At Nickelodeon

Between voting and business lunches, I spent a major part of the day at Nickelodeon ...

I'm told by Those Who Claim to Know that Nick's CG department has pretty much staffed most of the way up, and will have a lot of work to do moving forward. There's Madagascar Penguins (tied into the theatrical Madagascar franchise) and the upcoming Kung Fu Panda teevee version. There's Fanboy and who knows what else coming down the pike. A CG person spoke:

"I think the deal is, there's plenty of work for us over the next few years. The in-house crew here will be feeding overseas studios, and the overseas studios will get some of our overflow. But when the overflow goes down, we'll still be working here in Burbank ..."

We'll see how that works out.

Nick has some empty cubes, but it's developing a couple more pre-school shows that may or may not go into production ... and The Mighty Bee squad is gradually returning.

But I've noticed belt tightening. Schedules aren't getting longer, and some administrative positions are being streamlined. As a manager said to me: "We're losing some people. We're kind of broke."

Hyperbole, but I understand what he means. Everybody knows what's going on with the economy.