It's a Sunday morning in August and it's 1991, the cable network Nickelodeon had something planned that day. The network finished its morning rerun of Inspector Gadget and at 10AM eastern they premiered their first own cartoon, which they would dub as Nicktoons, called Doug. This would be the start of what were their first 3 original nicktoons. Nick had gotten into original programming, meaning they were making programming for themselves and not doing reruns or buying shows from somewhere else.
It was pretty wild that in 1991 they , a cable network, were doing this. It's even more wild they were going to do it three times in the same day, that Sunday I can see the logic of launching them on a Sunday. The networks held a spot on Saturdays and Nickelodeon wasn't ready for that; they would defeat the networks their own way. The shows would also re-air the week and even that Sunday night on Nick at Nite for the non-heathens who went to church. (We're going to remove that line right, right?)
At 10:30AM eastern, they aired their 2nd Nicktoon, and that would be Rugrats. Each original Nicktoon sets a stone of what Nickelodeon was trying to do. Doug wasn't the kind of show ABC, NBC( who was about to exit) , CBS, or even FOX were looking for. It's about an average boy and the stories aren't him in space, there's no aliens, he's not in a band that solves mysteries, and his dog might be a little more sentient than a real dog, but the dog doesn't talk. It was slice-of-life story telling with interesting characters that were less average than Doug, but still somewhat a grounded show. It would eventually inspire the idea of having more cartoons like this, but it wasn't something notable before this. Ren and Stimpy , the 3rd cartoon of that day, would be the show that feels the closest to retro cartoons and one starring talking animals. It also feels the most Nickelodeon of the shows introduced here. It's not a show that would have made to NBC (who was leaving at the time), CBS, and ABC. FOX probably would have maybe? They didn't.
That brings us to Rugrats , This show's premise on paper is about babies and toddlers who can talk to each other, and they get into adventures. The adventures, at least at first, weren't that big. It took the idea of small things to us and made them bigger. The mall is just a mall, but to them it's an entire wild place to do something for a quest. This is also a show other networks wouldn't have touched. Yes, they did do series where your favorite characters that you know and love were either kids or baby-fied. (That's a word I think) There's Tom and Jerry Kids , The Flintstones Kids , A Pup Named Scooby-Doo (which is actually great and only in this list as an example), The Muppet Babies which is sadly not about Kermit and Ms. Piggy raising their young family together. There was Baby Looney Tunes , which came out after all these other things, and Toddler Terminator which is not real ,and I made it up. The concept of babies doing anything in a main role at all, probably the closest before this was Fantastic Max (from 1988). That show had a talking baby but also had that baby doing real adventures and sci-fi stuff. This was different.
