If you grew up watching the kids TV channel Nickelodeon regularly, you may have had this question: What is a nickelodeon? How did they get the name Nickelodeon for a children’s channel? This comes from several early Nick executives (From the Nickelodeon oral history, “Slimed, an Oral History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age”.)
FRED SEIBERT (Creative Consultant): The biggest thing they told us was, “We keep telling everyone that we’re fun, but we’re not. What do we do?” From our perspective, we needed to start all over again. Gerry Laybourne and Debby Beece were so distressed about what Nick was that they wanted to reconsider everything from scratch, including the name of the network, which was not a name that resonated with children. No less adults.
SANDY KAVANAUGH (First Director of Programming, Creator of Pinwheel): The name of the network had come from Vivian Horner wanting me to come up with a list of possibilities. Everybody was suffering over what to call it. I came up with a list and Nickelodeon was my favorite. A lot of the other names we came up with were bad.
GUS HAUSER (Creator of Nickelodeon): We had an outside firm who counseled us on various names we could use. At the end of that session, I sat in the room and one of the things on the list was Nickelodeon. I said, “Let’s do Nickelodeon.” And that was it.
SANDY KAVANAUGH: I wasn’t thrilled with “Nickelodeon.” It was whimsical sounding, though. It had a fun lilt. Then it went to somebody higher up who said okay. I think I’m the person who came up with the name.
GUS HAUSER: That’s how things happen. Could have picked something else. Somebody had to make that decision. Everybody’s taking responsibility now.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER (Vice President of Production): It was all very thrilling because at one point when Nickelodeon was really at a crossroads, the whole thing was like, “All right: Are we going to change the name? Nickelodeon is a lousy name, this means nothing to children. Can we get this name to mean anything to children?” I mean, no one knows what a nickelodeon is.
BOB KLEIN (Original Brand Identity): The biggest issue we had to face at the beginning was what to call it. I said, “There isn’t a kid watching it who knows what a nickelodeon is. Why should we call it that?” #nickelodeon
Can’t add too much to this other than to say that there is a plaque in downtown Pittsburgh on the street corner where the word Nickelodeon was coined (or was, I last saw it in the mid-1980s).
I assumed it was an old-fashioned slot machine, brassy and gilty, with bright lights, stuck in the corner of an old-fashioned drugstore, where all the kids would come around, and lay their money on the ground; doling out random crap.
In the early days of Nick (the REALLY early ones, in the early eighties) they used to have bumpers featuring a mime, which played an instrumental of that song.
(I leafed through that Slimed! book, and was kind of disappointed that they didn’t make much mention of those really early days. I used to love Hocus Focus and Pinwheel–which was probably where I got my love for all kinds of animation and British/European cartoons. Also where I fell in love with Paddington Bear. I also loved Video Comics, where I first heard the Green Lantern oath.)
Exactly. The nickelodeon was the earliest form of movie theater. Each had rows of kinetoscope machines which had a series of cards. For a nickel, you turned a crank and the cards were flipped – like a flip card – and it gives the illusion of movement. Movies ran for a minute or two.
Technically, it was the theater that was the nickelodeon, but the word took on other movies. The song “Music, Music, Music” is referring to a jukebox, even though it uses the term “nickelodon”; by the time the song was written, the nickelodeon as movie theater was long gone.
As a kid that grew up during Nickelodeon’s golden era, I had no idea what a Nickelodeon was. It didn’t matter; I just thought it was a made-up word. It wasn’t until well into my late teens that I learned it had an actual meaning.
It would be a bitch to rely on the willingness of kids to look up words in the dictionary when you’re trying to attract them to your fledgling TV channel.
That’s what I thought, too. Nickel + odeon, early five-cent movie theaters. Apparently, it does refer to a player piano or jukebox, too, though. I did not know that. The movie theatre meaning seems to be the the original one.
This. My parents were both born in 1913, and I remember my mother singing this little ditty. But according to her, it wasn’t actually a “movie theater,” but a machine that you’d put a nickel in, and see a short movie.
It makes me think of the 1970s band Sailor who invented, and built and played, a special, multi-keyboard musical instrument (it took two people to play it) that they called a nickelodeon: The Old Nickelodeon Sound. (Their first, eponymous, album was very good, but they hit big in Britain just before the punk revolution, and got swept away by it.)
