He was perpetually hunted by Gordy the janitor, a terrible cleaner but a friendly confidante for Ned and his friends. There was Coconut Head, the screamer with the awful haircut Claire Sawyer, future lawyer Vice Principal Crubbs, trapped by the fashions and attitudes of a certain 80s cop show and the weasel who ran loose in the school. While there was at least one vintage pocket protector nerd, Cookie’s cybernetics set him apart, and the school was populated by unique oddballs more than stereotypes. I don’t know of any other school show to make woodshop such a prominent elective, but it was the favorite class of Moze ( Lindsey Shaw). The second key detail of Ned’s was its quirks, those individual flourishes that weren’t an exaggeration or spoof on what came before. Still, when science teachers go around in lab coats, bullies get a ridiculous guitar sting, and cyber-nerd Cookie ( Daniel Curtis Lee) goes so far as to build printers into his pants and virtual displays into his glasses, it’s impossible to take the clichés seriously or be annoyed by them. Ned’s was never mean-spirited in making fun of well-worn genre conventions.
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And the cartoony nature of the series pushed the stereotypes it made use of into the realm of parody. Not once did it attempt a dramatic turn, whether for a brief moment or for a “very special episode ” it was always fun. Ned’s was consistently outlandish and light-hearted.
It was arguably more cartoony than the likes of As Told by Ginger and other cartoons on Nickelodeon at the time. Ned’s was live-action, but its creator Scott Fellows got his start as a writer in animation, and the writing and performances on Ned’s bore more resemblance to a cartoon than other school sitcoms. It's in the details that Ned’s stood out, with three key details making the most difference. But whenever I encountered something that led with school, whether it was a comedy or drama, it was always the same experience: I could only get so far in before getting annoyed by the clichés that popped up, again and again, clichés that bore so little resemblance to my own school experience that I wondered where the hell they came from more than I considered the plots. That word “primary” is a key distinction because there were shows I loved, like Kim Possible and Danny Phantom, that did have high school settings, but that was a secondary element to adventure and fantasy (and almost always my least favorite part of any given episode).
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The teenage years were when I first became consciously aware of this attitude, which reared its head whenever I watched a TV show set primarily around high school. For how divorced such people and places are from our world, I find it easier to relate to fantastic fiction than its realistic cousins.
Worlds loaded with magic, high technology, eldritch creatures, antiquated architecture, and incorporeal intelligent forces have always been more of a lure to me than contemporary settings, and such worlds lend themselves to populations of larger-than-life characters that we real-life mortals could never match, only aspire to be. RELATED: 9 Episodes of Nostalgic Nickelodeon Cartoons to Watch on a Snowy Day
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