The final Nicktoon I would like to talk about is Oh Yeah! Cartoons. The show was basically Nickelodeon’s answer to Cartoon Network’s “What A Cartoon!” and just like “What A Cartoon!” the show had one purpose, to help Nickelodeon find shows. However while “What A Cartoon!” was successful and helped Cartoon Network define who they were and get their name known Oh Yeah! Cartoons wasn’t as successful as Nickelodeon would have hoped for. Oh don’t get me wrong the show wasn’t a total bust Nickelodeon was able to get three good shows from it. ChalkZone, The Fairy Oddparents, and My Life as a Teenage Robot. Okay they got two good shows from it but hey, at the time, ChalkZone had potential. To make this show even more surreal a lot of the animators who worked on “What A Cartoon” also worked on Oh Yeah! Cartoons, animators like Butch Hartman (Johnny Bravo), Rob Renzetti (The Powerpuff Girls), David Wasson (Time Squad), Fred Siebert (one of the original executives of What A Cartoon!), and even Seth MacFarlane joined the team creating a short 8 minute cartoon with his friend Butch Hartman called Zoomates. On top of these great animators the show also served as a platform for the animator Zac Moncrief the creator of Phineas and Ferb.
If I had to be really honest I think this was a show that Nickelodeon really didn’t need. Yeah they got two good shows out of it but I think if those shows had been pitched to the channel directly, I think they would have been approved. The reason why I think this show wasn’t needed is because Nickelodeon was flourishing quite well around this time. Shows like Ren and Stimpy and Doug had ended but they were still showing reruns of the shows and other shows like Hey Arnold, The Wild Thornberrys, Kablam!, and of course the Rugrats were still keeping the channel strong and fun to watch. The reason why What A Cartoon was so successful was because it came out around the time the channel was getting started, back then Cartoon Network didn’t have original shows of its own so this inspired animators to really go all out, take chances, and get creative with their shows so that they could say I made this channel big. Oh Yeah! Cartoons came out about 7 years after Nickelodeon started airing nicktoons so the pressure wasn’t really on the animators that much so even if by some stroke of bad luck Nickelodeon didn’t find anything worth turning into a series, they already had a number of series currently airing to fall back on and stay floating. But that’s just me and my opinion, if the show gave us two good series (one of them being one of favorite nicktoons) than it was needed and served its purpose. Oh Yeah! Cartoons may not have been as successful as Nickelodeon or myself was hoping for but it wasn’t a total waste and we got two good shows out of it.