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Hey Arnold!
1996 · TV series · 12 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by Craig Bartlett
The daily life of Arnold--a fourth-grader with a wild imagination, street smarts and a head shaped like a football.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Stu from Rugrats was a wonderful homage to the 90s everyman and the incoming new reality of men taking up some of the domestic drudgery. It was one of the few shows at the time that had some incredible adult insight and humour for a 'kids' show and never spoke down to its audience - Hey Arnold being another exemplar.
The episode where Angelica breaks her leg and Stu is basically forced into indentured servitude as a result is a masterpiece:
Didi: Stu? What are you doing?
Stu: Making chocolate pudding.
Didi: It's 4:00 in the morning. Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding?
Stu: Because I've lost control of my life.
My first experience learning about Operation Babylift was being traumatized by the Christmas episode of Hey Arnold. It's a fascinating situation, saving babies that have no parents because of your actions as a country.
I don't like that this article was written in such a negative light. I am sure there were terrible situations, but also, you simply wouldn't be writing about a Vietnamese orphan that died on the street without ever being sent to adoptive parents. It feels a bit biased to treat this as an overall negative action by the US. I have met several Babylift adoptees living in SF, and I think they would voice dissenting opinions.
I have terabytes of movies and series. I've spent like 1 hour in the past 12 months adding some stuff to my collection. HDD space is extremely cheap and keeping a local copy is such low effort that I don't see why I should get rid of my collection. Some of it is also so rare as to be impossible to find unless you're a member of some private sharing sites (try finding a complete archive of Jon Stewart on The Daily Show).
I've also lost terabytes of shows/movies before and wasn't affected by it at all. Shit happens. But I prefer having high quality copies immediately available. I've had a complete rip of the animated show "Hey, Arnold!" for like 3 years and only just started watching the whole thing now, and I'm thankful to my past self for giving me such convenient access to something I enjoyed so much as a kid.
This made me so confused as a kid growing up in a country where we can tell how a word is written based on its phonemes 99% of the time. So when I was watching dubbed cartoons from the US, they often had episodes revolving around spelling bees (e.g. I remember “Hey Arnold!” had such an episode), it made absolutely no sense when translated.
I grew up in the burbs and found it absolutely "dreadful" as far as being able to do things outside without a car. Now that I live in a city, I often think about how much happier and freer I would've felt as a child growing up in one. (I had similar feelings when I actually was a kid and watched cartoons like "Hey Arnold!" set in cities. I was so jealous of those kids.)
As a 12 year old in a city you can walk to a park or get on the metro/bus and visit some friends or go see a movie etc. In the burbs if your parents aren't home or are otherwise unwilling to drive you somewhere you're basically stuck at home counting the days until you turn 16.
It's something I envy the US a lot for. I'm assuming it has to do with the population of the state I live in being only 6 million, but there is so comparatively little archived about things like TV shows, and other kinds of trivial (yet important in its own way) history. You can look up what was on TV 50 years ago, and I couldn't even figure out if "Hey Arnold!" was dubbed or subtitled.