Hey Arnold!, and why it’s still important today
Less than a year ago my fiancee and I took to rewatching Hey Arnold! for the first time in YEARS to prep for The Jungle Movie. Having been obsessed with it when I was a kid, I knew the show like the back of my hand, so I went through and made a “best of” list of episodes, and we watched those.
Aaaand immediately went back to the beginning and watched ALL of them.
AAAAND went back AGAIN because revisiting this show has been so fun for me, and it just puts me in a good, good place. Since this (eternal) marathon began, I’ve wanted to do a big ol’ overview of the show itself, and why it’s important. It’s very diverse, and from a time when that really wasn’t what kids’ shows were striving for like they are today. There are tons of characters of color, different religions, sexualities, social classes, etc, and I kind of need this show to get the love and attention it so deserves. It’s really kinda gone unloved for a long while now (which is understandable, it’s been off the air since 2002), and I just know it’d be a huge deal if more people knew/remembered how inclusive it was. I’m kicking myself for not writing this sooner, but I’m holding out hope for Nick to greenlight a new series, and my dearest wish is that I can remind people of this wonderful, thoughtful show, and get it the attention it deserves.
Hey Arnold! is FULL of amazing characters and stories, so BUCKLE UP BUTTERCUP, THIS GON’ BE A LONG ONE.
| City life, poverty, & crime |
At it’s core, Hey Arnold! is a show about inner city kids, their school, and how they go about their daily lives. I did some research for this (believe it or not lmao), and besides Sesame Street, there is no other media geared toward kids that touch on this. That’s insane to me. And while Sesame Street is fantastic, it tends to steer on the positive side of city life. Which is great!! However, Hey Arnold!, being written for an older audience, isn’t afraid to show the not-so-pretty side of things as well. Violence, crime, theft, pollution, and poverty are ALL covered in more than just a few episodes. We saw a lot of this right off the bat in the first episode, “Downtown as Fruits”.
As for violence, in the episode “Mugged”, Arnold is jumped on his way home one evening, and takes self defense lessons from his Grandma.
And it’s not the last time Arnold, or other characters are mugged. It’s just something they deal with, something they have to learn to protect themselves from. And sometimes, they can’t.
They don’t shy away from poverty within the city, either. Multiple characters are shown to be very poor, and with the exception of two episodes in the whole series (Lila in her debut episode, “Ms. Perfect”, and Sid when he wants to impress a rich classmate and is too embarrassed to have him over at his own home, “Arnold’s Room”), it’s never really shown as a bad thing, or even as a defining character trait. It just is.
Even our title character lives in a boarding house run by his grandparents, inhabited by tenants of very little means. The building itself is always needing repairs, the tenants almost never have their rent on time, and they really don’t shy away from how dingy some of the rooms are there (pictured above, bottom left).
But again, all of this just is. It’s never portrayed as a bad thing, and none of the kids care much about it. Of course there’s Rhonda, the snooty, rich girl stereotype, but even she has a handful of episodes where she grows as a character and is repeatedly called out for having a classist attitude. In the end, all of these kids care about each other and never give a second’s thought to each others’ social class.
| Diversity & inclusiveness |
I’m putting the rest under a read more cut so no one murders me for clogging up their dashboards :’)
Another important thing is that, even though we had a bit of “boys can do that and girls can’t,” we also had a lot of episodes where girls were playing baseball and other sports with them and they never were less players than they were. Besides that, there’s episodes where we see girls full capacity like for example Helga is always the leader of the baseball (and gosh that must mean something, since i believe that is not just because she threatens them) or the time that Phoebe won a kart race.
Better yet, Helga herself criticizes the things that models have to go through to fit in a certain beauty stereotype. She calls out her girl classmates on “Helga´s sleepover” when she tells them that beyond everything, they are kids and they are supposed to have fun and well, BE KIDS. They didn’t need anything such as makeup to be girls or anything, as Helga proved over and over through the series. In fact, once the boys said she could not come investigate an urban legend about a ghost bride because she was a girl and not only she went anyway but also she dressed herself up as the bride to scare them.
Phoebe is also a great model of a girl. She is sweet, kind, fierce, smart and a bit of crazy too. She has her moments and sometimes messes up, demanding too much of herself, but she is always logical and in the end, knows what is the right thing to do. Even when Arnold helps her, it seems that she already know what is right to do, she just chooses not to do it right away, which is fine! Everyone has flaws and that doesn’t make Phoebe less awesome.
SPEAKING ABOUT MA MAN ARNOLD SHORTMAN BOI HOW DO I LOVE HIM. Like @speakfriendaandenter said he is almost flawless. Except that he is pretty nosy as said once by the people he normally helps and even his best friend on “Deconstructing Arnold”, but the only reason he is, it’s because he wants people to get it right. He hates seeing someone feeling bad and has a very empathetic nature. That’s exactly why Arnold works as a protagonist, because he is not someone we identify (well I do a bit but anyways), but he is someone we want to be or at least, he helps someone we identify with. We see ourselves not like him, but like the people he lives with. So seeing how they got better we feel that we can BE better too. At least, that’s like I feel
