Nickelodeon Is Making A Hey Arnold! TV Movie; Refusing To Ever Release Millennials From Its Clutches

Hi there, fellow ’80s/’90s kid!

Do you remember when your biggest concern was keeping your Tamagotchi alive or making sure no one stole your new light-up yoyo from your tote tray? How good was life when you got to munch on Dunkaroos all day and dress as your favourite Spice Girl on a Razor scooter, beanie babies VHS Land Before Time Polly Pocket Sea Monkeys Ring Pop Captain Planet, this thing:

Continuing on in a long-line of recently announced reboots and re-makes including The X-Files, Full House and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Nickelodeon has overnight confirmed they’ve green-lit a follow-up TV movie of Hey Arnold!. The project doesn’t yet have a release date (or even a script) but we do know the story will pick up where the cartoon left off in 2004, it will finally resolve the mystery surrounding Arnold’s parents, and it’ll be written and produced by the show’s original creator Craig Bartlett — three facts which are fairly huge wins for long-time fans.

“We want it to have a new look and feel but still respect the canon of what we’ve done,” Bartlett told The AV Club this morning.

This isn’t the only interesting news for ’90s Nicktoons lovers either. In an exclusive Variety report, Nickelodeon president Russell Hicks said the project is part of a larger move to “mine the network’s vast library of original series to develop new shows for modern audiences”. “Kids who grew up on these characters are now of the age that they are having kids and families themselves … Our library has come to fruition and it’s time for it to start coming back to life.”

Though no other titles have been confirmed, this hints that we could soon be seeing other revivals of shows like Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, Rugrats, Doug and The Wild Thornberrys to name a few.

Of course none of this is much of a surprise. It was only a couple of months ago that the kids’ network announced The Splat: a dedicated late-night programming block and online platform devoted to their ’90s classics. This was a smart move. Here, the channel can better compete with popular streaming alternatives like Netflix and Hulu that monopolise younger viewers and — with everything also integrated into social media — they’re able to properly capitalise on the overwhelming fandom they still have from Gen Y kids online.

However, that doesn’t mean the stream of piping hot nostalgia isn’t totally free from cringe. The promo clip for The Splat’s release in September, for instance, looked exactly like something that’d be projected on the wall at a club night where the staff regularly spit in everyone’s $5 vodka raspberries.

–

Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold! TV movie doesn’t yet have a release date. Fingers crossed it’s worth the wait.