Using their combined skills in journalism and filmmaking as well as their mutual love for classic Nickelodeon, directors Adam Sweeney (part of the team behind The Prequels Strike Back: A Fan's Journey) and Scott Barber set out to make the documentary film Nickelodeon fans deserve. The childhood friends from The Woodlands grew up watching their beloved shows together and now share a new perspective on Nickelodeon.
The Orange Years journeys behind the scenes of the “kids first” phenomenal programming to chronicle the improbable and unprecedented success of Nickelodeon, straight from the mouths of those who brought the classic shows to fans as children. Filled with interviews from the actors, writers, animators, and creators from all your favorite golden age Nick shows, the film highlights the work of visionary Geraldine Laybourne, who was largely responsible for the network’s success in the early days.
Photo: Nickelodeon
Update (5/11): The upcoming Nickelodeon documentary titled The Orange Years will be holding its world premiere at DOC NYC on November 15, and to celebrate, ComingSoon.net has unveiled an awesome sneak-peek clip! Learn about how cult classic series The Adventures of Pete & Pete scored such great musical guest stars as Michael Stipe, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, David Johanesen and Gordon Gano in the player below!
The Adventures of Pete & Pete star Danny Temberelli features in this clip, as he explains how series director Katherine Dieckmann had previously worked on the music videos “Shiny Happy People” and “Stand” for the band REM. That’s how they landed the band’s frontman Michael Stipe for a guest role, and that opened the door to have all sorts of cool guest stars.
The documentary has been been a labor of love for the filmmakers, who have interviewed some of the most famous and recognizable names from the channel's history, all the way back to its unlikely origins in Columbus, Ohio.
The film has an all-star Nickelodeon cast including Kenan Thompson (All That, Kenan & Kel, Good Burger, Saturday Night Live), Kel Mitchell (All That, Kenan & Kel, Good Burger, Game Shakers), Alisa Reyes (All That),
Marc Summers (Double Dare), Larisa Oleynik (The Secret World of Alex Mack), Phil Moore (Nick Arcade), Kirk Fogg (Legends of the Hidden Temple), Venus DeMilo (Salute Your Shorts), Michael Bower (Salute Your Shorts), and Danny Cooksey (Salute Your Shorts), Fred Keller (Hey Dude) and Christine McGlade (You Can’t Do That on Television).
Not that The Orange Years concentrates only on Nick's live-action output. The filmmakers also talked to talents from the groundbreaking animated division, like writer Mitchell Kriegman (Rugrats, Clarissa Explains it All), and the king of cartoon voice work, Tom Kenny (Rocko's Modern Life and SpongeBob SquarePants).
More than just a history lesson or a “where are they now?” special, the documentary explores the network’s revolutionary approach to storytelling, the impact it had on a generation of youth, and aims to find out of why these shows have stayed in the hearts of so many people.
The The Orange Years screening at the ninth annual DOC NYC festival will be attended by directors Scott Barber and Adam Sweeney; and '90s Nickelodeon stars Danny Tambarelli and Michael C. Maronna from The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Lee Leshen will serve as the panels moderator.
Below are the full details about the The Orange Years panel at DOC NYC 2018:
THE ORANGE YEARS: THE NICKELODEON STORY
Showtimes: Thu Nov 15, 2018, 7:00 PM | SVA Theatre
BUY TICKETS
Expected to Attend: Directors Scott Barber, Adam Sweeney; film subjects Danny Tambarelli, Michael C. Maronna, moderator Lee Leshen
WORLD PREMIERE You Can’t Do That on Television, Clarissa Explains It All, Double Dare, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Doug, Rugrats… If you recognize any of these titles, you probably grew up watching Nickelodeon, the cable-television network devoted to kids that launched almost 40 years ago. Beginning as a small local channel, visionary leadership led to its rapid growth into a global phenomenon. The Orange Years is a nostalgic and entertaining look back at the early years of the youth-oriented network that broke all the rules to let kids enjoy being kids.
Official Site: http://www.theorangeyears.com
On Twitter: theorangeyears
On Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theorangeyears/
Support on: Indiegogo
Director: Scott Barber, Adam Sweeney
Producer: EP Adam F. Goldberg (The Goldbergs), EP Lee Leshen, Producer Bill Parks, Producer Scott Barber, Producer Shawn Cauthen, Producer Alisa Reyes, Producer Adam Sweeney, Producer Brian MacGillivray, Producer Lance Paul
Cinematographer: Shawn Cauthen
Editor: Bradford Thomason, Scott Barber, Shawn Cauthen
Music: Daron Beck
Running Time: 98
Language: English
Country: USA
Year: 2018
Also, from Fort Worth Weekly:
The Orange Years
Pinkish Black’s Daron Beck has scored the music for an upcoming documentary on Nickelodeon
Beck said he prepared for writing the score to The Orange Years by watching old Nickelodeon shows.
In the entire history of musical expression, from the first repeated notes uttered by a caveman to whatever Brock Lesnar puts on to start his day, I truly believe that there is nothing more thrilling, more elating, more capable of generating pure excitement than the opening theme to Nickelodeon’s Double Dare. Just hearing it in my head makes me feel like I took a garbage bag full of Halloween candy, soaked it in espresso, ground that up with a bucket of Adderall, infused that powdered insanity with the most sativa-heavy dab in existence, and then huffed as big a glob as I could manage through the tailpipe of a monster truck. The Double Dare theme is that exciting, because Double Dare was that exciting. And for my money, that show is the most Nickelodeon of Nickelodeon shows: built on fun, snark, slime, slips, falls, and the disembodied voice of a guy named Harvey, all of it bursting with Nickelodeon’s Memphis Design-inspired ’80s visual pop. Double Dare was like getting hit in the face with a water balloon full of Jolt cola, and Nickelodeon was the cool older cousin who threw it. And like that cool older cousin is in real life, the network is currently in its early 40s. It is finally getting the documentary treatment in the form of a retrospective called The Orange Years, debuting in select theaters in the mid-November.
The doc’s director, Scott Barber, had done some voice work at FUNimation, the Flower Mound-based anime studio famous for hits like Yu Yu Hakasho and Cowboy Bebop, and he mentioned his upcoming Nickelodeon retrospective to ADR director Tyler Walker,because he needed someone to write the film’s score. Walker suggested the director reach out to a local musician who may seem like an unlikely composer for such a project, Pinkish Black frontman Daron Beck.
“It was kind of a weird situation,” Beck said. “I had been in a movie [Run from the Shadows] about 15 years ago with [Barber], and I was in Pointy Shoe Factory with [Walker]. They got to talking about Pinkish Black and Pointy Shoe, and [Walker] suggested he contact me.”
Though making original music to match Nickelodeon’s characteristic wackiness is not the sort of sound Beck normally dabbles in, he was stoked for the gig and the compositional challenges it presented.
“There are so many different subjects [in the film], and it covers a 30-year time period,” he said. “It was different every two seconds, kind of schizophrenic in a way. I wrote 50 original songs for it.”
Beck mostly composed the soundtrack on keyboards, though he had to write some stuff on guitar. “The Adventures of Pete and Pete used a lot of indie rock stuff, so I had to pull out the guitar and play some R.E.M.-sounding crap.”
Beck said his favorite Nickelodeon era was the network’s early ’80s programming block –– shows like Pinwheel, Today’s Special, and You Can’t Do that on Television.
“I liked Today’s Special because it was like this weird, vaguely Canadian Sesame Street,” Beck said. “And You Can’t Do that On Television was basically SNL for kids, but I didn’t really watch TV between the ages of 15 and 18, so I missed out on a lot of those ’90s Nickelodeon shows, though I would take acid and watch Ren and Stimpy until I was 15 and moved out of the house. I did the research, though, and watched a little bit of each series. I redid the themes to shows like Hey, Dude and You Can’t Do that on Television, watching them and coming up with my own take on it.”
Other than some soundtrack work at FUNimation for Dragon Ball Z, The Orange Years is Beck’s first legit soundtrack job. He said that Barber is in the midst of pitching another project to producers.
“I can’t say what it is yet, but if he gets the green light, I think I’m going to work on that one,” Beck said. “It’s more up my musical alley.”
What that could be is left to one’s imagination – his main musical endeavor, Pinkish Black, is a dark, moody contrast to Nickelodeon’s orange-hued exuberance, but he also said that his dream soundtrack work would be to rescore Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
“Though honestly, that soundtrack is already incredible,” he said. “Re-scoring Land of the Lost would be cool, because it’s basically like Pinkish Black but with a banjo.”
His score for The Orange Years will be a testament to his versatility as a composer, matching Double Dare and Nickelodeon’s other classics note for hyperactive note.
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Also, from The Mary Sue:
Soak Up the ’90s Nickelodeon Nostalgia With The Orange Years Trailer
Wherefore art thou, Stick Stickley?
If you grew up in the ’90s, chances are you spent way too much of your childhood glued to the TV watching Nickelodeon. The network made a name for itself with off-kilter animated series like Ren & Stimpy and Rugrats, while creating a world of content for kids that included classic shows like Clarissa Explains It All, Salute Your Shorts, and You Can’t Do That on Television.
Now, you can relive all that ’90s Nick nostalgia in a new documentary called The Orange Years, which follows Nickelodeon’s humble origins as Qube in Columbus, Ohio, before it became the kids’ programming juggernaut it is today. The film features interviews with former executives, creators, and stars, including Melissa Joan Hart (Clarissa Explains It All), Kenan Thompson (Kenan and Kel), Larisa Oleynik (The Secret World of Alex Mack), and Danny Cooksey (Salute Your Shorts).
The film, directed by Scott Barber and Adam Sweeney, delves into what made ’90s Nick such a phenomenon, which many people attributed to the visionary president Geraldine Laybourne, who also went on to create the successful rerun block Nick at Nite and the Oxygen Channel. Laybourne championed offbeat shows like You Can’t Do That on Television, which she called in an interview with The Archive of American Television, “the most important, psychologically important show we ever did … unlike the stars of kid’s TV today, we wanted the stars to be as regular kids as possible, not these aspirational Hollywood kids, we wanted them to be everyday kids …”
That handmade, off-the-wall quality endeared the world of Nickelodeon to its audiences, who were looking for something less sanitized or polished than what the Disney Channel was offering. Nickelodeon was not afraid to get gross, whether through dumping green slime on its actors or hosting game shows where kids had to fish around inside a giant snot-filled nose for clues—ah, Double Dare, the American Ninja Warrior of our youth.
As one of the Nick creators says in the trailer, “We were the anti-Disney, the anti-Saturday morning, we wanted less acting and we wanted more normal kids …” The slapdash authenticity that came across in Nick’s programming was also echoed behind the scenes. Tom Kenny (Spongebob Squarepants) described working for Nick like so: “The inmates were very much running the asylum back then. It was way easier to slip stuff in.”
The documentary will also look at the inclusivity (in race, gender, body type) of shows like the sketch comedy series All That. Kel Mitchell (Kenan and Kel) says in the trailer, “To have that diversity in the show gave a lot of hope to a lot of kids coming from different walks of life saying, ‘Well, I can do this too.'”
What do you think of The Orange Years trailer, and what was your favorite ’90s Nick show?
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Watch all your '90s Nickelodeon favorites on NickSplat, your late-night destination for your favorite childhood Nickelodeon cartoons and live-action shows! NickSplat doesn't question football-shaped heads, but embrace them - along with Reptar bars, a Big Ear of Corn, orange soda, and even slime for Pete (and Pete's) sake. Make your slime-covered Nickelodeon childhood dreams come true every night at 11 PM ET/PT on TeenNick USA, and anytime you want on NickSplat on VRV! #NickSplat!
More Nick: DK Partners with Nickelodeon to Release Two Adult Humour Titles Inspired by 'Rugrats' and 'Hey Arnold!'!
Originally published: Tuesday, October 16, 2018.
H/T: Film Pulse; Additional sources: Hello Woodlands, The Austin Chronicle, /Film, Collider.
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