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Nick Cancelling Invader Zim
orn writes "Lots of my slashdotting friends turned me on to Invader Zim not so long ago. Well, aintitcool.com is reporting that the show is being cancelled." Now that really sucks. Zim was absolute genius in terms of art, use of CG, and just flat out hilarious writing. I'll miss this one a lot.
According to the article, it isn't being axed immediately--next season there will be only six episodes instead of 20, which means there will still be 16 more new episodes to wait for.
However, it is still disappointing. I've only seen Invader Zim a couple times (my cable company doesn't carry that channel) but it was one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. Unfortunately, I believe Nickelodeon marketed it to the wrong audience: it should have been aimed at teenagers and adults. Most young children don't appreciate it enough.
Perhaps if Invader Zim had been on another network, one that doesn't focus on children's entertainment, it would have fared better.
The article suggests that Nick is pulling Zim due to poor ratings- yet how can they expect good ratings when they randomly move the show to a new time slot every week? When they randomly show 'Wild Thornberries' in the slot Invader Zim was scheduled for, causing my Tivo to waste valuable recoding time? When they fail to supply episode descriptions 90% of the time?
In my opinion, the worst sin of Nicktoons is the 'splitting' of episodes, where they take the individual segments that make up a 30-minute episode of Zim, CatDog, etc and package it with some live action slime game or other filler into a fifteen minute slot.
Worse than that, they tend to start shows early and end them late, especially with these 15-minute half-episodes, so TiVo misses large portions of the cartoon.
With the cancellation of Zim, I have one less reason to bother turning on the TV anymore.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
The reason Invader Zim, Spongebob, and 2 other shows are being dropped has everything to do with 16 out of 19 writers signing union cards.
There is no unionization in the animation industry, and Nickelodeon means to keep it that way.
Nick staffers demand union representation
There was a story on yahoo! news last week that made the link clearer, but I can no longer find it.
--
Industrial Workers of the World
So. Who buys the ratings bullshit?
Honestly. There's a lot more shows that pull in worse ratings than Invader Zim and that don't have the same cult following that Zim has behind it.
I think Nickelodeon didn't think when they gave a man who happened to author a comic called "Johnny The Homicidal Maniac" a Children's TV Show.
Go watch Dark Harvest. What kind of Kid wouldn't get nightmares from watching that episode? Honestly... just whenever he opens his mouth and you see all the guts inside.
Not to mention the unaired FBI Warning episode, which is as such simply because it was apparently too controversial (Anybody care to shed some light behind why? I think it had something to do with Sept11...).
This is a Viacom move, I'm guessing... and thusly political. Nickelodeon is Viacom's Kids Network, and being that Zim, much like Undergrads, The Oblongs, The Simpsons (so far the only one out of that list that was actually promoted _right_) and a pantheon of other cartoons aren't geared towards kids, were promoted as kids' shows, of course it's going to get pulled...
The problem is the only more recent controversial cartoon that actually managed to survive through all of it got worn out in the first year (*coughSouthParkcough*) and after that it wasn't really funny anymore...
So it's not a kids show. I honestly think Viacom should look around at its other channels (MTV?) for support of Zim.
And while they're at it, they should push someone in Canada to pick it up. I hate having to watch all the episodes on my computer.
Karma: Non-Heinous
Nick kept on screwing around with the timeslot which made it kinda hard to watch. It seemed that it changed every week.
I doubt anyone will pick up this show because
1) its a very small audience who can understand zim and jhonen vasquez's work
2) the show is expensive with all the cgi they do. i read an interview with vasquez and nick was the only place that had the capital to support the technology they use to animate
The only good part about this is that jhonen will be able to work on johnny the homicidal maniac. The only thing that was stopping him was all the time he had to dedicate to zim.
Unfortunately I doubt that nick will release the series in DVD form because they never do that with any of their shows. Stupid humans
I personally think since the "MTV-ising" of Nickelodean started they sorta went downhill (then again, I AM an adult -- perhaps I should stop watching cartoons as well?) The only cartoon I truely care about nowadays is Dexter's Laboratory, because even though I've seen some episodes a number of times they continue to surprise me. Plus, a great majority of episodes were funny. If either it or SpongeBob were to leave the airwaves permenantly I would probably be a little upset.
I throw Invader Zim into the same pool I throw Rocko's Modern Life, Ren & Stimpy, Sheep in the Big City and the Grim and Evil show in -- supposedly "adult" cartoons that just come off like college students' art projects.
Heres an interview with Jhonen Vasquez. Its kinda old but its a great read. It has info on the censorship that nick imposed and plenty of fan boy questions. Its very sad to see the show go. I have been a fan of vasquez since the days of Johnny and SQUEE. For all those who doubt the greatness of ZIM download the episodes. ZIM IMO is the best american cartoon out there, and yes I do watch adult swim. Vasquez has a really unique art style and a unique sense of humor. Hes one of the few comic book artists who doesnt draw every woman with double D's
Maybe it's nothing, and the show was cancelled simply because they didn't know how to handle it, just like the John K. days of Ren & Stimpy. Funny how whenever I would tell someone about Zim, I would always say, "...and for some reason Nicklodeon is airing it." Zim is so subversive and dark-I think all of us knew this day would come, at least those of us who remember what happened to Ren & Stimpy...at least they didn't fire Vasquez and re-edit the show in horrible horrible ways. Well, at least HOPEFULLY they won't...
***
> How is ZIM any worse than, say, MAD Magazine?
I haven't seen ZIM, but Mad, in its original form, was a Harvey Kurtzman showcase. The content back then was largely too complex for kids.
The Kurtzman/Elder/Krigstein parody of George McManus' Bringing Up Father in Mad #17 is a good example -- it's a dark take on McManus' use of domesic violence as comedy.
Kurtzman was pushed out of Mad after a couple of years, and his later magazine Help! was also Not For Kids; R. Crumb's Fritz the Cat pseudo-rape comic was published there, some of the first non-greeting-card stuff Crumb published. (Terry Gilliam also worked for Help.)
And EC in general was really an adult comics line back then (Tales from the Crypt, etc.); the Comics Code Authority killed off all EC comics but Mad (which was billed as a magazine, and thus not for kids, because only kids read comics, right?), and Mad was steadily dumbed-down over the years to increase sales to kids. But back before the CCA dark times, EC almost a low-brow Fantagraphics, a tiny niche for grown-ups' comics.
[sigh...]
> The whole point of subversiveness is to open
> eyes.
Yeah, but it still needs to be aimed at kids to be really subversive. Otherwise it will just be disturbing; they won't understand what's being subverted. Crumb's How Snoids are Born (Snoid Comics, Kitchen Sink Press) is a glorious treatise on how dysfunction is passed down through generations, but I sure wouldn't give that comic to a kid (in the comic, the Snoid masturbates to thoughts of dismembered women; the droplets of jizz turn into little Snoids; the Snoid then shoos the offspring out the door with a broom, saying "Scoot! 'An don't let me see yer ugly faces around this neighborhood!"). A kid wouldn't get that comic; hell, I'm expecting some AC flames from folks who don't get it. The target audience matters.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man