Kids’ Favorite Network - Nickelodeon - Turns 20

Television’s loudest, wildest kid turns 20 this month and has absolutely, positively no plans to grow up. No way. Green slime forever!

The kid in question is Nickelodeon, the first-ever kids’ network, which is celebrating its two-decade birthday throughout June.

For the uninitiated, this is the cable network that gave us “Blue’s Clues,” the highest-rated children’s show on TV; the wildly popular “Rugrats”; and Linda Ellerbee’s acclaimed weekly newsmagazine, “Nick News.”

Nickelodeon is the reason a whole generation of viewers don’t distinguish between cable and broadcast channels. They just watch TV.

“For that generation, Nickelodeon legitimized non-network TV,” said Jennings Bryant, a University of Alabama professor and nationally recognized scholar on children’s TV. “It took down the barricade that labeled programming network, PBS, cable or something else. Children recognized that Nickelodeon is for them, and it came at a time when the networks were forsaking children’s programming.”

After debuting on a single cable system in Buffalo, N.Y., with an educational magazine for preschoolers called “Pinwheel,” Nickelodeon became the No. 1 kids’ network a decade later. Along the way, it revolutionized the way children’s programming is produced and the way children watch television. For better or worse. Besides the lovely “Blue’s Clues,” Nickelodeon also gave us the gross-out, bodily-function-prone cartoon “Ren and Stimpy.”

PBS may be home of the top-of-the-line educational shows, but Nickelodeon hooks kids with guffaws and goo. Which is not to say the cable network doesn’t also do good deeds. It does, but nobody’s going to confuse Nickelodeon with PBS.

“It’s clearly been an influential force in television,” Bryant said. “It hasn’t been entirely good or entirely bad. One thing it does better than anyone else is to put themselves into the kids’ perspective. Part of what they do is make sure everything they do taps into children’s psyches in ways others haven’t.”

Nickelodeon has succeeded big-time because kids love it. It may not be broccoli TV, with only nutritious fare, but it’s not junk food, either. Think of it as a hot dog with salad.