Hey Arnold! is an American animated television series that ran from October 7, 1996, until June 8, 2004, on Nickelodeon.

Premise

The show stars 4th-grader Arnold, who lives with his paternal grandparents Phil and Gertie, proprietors of the Sunset Arms boarding house. Arnold attends P. S. 118, along with several other students, including his best friend Gerald, and Helga, a female bully that is secretly in love with Arnold. In each episode, Arnold will often help a schoolmate solve a personal problem, or he will encounter a predicament of his own.

Format and Setting

Each episode of the show is one 23-minute block featuring two 11-minute segments, although there are several episodes that last the full 23 minutes.

The series takes place in the late 1990s and exists in a floating timeline, where time passes and past events are remembered, but almost no characters age and none of the 4th-grade students ever move on to the 5th grade. The only exception to this is Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie, which explicitly takes place approximately a year after the original series' run, during the summer between 5th and 6th grade.

Episodes of the series take place in the order they were written/produced, without adhering to any chronological order. While nearly every episode of the series is standalone, there's subtle continuity between episodes, and new recurring characters are sometimes introduced, such as in "New Teacher" and "Ms. Perfect".

Even though the show takes place in the late 1990s, old cars are a very common sight. Grandpa Phil drives a green 1930s or 1940s Packard, the Pataki family car is a blue 1970s Lincoln Continental, and Gerald's older brother Jamie-O drives a 1967-1968 Pontiac Firebird, just to name a few. The local police drive around in patrol cars resembling the 1960s Dodge Polara sedans. The city buses resemble 1960s models of an unknown make and model, and they have manual transmissions, which wasn't common on buses in North America even during this time period. Despite the presence of old cars and some older-style appliances like console television sets and beepers (which in real life were made obsolete by smartphones and tablets by the mid-2000s), modern technology is also present. This includes computers, video games, VCRs, camcorders, modern bicycles, microwaves, laptops, and Arnold's high-tech bedroom with its remote-controlled hideaway couch and track lighting. As of Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie, which takes place roughly a year after the original series, even more mid-2000s technology is present, with flat-screen monitors and smartphones being commercially available, but not yet being an integral part of life.

Hey Arnold! takes place in a realistic urban setting; the fictional American city of Hillwood (though the city is never verbally named). Contrary to popular belief, the city is not or does not represent New York City. Craig Bartlett has officially stated that the city the show takes place in is somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, and is an amalgam of three cities (mostly Northern) that he lived in: Seattle, Brooklyn, and Portland. Many of the show's events were based on his own experiences growing up in the big city.

Background and Production

Hey Arnold! was created by Craig Bartlett and first began to take shape in 1988. The original Arnold was made out of clay and created after Bartlett finished working on the Penny cartoons from Pee-Wee's Playhouse in 1987. Craig Bartlett shot Arnold on a glass panel in his living room and produced three claymation shorts: Arnold Escapes From Church (1988), The Arnold Waltz (1990), and Arnold Rides His Chair (1991), which eventually aired on an early-1990s episode of Sesame Street. "Arnold" comic strips also appeared in Simpsons Illustrated magazine from 1991 to 1993.

The familiar, 2D Arnold came about in the mid-1990s. While Bartlett was working at Klasky-Csupo Inc. as a story editor on Rugrats, he showed the claymation shorts to Nickelodeon executive Mary Harrington. The network later ordered a pilot in 1993 and picked it up for a full series in early 1995. Apart from the different animation styles, Nick's Arnold now wore a sweater, with his plaid shirt untucked (resembling a kilt). Only Arnold's cap remained from his original claymation wardrobe.

Some aspects of the series came about through Bartlett's family. Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons and Craig Bartlett's brother-in-law) advised Bartlett to make his character designs recognizable from a distance, and Lisa Groening (Bartlett's wife, Matt's sister) came up with the idea of Helga's crush on Arnold. Other aspects of the series developed as the series went on, such as the whereabouts of Arnold's parents.

Hey Arnold! first debuted as an animated short for the Nickelodeon film Harriet the Spy in July 1996. Production on the show started in August 1995 and ended on December 7. 2001 after 100 episodes and one theatrical film, though the very last episodes, were not aired until 2004.

All the music in the series was handled by composer Jim Lang, and the series initially used traditional cel animation, though it switched to digital ink and paint in 1999. Sae Rom Productions handled the overseas animation services starting with Season 2.

The show is notable for being one of the first modern animated series to use child or teenage voice actors for most child characters, in order to add a more "authentic" childhood vibe to the series. As a result of the use of young voices, some characters (such as Arnold and Eugene) were played by multiple actors throughout the years, due to their previous voice actors going through voice changes. Other characters (such as Rhonda and Helga) retained the same voice actor for the entire run of the series and had their voices become deeper as the series progressed, giving the impression of them maturing. The actors also recorded their lines altogether in the same room, another uncommon thing for animated series.

As Craig Bartlett himself has noted years after producing the series, something else that came along with the "realistic childhood" part of the show was a more dramatic and emotional tone, which can be seen in various episodes of the series.

For a brief period, a spin-off series called The Patakis was planned. The premise was to focus on Helga Pataki in her teenage years and her family.

In 2016, over a decade after the original series ended, Nick and Bartlett came to an agreement and began production on a new Arnold TV movie that was originally a canceled theatrical project, Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie, which was released in 2017 and served as a conclusion to the series.

Canon

The canon of the main Hey Arnold! series includes:

100 half-hour episodes (185 stories total)

1 theatrical film

1 television film

9 books (five of the nine books are novelizations of animated stories)

Several сomic strips

Characters

Main article: Characters

Main voice cast