Nickelodeon’s Most Relatable Cartoon Turns 30, And We’re Still Hoping for a Sequel Series in 2026

Skip to content Nickelodeon is home to some of the most beloved cartoons of all time, with animated properties like SpongeBob SquarePants, Rugrats, CatDog, The Fairly OddParents, and more creating massive waves upon hitting televisions across the country. While the era of streaming has made the network less popular than it once was, the company still has managed to have an impact, with the release of modern shows like The Loud House and new films like The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants proving that Nickelodeon is still a titan in the world of animation. However, there is one way for the brand to maintain relevance by bringing back one of its most iconic shows.

In recent years, Nickelodeon has produced all kinds of sequels and spinoffs to some of its most iconic shows, including 2021’s The Patrick Star Show, 2021’s Rugrats, and 2024’s The Fairly OddParents: A New Wish. This has allowed the company to market its most iconic properties to a whole new generation, and while this is fun for fans of these shows, this trend has one glaring omission: a show that just turned 30 years old.

Nickelodeon was known for wacky, energetic, and sometimes bizarre cartoons, which is why it’s so odd that one of its best shows was relatively down-to-earth: Hey Arnold!. Early in his career, animator Craig Bartlett got a job making claymation cutaways for the live-action children’s series Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, inspiring him to make his own series of claymation short films. So, Craig made three shorts focused on a character named Arnold, with the first one being 1988’s Arnold Escapes From Church. Then, Bartlett got a job on Rugrats in 1993, which eventually led to him pitching his own series to Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon was interested in an animated series based on his Arnold character, leading to the development of a short film that aired in theaters before 1996’s Harriet the Spy. Eventually, the network greenlit a series, and Hey Arnold! premiered on Nickelodeon on October 7, 1996.

Hey Arnold! tells the story of the titular football-headed fourth grader as he goes on various adventures with his friends in the city of Hillwood, an amalgam of cities like Portland and Brooklyn. The series explores Arnold’s point of view of living in a run-down, dark, big city, something that many real-life children experience despite the lack of representation in children’s cartoons. This is what caused Hey Arnold! to connect with so many kids, quickly turning it into one of Nickelodeon’s biggest shows of the late 1990s.

Hey Arnold! ran for five seasons consisting of 100 episodes, with it eventually ending on June 8, 2004. Throughout its run, the series was a hit with critics and audiences alike, with it featuring all the charm of a regular Nickelodeon cartoon while simultaneously including more mature storytelling and atmosphere. Following up on the success of 1998’s The Rugrats Movie, Nickelodeon released 2002’s Hey Arnold!: The Movie, which follows the gang as they discover that a real estate developer has a plan to tear their neighborhood down.

After all these years, Hey Arnold! remains one of Nickelodeon’s most popular and influential shows, which is why it’s so sad that the series never got a sequel. The long-awaited Hey Arnold!: The Jungle Movie was finally released on November 24, 2017, which told the story of Arnold’s missing parents, something that was frequently theorized about during the run of the original series. This gave the franchise a significant boost in popularity in the late 2010s, and if Nickelodeon ever wanted to bring the series back, this was the time.

Unfortunately, nothing else ever happened with Hey Arnold!. No sequels or spinoffs came about as a result of The Jungle Movie, and Nickelodeon hasn’t touched the franchise in a significant way since the film aired. There were rumors that Nickelodeon would revive the show if the film was a hit, but since The Jungle Movie got poor ratings, this idea may have been scrapped.

It may be too late for Nickelodeon to bring back Hey Arnold!, as the company has seemingly shifted to bringing back properties that were more popular in the 2000s, like SpongeBob SquarePants and Invader Zim. However, Hey Arnold! still has so much potential, and hopefully Nickelodeon brings that franchise back someday, even if 30 years have passed.

What Nickelodeon show do you want to see come back? Let us know on the ComicBook Forum!