For some reason lost to the sands of time my teevee has been tuned to Nickelodeon the last few days. This would be less odd if there were any children in my house, but I have yet to be blessed with the desire for a sticky monster who will boss me around. And yet, somehow, there it is. Being all Nickelodeon. For no good reason. And when I have found myself looking up from work in early hours of the morning, it was the usual fare: a bit of Spongebob, some Dora…and then, things take quite the turn. And I, a childless adult, have come to the conclusion that adults who make children’s television are literally insane. Because these are real characters, that exist on children’s teevee:
1. Mermaid/man Traffic Police
Although it was the merpolice that caught my eye, this show is actually called Bubble Guppies. Okay, sure. Guppies. In the sense that they are tiny people with fishtails who live in, wait for it…Bubbletucky.
2. Oobi
Oobi is, sadly, no longer on the air. Nick Jr showed the last season in 2013. But, when I discovered a disembodied hand with puppet eyes had its own show for over a decade, I felt that it needed to be included.
Interesting aside, Oobi and his (?) friends don’t speak in full sentences. Nick Jr: teaching babies baby talk since always.
3. Rabbid Invasion
If you are thinking, “wait, aren’t these guys from a wildly inappropriate and terribly violent video game” you are right! But, apparently, Nick toned down the violence and made it a teevee show that Common Sense Media called “rude, crude, and minimally taxing on viewers’ sense of comprehension”1
4. Lumpy Space Princess
Apparently, the phrase Lumpy Space is a description of the space over which this princess has dominion, not the lumpy way it is drawn. Either way an anthropomorphized lumpy purple cloud is a weird character.
5. Foop
Foop is part of some sort of crazy Star Trek style dark universe on Fairly Odd Parents. Now, it may occur to you that this show is about two fish that poof into some sort of wish granting fairy godparents, so why wouldn’t we just use the titular characters for this post? Because Foop is f’ing weird. the reason s/he/it is is named Foop is because it’s poof backwards, and somehow that makes Foop child of the anti-Wanda. Oh dear. Now we are all caught up in the back story. Someone needs to hold an intervention. Wait! Why is Foop shaped like a fat Spongebob?!
Emily Ashby “Rabbids Invasion” Common Sense Media, Retrieved August 6, 2013. ↩