LESSONS FROM THE 90s, Memoir 5

HEY ARNOLD!: A Shoutout to Quiet Kindness

Hello all! I hope you’re having a fine Monday morning. I’ve been cleaning out bots and porn-stars from my Twitter, so instead of a steady curve on a graphic, I’m going up and down on followers that would make an analyst have a seizure. Gettin’ reall annoying but that’s part of the show. And partly my fault. I’m following a method by a dude who said it will, by doing leg work!, I’ll get a 1000 followers by the end of a month.

I haven’t been doing the legwork as he suggests (poking 10 people a day) and…well I just have to think back to Desiderata, the poem, every time I encounter the world’s sham and drudgery.

Hey Arnold! began in 1996 and went to 2004, with 2 movies in 2002 and a grand, belated finale in 2017. I don’t have a memory of when I started watching it. I don’t think I watched much of it at my old house (birth to 8 years old) and I know I watched it to a degree at my new home.

How to describe it? Quiet kindness in a quirky world. See, a distinct thing about the show is that everyone is drawn weird. Not ugly—you could compare the show to others around the time and see it was distinctly not trying to be ugly*. Rather, the main life lesson of the show is that:

People are Weird!

[*Unlike Cow and Chicken, Ren and Stimpy, or god-forbid, Duckman. Those three were trying to prove a point to the industry, that a show can be weird, gross, entertaining, and have all the rude humor you can sneak into a show past the censors. Cow and Chicken’s opening theme song ‘Momma had a Chicken/Momma had a Cow. Dad was proud/Didn’t care how’ is a joke that combines adultery and bestiality in one lyric.]

And not in our contemporary ‘you’re a special unique snowflake whose weirdness is innately special’, I mean the show pulls no punches in showing people, as people, who are unabashedly bizarre. Not gross, not psychos, just bizarre. It is a strange life experience to be a human being, and Arnold himself captures that with his football-shaped head—which is seen as strange by the characters in the show!

Arnold himself…he is kind, hands down, and helpful. Raised as an orphan by his two grandparents (both the liveliest characters on the show despite their old age), Arnold was in the unique situation of growing up in a boarding house owned by his grandparents. The lion’s share of the adult cast lived in the house, and their lives were put on full display. Often, because Arnold was roped into whatever drama they were in. Or, sometimes, Arnold was too generous and got involved, and usually it was either his danger or sacrifice that made the adult in question have a wakeup call. (For example, him helping middle-aged married man Oskar after he had a spat with his wife; Arnold let him crash in his room, and Oskar took advantage of it until Arnold called him out on his mooching.)

You can say that Arnold lived in a home of controlled chaos. He was regularly sent to collect rent from the boarders, and if they gave him guff about it, he took it in good humor. His school friends were the other majority of characters, and they took had their own dramas that Arnold so happened to be around. Sometimes, but not always. The show was careful to give one episode to every person with a name (I think, except for the paranoid recluse that lived in the boarding house; Arnold had to take him food). If Arnold wasn’t needed, he didn’t show up.

Nah, to me, though, Arnold’s best feature was his private room. At the top of the boarding house was an attic that was an entire pad for Arnold himself. I wonder if that was a warning for our future? But it had everything for Arnold—a fold out bed from the wall, a great big blue couch in front of a huge 90s TV, carpets, posters—

Uh oh. Memory problem. It was an orange fluffy couch. Uh. Oops—aha! Found a picture. The walls were blue, with his bed next to a whole was that was converted into a bookshelf. The skylight window forever shining down in that totally 90s room. It’s funny, because the whole place was a sanctum for Arnold, who got into so much hijinks that he’d need a break from the world. Under the clear blue sky.

Eh, I’ll go on from my memories. I’m reading through the episode summaries. See, Arnold was not a scary show. It had repeated supernatural elements in it—more on that later—but the show was never scary. (Unlike, say, Courage the Cowardly Dog.) Rather, the show was cool and bittersweet. The red brick buildings contrasted against the soft yellow lamps and streetlights, while over head the sky was shining blue or dimming to a dark blue blanket that never oppressed. The fictional city of Hillwood was always lively, from problems mundane to tragicomic.

But there were sad stories in Hey Arnold! Sometimes, it was simple things, like Arnold learning that life wasn’t fair, in love or school life. Other times, it went 180 and delved into topics like Vietnam and crippling isolation (with kid filters on, mind you). Yes, my first lessons about Vietnam were from Arnold (along with my Aunt Joan), as, one of Arnold’s neighbors, Mr. Hyunh, was a civilian at the fall of Saigon, 1975, and he gave up his newborn daughter to be airlifted out by the US helicopters. You see a stylized showing of events, and even as a kid you get all the heartache and drama.

There was a whole Christmas episode where Arnold and friends went through various adoption agencies to help Mr. Hyunh find his daughter. They did.

Then there were sad episodes, like the Pigeon Man episode*. The Pigeon Man was one of many lonely people on the show (he was voiced by Vincent Schiaveli, an actor born with a naturally sad-looking face). He was hurt too often by humans, so he retreated to live a homeless life on a roof with a pigeon coop. Arnold came to the Pigeon Man to heal his own pet pigeon, and they struck up a friendship there. Unfortunately, Syd, Stinky, and Harold—the three immature rough-housing boys of the show—discovered Arnold’s secret, and, misunderstanding the Pigeon Man, trash his home in an act of mischief. (None of the birds were hurt.) Saddened but not surprised, the Pigeon Man attached many pieces of string to himself, and his flock of pigeons carried him away in front of an amazed Arnold.

[*The creator of the show, Craig Barlett, was so incensed at the gross fan theory ‘the pigeon man committed suicide’ that he had the Pigeon Man show up in the background in one of the movies, just to shut those people up.]

There were other wild episodes. Again, Hey Arnold had some supernatural elements to the show. They were not necessarily about world-building or mythology. More like, the show merely engaged in a kind of Magic Realism to help make a better story, a better lesson. For example, there’s an honest-to-goodness ghost train near the town, as well as a flatulent ghost.

In another episode, Arnold and his best friend Gerald caught a prehistoric catfish-monster in the local park lake. The first amazement was that 2 fourth-graders caught a shark-monster, the second was that Arnold had a change of heart and let the beast go. The boys caught the monster to win fame and fortune (Gerald especially). But Arnold looked into the beast’s eyes, and realized that if they did bring in the giant catfish, he’d be locked up in display for the rest of his life—and the legends went that the beast was living in the lake for a hundred years. Arnold let him go out of pity.

I bring all these episodes up, because I think their lessons stuck with me the most. Be careful of exploring a mystery—it might be real! (Boy, is that missing in our day.) Be kind to the strange and weird, but use caution; go slowly, at first. Remember that people can be and are hurt, and are deathly afraid of their own shortcomings. Go forth in the world with a quiet patience; listen and watch well. Be brave and curious. You never know how wonderful life is!

More to follow!