The Nick Experience

I spent my morning at Nickelodeon Cartoon Studios located on lovely Olive Avenue in the Athens of California.

(Burbank.)

When I walked in to visit with Nick's Human Resources person, he had employment paperwork fanned out on his desk and said:

Look at these. Hire, hire, hire. We're picking up a lot of new people. We had layoffs after The Mighty Bee ended production, but now we're bringing on a lot of new people ..."

TAG has 131-plus member employees at Nickelodeon at present (see the pie-chart below), but my H.R. person said they would be adding enough folks to bring it close to 200. We'll see.

Of course, there are reasons Nick is doing more production, and here are several of them:

List of top 15 cable shows in Nielsen ratings

By The Associated Press (AP) ...

Rankings for the top 15 programs on cable networks as compiled by the Nielsen Co. for the week of April 5-11. Day and start time (EST) are in parentheses:

.

... 7. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Saturday, 9:30 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 3.02 million homes, 4.01 million viewers ...

... 9. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Sunday, 9:30 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.82 million homes, 3.73 million viewers ...

... 11. "Penguins of Madagascar" (Saturday, 10 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.76 million homes, 3.51 million viewers ...

... 15. "SpongeBob SquarePants" (Saturday, 9 a.m.), Nickelodeon, 2.64 million homes, 3.43 million viewers ...

I've gotten in trouble for writing about animated teevee shows that have gotten new-episode orders before our fine conglomerates have sprung this news on a breathless public. So I won't do any blabbing this time, because I want to avoid a brusque and businesslike phone call from some exec or other (and nobody called me back to give permission.)

Suffice it to say, one of Nick's shows has gotten a sizable extension; others are in full-bore production and likely to remain that way for awhile. (One of the leads on Kung Fu Panda, the Series informed me that the overseas animation and rendering or the characters look "real good.") I guess you can decide for yourself when the show comes out next month.

Nickelodeon is doing a lot of CG shows for the first time in its existence, so the studio is at last fully engaged with computer-generated projects as the genre finally takes off on television. Up until now, CGI has been a lagging indictor in t.v. The higher expense of doing it wasn't rewarded with higher ratings, so many studios didn't do very much. Not so anymore ...

.