"Oh Yeah! Cartoons" was a feature on Nickelodeon back in the late 1990's, the idea was to feature shorts that would let new talent and those who wanted to get their projects out there to an audience and maybe gage what could be the next series. Something we don't really see today on TV, a format of programming that's airing these. Now, they have done this stuff online, but it seems doing it on TV has been more muted.
This was crated by Fred Seibert , who was part of MTV's early days the man who helped create the famous visuals the channel had, later he helped MTV's sister network, Nickelodeon , get a new look : the famous orange splat, and also created Nick at Nite. He worked at Hanna-Barbera later on and helped make their cartoon incubator/anthology series "What a Cartoon!" which helped formulate some big Cartoon Network series. This idea came to Nickelodeon with this series.
Here's what these series of posts will be doing is taking a look at some shorts that were featured on it. To make it more interesting, I won't be doing any shorts from things that became series, like "Fairly Odd Parents", "Chalkzone" , or "My Life as a Teenage Robot" . The things that were series in "Oh Yeah!" but not otherwise a series , may be featured but in a different way. The main idea is we'll be going through and seeing an alternate world of things that what could have been.
This is our look at "Oh Yeah Cartoons",
#1 Jelly's Day
From Season 1, Episode 1c; Season 2, Episode 6c, and Season 2, Episode 13a
Jelly's day had 3 different episodes, but never did become a series. It was created by Bill Burnett and Greg Emison. In fact, the entire first episode of Oh Yeah! Cartoons has Burnett's name as creator for all 3 shorts. That includes "Chalkzone". We''ll be seeing his name a few times during our journey. So, instead of me doing three different posts about "Jelly's Day" I'm going to do them all in this one post.
It's about a girl named Jelly (voiced by Grey Griffin) , and she's purple, I guess as a way to stand out as a main character the basic premise of her shorts is her explaining her day to us the viewer. While we'll see it flashback mode.
In the first one, she's talking about her unique cousin named Hargus, who looks like one of the gang green gang guys from "Powerpuff Girls". The plot is they go to the beach for a beach day and things go not well and ends up with beach goers going after him in a mob. Things get better when he saves Jelly from an attacking octopus and he's given an award.
The next one is called "Jelly's Day: Uncle Betty's Strange Rash" . This one was co-written by Vinent Waller who worked on many shorts in "Oh Yeah" He came from Nick's "Ren and Stimpy" days as a director. Later, he went to also work on "Spongebob Squarepants".
The second short is about Jelly's uncle Betty visiting. (His name is Betty, just roll with it) I also see the Stimpy backpack slipped in. Jelly is trying to get her strange uncle out to see if he makes any friends. Eventually Betty gets attacked by a plant who used his body to spread seeds to make little baby plants (what) that start scaring the museum. The uncle and the plant are together and now and they live together because sure why not?
The final short is "Jelly's Day: Aunt Broth's Makeover" so yes another relative. Aunt Broth is sad and Jelly tells us that something happened that made her aunt be the crying woman we hear today. Aunt Broth, also doesn't get out much and lives in the attic, but this time Jelly was going to bring her aunt to get a makeover.
Also the woman has a ticklish problem, where's she constantly being tickled somehow. Thanks to this she's can't be given a makeover since everything goes wrong. Jelly's idea is to do brain surgery. (logical) The reason why the woman is so ticklish is little French clown living in her brain.(of course!) She gets rid of the clown, but apparently now the aunt is sad. Thankfully the clown isn't dead and is able to return to make the aunt happy.
Jelly's Day is pretty fun, it has a chaos to it that works. I think there's possibilities with the format would have been interesting if this had become a series where we would we meet more relatives? Would we have seen Jelly meet other interesting characters for stories? Jelly seemed to be the straight man character to the weirdness, but not above it.
There's a fun creativeness to these three shorts, I think the 2nd and 3rd ones were the most creative, and funny. I think this would have fit in well at Nickelodeon of the time. Since Burnett made "Chalkzone" and that's the one that became the series, this one wasn't going to get that chance, imagine that universe though.
I do think you should check out Jelly's Day, it's fun.
That's it for now, tune in next time, after we do brain surgery by finding someone's zipper and opening it up.
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