Thirty years ago, a new icon emerged at Nickelodeon: a 9-year-old boy with a football-shaped head and a love of jazz.
The titular character of “Hey Arnold!,” which ran for five seasons beginning in 1996, lives in a boarding home with his grandparents and spends much of the series dealing with his own loneliness after the mysterious disappearance of his parents. When he’s not in school, Arnold stays busy helping eccentric friends like Pigeon Man, a loner who prefers the birds on his rooftop to other people, and Dino Spumoni, a disgraced Rat Pack-era singer, around the fictional city of Hillwood, an amalgamation of Seattle, Portland, and Brooklyn as imagined by Craig Bartlett, the show’s creator.
Balancing big feelings with colorful characters, the cartoon turned the mundane into magic, all scored by original jazz composed and recorded by Jim Lang in his basement. The music turned a generation of kids on to jazz through several reissues and devoted fan bootlegs. Its legacy endures in lengthy playlists that promise “‘Hey Arnold’ vibes,” and now on a 26-date tour booked after two Los Angeles shows for family and friends in August quickly sold out.
Much of the show’s music existed only as 10- to 20-second song fragments meant to accompany the action onscreen. “There was never any long-form version of it,” Lang said, “so I had to do a bunch of arranging and additional writing to make the stuff long-form so we could play it in a set.” Bartlett also performs with the band on tour, singing Dino Spumoni’s fictitious hits like “Smashed” and “You Better Not Touch My Gal.”
In a video interview in September, Bartlett and Lang spoke about making “Hey Arnold!,” the atmosphere they wanted to create, and the music that left a lasting impression on a young generation. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Did you have discussions early on about what you wanted “Hey Arnold!” to sound like?
CRAIG BARTLETT Yeah, especially at the beginning. We played stuff for each other, talked about our favorite jazz musicians. Jim put a great mixtape together.
JIM LANG Well, so did Craig. “Arnold Time Is Here” is what it said on it. It had pretty much the whole Vince Guaraldi [“A Charlie Brown Christmas”] score on it. And a bunch of other stuff, which I can’t remember now. But Vince Guaraldi was a touchpoint because it’s really melodic. Both of us really felt like melody was where the emotion lies in music.
BARTLETT Since I was such a fan of Charlie Brown as a kid, I was really influenced by that Peanuts Christmas special. When I saw that, I was like, “Wow, a cartoon that’s about actual kid emotions.” And the really great melancholy score that Vince Guaraldi did. So those were all really key to me.
And so I’m like, “How can I make a Peanuts for the ’90s that isn’t just a rip-off of Charles Schulz’s work?” And one of the things I could do was really double down on the setting.
What did jazz represent for Arnold as a character?
BARTLETT Arnold’s a cool cat. He’s low-key and he’s got style. He’s not a typical lead character at all. He’s more kind of philosophical. He’s this little Buddha, and all around him are all the crazy characters acting out, and he kind of mediates for them and dispenses advice. So of course he would listen to jazz, and then that served our purpose. Where he got that from, I do not know. Grandpa and Grandma, they probably had all the greats. They had Thelonious Monk records.
Did the theme song really begin as an idea for a Dunkin’ Donuts jingle?
LANG Yeah. I lived in Boston for a few years in the mid-70s, and I had a publishing deal with a company called Full Sail. One of their other partners was a guy named Donny Rosenberg, and his dad was the guy that started Dunkin’ Donuts. At one point I thought, “Man, if I could just make some money out of this some kind of way. Maybe I’ll write a Dunkin’ Donuts jingle.”
I never played it for him. I never recorded it. I was too shy, so it never happened. But when Craig and I were pitching them on ideas for the theme song for Arnold, Craig had always sung this, “Arnold, you crazy nut,” kind of a swing thing. And so, we’re sitting in a meeting with two of the execs from Nickelodeon, and we started finger-popping and singing that thing to them, “Arnold, you crazy nut!” And immediately they’re moaning and saying, “Oh no.” So, we knew that wasn’t going to fly.
I went home and somehow, miraculously, that Dunkin’ Donuts thing popped into my head, and I just altered the melody a little bit. I did what I did a lot of times on the show, which is think, “OK, how would Thelonious Monk play this?” That’s what became the theme song.
“Hey Arnold!” didn’t avoid heavy topics. The episode “Parents Day,” about how Arnold’s parents went missing, is a fan favorite with a beautiful score. Jim, I saw a video of you playing the music and I just totally started weeping. How did you go about capturing these moments?
LANG It just came from the story, you know? That’s all it was. When I play that, people get choked up. I definitely get choked up, too. That one’s always been really emotional for me, and it was when I was writing it.
BARTLETT I remember mixing “Parents Day” after everything was done and it was being all put together. I’d been crying in there while we were mixing, and I went out and someone was going to come get me and take me to lunch. I was standing out on that sidewalk wiping tears from my eyes, going, “What in the hell is wrong with you? Why are you doing this? Why are you making this kids’ show so sad?”
And I didn’t really have an answer then. I felt like I’d kind of gone too far. I didn’t want it to land wrong, you know? I wanted it to actually have a good effect. And later I realized we were doing that because that was kind of our specialty that we had developed — making the show be about feelings. The music, of course, was a gigantic part of that.
Tell me a bit about your experience with the fans since the show ended. What’s surprised you most about what connected with people?
BARTLETT Fans will come up to me and say, “It had such great messages. I really learned something from it,” or “It gave me a moral compass.” And those are interesting byproducts of what we were trying to do. Because I just described that whole thing, you know, Jim’s music, the sound, the package of what it was, and some jokes, and I wasn’t really concentrating on the moral compass or the message at all. I really wasn’t.
LANG I think it’s the greatest blessing you could ever ask for — to have somebody tell you that the music made an impression on them that’s lasted for 30 years, or that it was their introduction to jazz. I met a guy after our show in L.A. a couple of weeks ago, and he said, “I became a music teacher, and now I run the jazz program at this little school.” And it’s like, ‘OK …
BARTLETT It landed.
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