BUMPERPALOOZA, PART THREE: Better living through good TV

Today, we're going to wrap up Bumperpalooza with a guest entry by my good friend Jess. Because I grew up in Canada, and I didn't even have cable, I was never able to see anything from Nickelodeon. I missed out on all sorts of classic shows, including The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Clarissa Explains It All, and GUTS. Missing those shows were bad enough, because now that I'm living in the States, I can't talk about them with my friends!

When Jess sent me links to these videos, I realized that I missed out on some pretty epic bumpers. I think they were well produced, especially the Nick at Nite bumpers. I'm extremely grateful that Jessica offered to write about them!

Before I hand it over to Jess, I'm probably going to be snowed into my apartment until tomorrow afternoon. My area of Missouri is expecting about 20 inches of snow today, so maybe I'll spend the day updating this blog.

Ok, enough of me. Jess, take it away!

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From the age of about 7 on, I watched a LOT of Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite. Back then, Nick at Nite came on every night beginning at 8PM, and they still aired shows like I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, etc. On Nickelodeon, Nicktoons had just started back then, it consisted of three shows (Doug, Rugrats,and Ren & Stimpy) which aired in a block beginning at 10AM Sunday morning.

One of the distinctive features of both Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite was the collection of bumpers from each channel. These bumpers, to borrow a phrase from Pat's recent entry, "served one main purpose: to reassure viewers that their shows would, indeed, return after a few short commercials."

First, we have a collection of bumpers from Nickelodeon. These would air between shows beginning about 6 in the morning until 8PM. There are a few block-specific bumpers (for example, the one at about 2:47 which explicitly advertises Nicktoons), but see if you remember any of these:



These bumpers are little slivers of my childhood. Those were Nickelodeon's golden years, in my opinion. I remember when they started SNICK and my brothers and I could stay up until 10PM on Saturday nights. I remember the premieres of shows such as Ahh! Real Monsters and Rocko's Modern Life and the ends of other classics such as Salute Your Shorts and The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Others of my immediate peer group(those American children born in the early 80s) should remember these, right? They'll probably get stuck in your head, fair warning.

After 8PM, Nickelodeon became Nick at Nite. Check out these bumpers from those years. I think they were likely done by the same folks:



The thing that sticks out to me with these (and the other bumpers FVA has been writing about) is how fast-paced and frenetic they are. The human mind can only take in and remember so much at a time, and so these bumpers were probably effective at ensuring long-term channel and brand loyalty. At the very least, they were effective in getting jingles stuck in our heads (but what would you expect after hearing the same eight-second jingle hundreds of times a day).

In any event, these bumpers serve to remind us that childhood television watching was made up of many different components, all designed to zap us at our core and stick with us forever.