Arnold's Room

If I had been a more dedicated webmaster I surely would have posted on the following events concerning Hey Arnold!, but I just never felt motivated to update the homepage as I really thought no one was visiting anymore. While news concerning the show and this website has cooled over the past year, there are some key events over the past year I’d like to highlight.

Craig Bartlett and Hey Arnold!:

-This could very well be considered the biggest HA! news in recent years – concept art for “The Jungle Movie”, the second movie that was never produced to end the series properly, was discovered earlier this year at the Hey Arnold! Livejournal Community. I don’t know why more buzz surrounding these images never arose as these are amazing finds – perhaps it’s too little too late? I hope not, as its high quality art and it gives us a brief glimpse at how the movie could have looked. I remember my jaw dropping at the sight of these, and I wish there were more!

-This October 7th will mark a staggering 12 years since Hey Arnold! premiered on Nickelodeon. It’s already been 10 years since the show’s third season premiered on the network on August 31, 1998. This past June 28th marked 6 years since Hey Arnold! The Movie debuted in theaters.

-I almost forgot about this until I remembered it recently – it’s hard to believe but it’s been 20 years since Craig Bartlett originally created the character of Arnold in the Claymation short Arnold Escapes From Church, which was originally made in June/July 1988. On a side note, this October 18th Craig Bartlett celebrates his 52nd birthday!

-A new picture of Craig Bartlett surfaced online this past June, its nice to finally see a new face as all the images of him on the net are at least a decade old. Pictured with him is Herb Scannell who was president of Nickelodeon from 1996-2006, and Dan Meth who has animated a host of popular online cartoons.

-Remember Party Wagon, Craig’s one-shot movie with Cartoon Network that aired only a couple times back in early 2004? You can currently download the entire movie at this Megaupload link. Depending on your internet connection it may take awhile to download, its an 458MB .avi file.

-I kept seeing ads for this movie on television and only found out recently Craig was a part of its production – up until now I had no idea he was working on anything cartoon-related. The Jim Henson Company is producing a series of computer animated direct-to-video movies called Unstable Fables. The first title "3 Pigs and a Baby" was written by Craig Bartlett and Joseph Purdy, and adds a twist to the old tale of "The Three Little Pigs".

-Harvey Korman, the voice of Dino Spumoni’s songwriting partner Don Reynolds, died on May 29, 2008. He’s the third voice actor featured in the series to pass away, following Lou Rawls who was the voice of Harvey the Mailman who died on January 6, 2006, and Vincent Schiavelli, who was the voice of Pigeon Man and Mr. Bailey who died on December 26, 2005. I always find it bizarre when a voice actor passes away, as the voice they gave to their character(s) will live on forever and entertain generations to come; all the while the person who supplied that voice will never be heard from again. It’s sad to think how many great voices we’ve lost in the animation voice over industry over the past couple decades.

Hey Arnold! on the web:

-Don’s Hey Arnold! Site celebrated ten years online mid last year, during all of this site’s events at the time I don’t recall ever mentioning that. The Unofficial Hey Arnold! Site is currently celebrating ten years online, but unfortunately webmaster Kim Burk had no time to focus on making anything concerning the event, which is sad as its one of the most influential websites the fandom has had and with the help of its forum back in the day, united fans from all over the world.

-Arnold’s Room will be 6 years old this August 24th, and we just hit 60,000 hits on July 13th! Currently we have almost 750 members. While I’m sure I mentioned it, I stopped updating my Save Hey Arnold! site due to lack of interest last year. On a side note, I opened a blog this year which is starting to gain an audience – The Cartoon Couch Potato. While this site may be on hiatus for now, you can catch my latest rants and reviews on animation over there.

-Earlier this year the chatroom was having problems and the Java page was down. It eventually got fixed some months later but I forgot to post about it since there wasn’t anyone visiting. So just to let you know now, our current chatroom is still online, and you can either use the Java applet (if you don’t have Java download it here) or download a chat client to enter. No one seems to come in for chatting anymore; I’d like to see if there is anymore interest in it.

-Hey Arnold! is still a popular fandom over on DeviantArt although now all fanart is under a "past tense" mode as anyone who draws art for it refers to it in the past tense or how they used to love the show – gone are the days of the active HA! fanarts where every single art was nothing but HA!. Seems these days they only do a couple pics and then move on to another oldschool cartoon. Fanfiction however still seems to do well. As stated above I visited my Fanfiction.net account for the first time in years (read The Masterplan, it’s so underrated it’s a crime!). I barley know how that place works anymore, but it appears they have added some well overdue enhancements. While the pace for new stories and updating old ones will never be as brisk as it used to be, it’s still fairly swift for a show that’s been out of production since 2001. Two other places where fiction is being hosted is at Hey Arnold! Fanfiction Community and Hey Arnold! Prompts on Livejournal. As usual, don’t forget to check out the Hey Arnold! Community on Livejournal as well for up-to-date news, along with Don’s Hey Arnold! Site.

-A Fandom History Wikipedia was created earlier this year, and an entry was created for Hey Arnold!. Its good to see something like this online, as it displays keys points in the show’s online fandom. However it’s not that detailed and some of the dates are wrong. If anyone knows the online history of Hey Arnold! in its later years, its me. Sadly I don’t have time to focus on editing this article. If you’d like some detailed information and are in for a read, you can look over my Fandom Histories project which I wrote years ago.

-As I was pillaging around old links, I came to find every old and extremely old Hey Arnold! website still online, some of these sites ten years old or getting close to it. Of course they have been abandoned for years and just sit with all their content still online. However Nadine’s Hey Arnold Message Board finally went offline, as did The Hey Arnold Archive – while the homepage was down soon after it stopped updating, its contents were left online five years later, until I found recently my avatar pic at the old Hey Arnold Forum (Arnold with a pancake on his head) was offline as I had directly linked the image.