In Season 1, Episode 8 of Craig Bartlett’s Hey Arnold!, our titular character Arnold (voiced by Toran Caudell for season one, which features most of the episodes mentioned here) is determined to achieve 4th grade glory by way of “The List:” a legendary document passed from kid generation to kid generation, comprising everything a kid needs to do to have the perfect Saturday. The list is filled with all the classics from waking up to eat the sugariest cereal while watching cartoons to riding your bike down the tallest hill in the neighborhood. Why wouldn’t Arnold be excited and ready to take on such a challenge?
Well, of course, everything goes wrong. Just for starters, Arnold’s alarm clock breaks, and then there’s not even any good cereal available. Each element of the list goes haywire, but Arnold never gives up. Arnold is an eternal optimist, and each time something gets messed up, he just soldiers on to the next thing. Still, by the time Arnold makes it back to the boarding house he calls home, he goes up to the roof to be alone and disappointed. But his eccentric Grandma (Tress MacNeille) ends up there soon, playing the grand piano that couldn’t fit through the front door. Arnold tells her about his bad day and subsequent bad mood, so Grandma, naturally, launches into a song: “'Cause everything new that happens to you is better when you... look up!” Weird stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. Sometimes you’ve just gotta find a new way to look at things.
Over 25 Years Later, Hey Arnold! Still Rules as a Beloved Nicktoon
It’s a thoughtful, deep, funny, and compassionate kids’ show, with some of the most thoroughly sketched out characters to ever grace Nickelodeon. It’s a show that is both sprawling in its urban setting (the kids can walk or take the bus to all kinds of places) and also extremely intimate in its depictions of family and friendship. What struck me most upon this re-watch of many of my old favorites was the continual message that everyone you encounter is many things, so be curious. Be open-minded (and hearted) to the stories of even your kookiest classmates and neighbors. As Grandma sings on the roof, “Don’t look away, look up.”
Arnold Toes the Line Between Cool and Nerdy
The magic of Arnold as a character is that he effortlessly toes the barrier of deeply cool and deeply nerdy. To his fellow 4th graders, Arnold holds a lot of influence by virtue of his loyalty, trustworthiness, and determination. His best friend Gerald (Jamil Walker Smith) often tells him, “You’re a bold kid, Arnold.” And Arnold really is, getting into all kinds of scrapes and adventures, mostly as a result of his own kindness and unwillingness to give up on people. He’s a really cool kid.
But to the 5th graders, Arnold’s just another piece of meat to get stuffed into a trashcan. Perspective is important!
In a world obsessed with categorization, all the kids of P.S. 118 defy neat and tidy archetypes. Hey Arnold takes kids seriously in the way it treats them as fully rounded and, oftentimes, deeply weird human beings. They’re all so specific. Phoebe Heyerdahl, for example, could have just been the show’s classic quiet and smart girl, focused exclusively on her good grades. But when it’s time to win a radio contest to go backstage at pop superstar Ronnie Matthews’ concert? It’s Phoebe who has her heart broken over learning her musician hero is a big phoney.
Hey Arnold! Reminds Us that Good and Bad Aren't Binary
Like anyone else, kids aren’t inherently good or bad. A nice kid like Arnold is capable of inflicting pain on a classmate like poor, clumsy Eugene (Christopher Castile) while a bully like Helga Pataki (Francesca Marie Smith) is capable of extreme generosity (as seen in “Arnold’s Christmas”). In the case of Helga, for example, the show is very interested in getting into what makes Helga the person she is. Without ever sanding down her edges, episodes like “Olga Comes Home” show us the difficult home life that’s forced Helga to have her guard up. It doesn’t make it okay for Helga to punch Brainy (Craig Bartlett) in the face (though, Brainy, come on, learn from your past mistakes), but it gives us pause as viewers– especially young viewers– to try to fit Helga into a single box.
For a lot of kids, your closest and most familiar peers aren’t necessarily the people with whom you have a lot in common. Those kids are just the other kids in your class or in your neighborhood. And whether you’d ever have anything to talk about after college, you are brought together on sweaty summer days by spooky local legends, by a shared fear of the 5th grade bullies, or maybe just by being the only other people to play baseball with. It seems unlikely that a kid like Arnold would voluntarily spend his time with, for example, a kid like Harold (Justin Shenkarow). In his earliest appearances, Harold seems like your classic bully: big and loud and intimidating. But neither Arnold nor the show gives up on Harold. Harold’s just another kid with his own struggles and insecurities.
Arnold Doesn’t Give Up Where it Counts
In episodes like “False Alarm” and “The Old Building,” we see Arnold always searching for how to make things right, even if that quest takes him far off the establish path. When all the other kids want to hurry up and let Eugene go down for pulling the fire alarm, Arnold insists everyone stay until justice is truly served. And while Arnold is almost always the catalyst of these moments, it’s important to see how the kids around him rally to the side of what’s right, even if it makes them late for Wrestlemania. For a bunch of 4th graders, the results of a student trial are extremely high stakes, so it matters to see the joy and satisfaction that comes from working together and working until you get it right.
It can be so easy as adults to dismiss or downplay the power of the stories that brought us joy as children. In becoming older and ostensibly more serious, it’s easy to brush off what we once loved as silly or even small. Sometimes it seems that all the reboots and remakes are borne from the desire not just to give us back something we’ve been missing, but also to poke at the perceived holes of what “didn’t make sense” in the original story. Nostalgia is a tricky monster, because what if we find out we were wrong? What if we were foolish, and that show we raced home to watch after school was never "good" after all?
First, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe trying to view what we loved as kids through any sort of adult lens is a little pointless. You don’t have to now claim some sort of ironic affection for your old Saturday morning cartoons. More specifically, though, if Hey Arnold! was one of the shows that delighted you when you were a kid, I’m happy to report these episodes absolutely hold up on a re-watch. “Curly Snaps” made me laugh just as much as “Arnold’s Christmas” got me teary.
Hey, I make a list for myself nearly every day; of everything I need to get done or what I believe I should be getting done. Those are my lists for trying to have the “perfect life.” And just like Arnold, I find these lists careening into catastrophe basically every day. More often than not, things are weird and out of our control. There’s no perfect Saturday, and there’s no perfect existence. We’re all too specific for such a metric to make any kind of sense. If life’s got you down, particularly due to itching against society’s desire to shove you in a box that cannot contain you, I highly recommend spending an adventurous afternoon with the kids of P.S. 118. Don't look away, look up.