay. I hope she's all right. She's so out there. She's so funny. It's so funny you mention that because one of the hardest challenges of making the series was me trying to... to rein in all the writers who kind of wanted to take it to crazy places. And me going, Grandma's being nuts in this episode. Grandpa needs to be a little more reasonable. Someone here of the two of them has to be a little bit more lucid.
or kids are going to start to feel bad for Arnold. Yeah. I wanted them to think, wow, dream grandparents. They're so funny. They're so funny. They're actually really like, grandma and grandpa both are physically like, on point she's like a ninja and so so you go oh okay so they're they're well they're not gonna die right early on uh as we tried to kind of make the rules uh arnold gets mugged about
I don't know, six or so or seven half hours in. And in that one, he comes home beat up. I thought, okay, this is perfect. Let's have grandma be super lucid. So she doesn't act kooky at all in that episode. She kind of interviews him about what happened. He leaves and she says, what are we going to do about this, Phil? You better not touch my gal or I'll pop you in the kisser, pal. You better not even try or you'll be looking at a big black eye.
So listen good, you stupid hood I'll get you to the count of ten And if you're not gone you still got it in you. The journal was an assignment, basically. Nickelodeon said, we want you to do three more... hours of of programming in this kind of downtime while we wait to see how the jungle movie goes and see the first movie and we're developing and so just to keep the crew from you know from turning the lights off we'll give you three hours to make
And so the, or no, three, sorry, three half hours. April Fool's was the first one. And then the other two half hours combined into one hour of the journal. And they said, make it a prequel to the Jungle movies so we can set stuff up. Wow. okay, what do we have to set up? I thought, all right, here's my problem with Arnold's parents. They've been missing for 100 half hours of five years of episodes. Yeah.
What's their deal? How come they don't send postcards and stuff? They must be truly lost. What's happened to them? Yeah. Quite an unexpected find, this journal. I'm so glad that we found it. It's great to hear all these stories. I learned so much more about my parents. They were pretty great people, Arnold. And they loved you so much. Now I know how hard it was for them to leave me. I understand why they had to do it.
They did it for the green-eyed people. I just wish I knew what happened to them. Me too, short man. It ends on that cliffhanger that was me being kind of a... I was being a little bit of a jerk. I was like, I was going... Hey, Paramount, I dare you not to make this movie. Sure. Look, he found a map. Come on. Come on. The kids are going to be so disappointed around the world. Come on. You've got to do it. Yeah. And then you find out. It's the business. You find out just how much.
You really control things. Man, what kind of reaction? Which is almost not at all. I felt like I'd personally hurt the feelings of millions of kids. I remember watching the finale with the cliffhanger, realizing there was nothing after. And I had always kind of in a child way been like, this is a betrayal. How dare they do this to us? And then to grow up and talk to the people that made the show and be like, oh, it wasn't on purpose. Like, this was just a misunderstanding.
They kind of turned it on Nick. Like, ah, Nick, why'd you not make this movie? And you kicked him out. But you knew what you were doing. Absolutely. My answer to that was it's way more complicated than that, you guys. Yeah. you I actually heard about it from a friend who I guess was up for the job, potentially.
It's been a slow process, I think. It was just a ton of fans and then some sort of petition and then all the artwork. It just slowly started to build. I thought I was so smart because I like...
kicked down the door to see Craig and I was like I know what movie you should be making it's the jungle movie here's all my ideas and he was like yeah no we know like we're doing that it was one of those yearly things where I would call Ramey and I would check in with him like hey Craig or hey Ramey hear any more about Arnold you know so it was like
almost like same time next year. And then all of a sudden... I received an email kind of surprisingly out of nowhere asking if I wanted to interview for a job, in those words, on the Hey Arnold movie and came in to surprisingly... interview for the directing position i was there when we were opening boxes that they pulled out of storage and i'm looking at drawings i drew with you know a pencil on paper
And it's just like, wow, I can't draw like that anymore. But thank God we had all that stuff and it still existed. Yeah, it happened pretty fast once Craig told us. I think Olivia and I were just sitting there and we looked at each other like, did he just say that? It's amazing. Couldn't quite process the words.
ramey mooskies you know ramey is is the supervising director and stew livingston is is the other director the two of them each directed one of the each directed an hour of this two-hour movie wow and stew grew up as a kid watching the show So he's what we would call an encyclopedia Arnoldia superfan. And Raimi was there trying to make the movie with me in the first place. So we have people who go back all the way to the beginning.
And people who kind of came on at different points in the run of the series. And so we have a deep, deep love for the series and this crew. It sounds like Craig brought us on because he wanted the newer generation to weigh in.
They never really argued any points. They were open to any discussion. I think it was one of the most... embracive and positive writers room ever been a part of like there was no idea that was a bad idea it would just bring you off to another idea there was definitely a strangeness to it yeah to come back to a character
who felt like such an intrinsic part of me that to come back to it in a setting, which, you know, of course totally makes sense. Like, you want to make sure that it's still going to work. Like, I get that. But it is still a very strange sensation. to sort of hold this character up and be like, is this still me? Do I still count as the voice of Alka? Yeah, you're auditioning for essentially yourself at 12. When we did the table read, which was really cool.
A lot of the boys had obviously aged out of their roles, but a lot of the women came back to do... The roles in one of them was Francesca. I was sitting right next to Mason, who's our new voice of Arnold, at the table read. And, you know, I'm, what am I, I'm 32? I'm 32 now. So I was 31 at the time. time um and mason was 12 13 i don't even know but you know a little tight right so i will i will totally admit there was a little bit of a weirdness of me just walking into the room being like
Okay. Because when we're all 12 or 13 or 14 or 15, it's not so weird to be like, I love you so much. It does feel a little strange to be like, I love you so much to a 12-year-old. for me um as it should that should feel weird um But I was like, it's animation. It's cool. I can do this. I can be professional. It's just a character. And as soon as we started doing lines, I was fine with it. I got back into the zone of Helga. Not so for Mason. Mason, bless his soul, was sitting there.
next to me as I'm ramping up into this like, I love you so much. Whatever it was. And I hear him going, oh, man. Oh, jeez. Oh, gosh. Oh, man. And he's just got this, like, running commentary of horror next to me. I just want to put my arm around him and be like, it's just a job. It's okay. I promise I'm not going to follow you home and, you know, throw rocks at your window or anything. It's going to be fine. We get to see a different angle of Arnold.
in this movie I don't know if you would agree where he's really driving the action because of his this is what he wants he wants to find his parents but he everybody else gets involved and you get to see kind of an element of Arnold feeling lost and losing his optimism for the first time ever. And I think in the series, Arnold's really out helping other people, trying to figure out to make their situations better. And in this movie, it's...
Arnold helping himself out and him feeling weird about it. The cliffhanger of the series is that he finds this map and he thinks it could be where his parents disappeared to and this is really his journey to see if he can find them or at least find out what happened to them. This one thing I repeatedly tried to place in front of the storyboard artists is that these characters are familiar characters and they reacted in familiar ways to their environment.
But this has to be completely unprecedented. So you have your known quantity in an unknown situation. So they can't just react in the same way. They can't have pratfalls the same way. They can't. be disappointed the same way it's just sort of like this has got to be like just tectonically just huge because it's like i mean these these kids essentially are lost in the in the jungle and and you know and terrible things potentially
will befall them. The cast, the crew, and the writers have been pouring their hearts and souls into the Jungle movie for the better part of the last two years. And on the eve of its release... They sound like they're pretty excited about it. I was really thrilled with the writing, you know, of the Jungle movie. It's so good. It's so good. Well, I was telling Raimi because I didn't work on part two much. When I watched part two, because I didn't really work.
I see that as a fan and I watch that part as a fan and I really enjoy it as a fan and so I can tell him with a critical eye say, I think this is going to be a really amazing film. Finally, after all this time and all of the mental energy we put in
the movie way back when is going to be paid off i mean it's like it's like we finally get to finish this sucker you know it's like i didn't really need to like find my way in the dark on this project it just seemed like it was kind of in my blood all this time Just knowing that people are very interested and trying to make the most of it.
then getting the chance to make it and learning from our mistakes and kind of talking about all the things, all the loose ends. What would we like to address? You know, we said the three things that fans wanted to know most. What's his last name? How does he feel about Helga? Yeah. What happened to his parents? And I thought, well, then we'll just check all those and that'll be, that'll all be in the movie.
As a fan, I cannot wait for those of us who grew up watching Hey Arnold to finally be able to see the Jungle movie. And I'm so excited for new fans to discover the show as well. I want to personally thank every single person who's ever worked on Hey Arnold.
Arnold, the series, the first movie or the jungle movie for bringing these characters and these stories to life. And we hope that you guys enjoyed our deep dive discussion into the world of Hey Arnold and a huge thanks to Craig Bartlett and everybody on the crew for talking to us about Hey Thanks to the awesome crew who puts this podcast together.
edited by Jonathan Highlander and Josh Caldwell. Our social media team is Narbe Manassians, Sammy Armager, and David Watson. And our man behind the faders with the gorgeous flowing locks, our engineer, Manny Grujava. Until next time, keep watching cartoons.