'Hey Arnold!' at 30: Why a cartoon about a boy with a football-shaped head endures

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Set us as preferred One of Craig Bartlett’s profoundest childhood memories involves a despondent turtle.In a pet store hidden away in Seattle’s Chinatown, he and his friend Joan came across one in a murky little tank.They took pity on it, bought it and took it home to Portland, Ore.

It didn’t come out of its shell for two weeks.They knew what they had to do.They took the turtle to Square Lake, on Sauvie Island, and laid the turtle down on the shore.

The creature’s head emerged from its shell to consider its new circumstances.Slowly but surely, it eased its way into the water and swam away.

“We were jumping up and down with a kind of weird joy,” Bartlett remembers.Much later, when Bartlett was creating his own animated series, he knew that the poetry of that moment, the strange cinematic magic of it, was something he wanted to tap into.Thirty years ago, on Oct.7, 1996, “Hey Arnold!” premiered on the kids’ cable network Nickelodeon.

With its offbeat, lyrical, sometimes painfully honest portrayal of the feeling of childhood in the city, it quickly set itself apart as a new kind of kids’ show, attracting a dedicated fandom that endures to this day.Arnold was a 9-year-old boy with an elongated ovoid head who enjoyed listening to jazz fusion under the skylight of his attic bedroom.According to Bartlett’s show bible, he was “philosophical, idealistic, romantic and hard to rile.” His best friend was Gerald.

He was, in short, a chill little dude.Bartlett had created the character almost a decade earlier, after a stint producing claymation segments for “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” Back then, one of the cookie cutters that Bartlett used to cut shapes out of clay happened to be shaped like a football; from the work of his brother-in-law, Matt Groening, he’d also observed the importance of a striking silhoue...