Nicktoons

Nicktoons is the brand name given to the television cartoon shows that are produced and aired by Nickelodeon.

The first three "Nicktoons" (Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show) began production in 1989 before premiering as part of a 90-minute block on Sunday, August 11, 1991. This format was repeated every Sunday, eventually leading to the production of more Nicktoons at Nickelodeon Animation Studio's first facility in California.

1999 marked the premiere of SpongeBob SquarePants, which would later become the longest-running Nicktoon. During the same year, Nickelodeon opened a second animation facility in New York City. A spin-off channel named after Nicktoons was established on May 1, 2002.

In the 2010s, Nickelodeon Animation Studio began to produce Nicktoons based on pre-existing franchises that had been purchased by Viacom: Winx Club (in 2011), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (in 2012), Garfield (in 2019) Star Trek, Big Nate (in 2020), Monster High and Transformers (in 2022). Each shows had unprecedentedly high budgets for Nicktoons, and a large team of Nickelodeon veterans grouped to work on Winx Club.

The Nicktoons brand also extends to other media, such as crossover games featuring the Nicktoon characters (including Nicktoons Unite! and the Nickelodeon Super Brawl series). Since 2001, the official slogan for the brand has been "[They're] Not just cartoons, they're Nicktoons".

History
Pinwheel, the first Nickelodeon series which began in 1977, was formatted as an hour-long program with two forms of segments: original content with its cast of puppet and human characters, and showcases of foreign-made short films. Many of these films were animated cartoons dating back to the 1950s. These were the first form of animated content on what would become Nickelodeon.

For its first years, Nickelodeon continued to play foreign-made cartoons in a similar fashion as part of two anthology series called First Row Features and Special Delivery. In 1980, the channel aired its first original series that was not live-action: Video Comic Book. It could best be described as a "motion comic" that consisted of illustrated scenes with animated elements, like speech bubbles and moving backgrounds.

Nickelodeon's first attempt at a fully-animated show occurred later in 1980, when Geraldine Laybourne produced test pilots for Video Dream Theatre. It holds the title of Nickelodeon's first true cartoon. However, it was left unaired when test audiences did not give the reactions Laybourne wanted.

Throughout the 1980s, the amount of acquired animated shows on Nickelodeon increased, with reruns of cartoons and anime such as Bananaman, Danger Mouse, The Little Prince, and The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Blocks dedicated to animated programming such as Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon ran from the mid-1980s well into the late 1990s. When Nick Jr. premiered on Nickelodeon as a block in January 1988, much of its shows were imported cartoons.

Profits from Nickelodeon's expanding audience at the time helped it fund its own original cartoons: the first three "Nicktoons", Doug, Rugrats and The Ren & Stimpy Show. Nickelodeon executive Vanessa Coffey discovered all three of these programs after traveling to Los Angeles in 1988. Her goal was to find "three projects that looked completely different" in order to counter the homogeneous, toy-centric cartoons of the 1980s.

Nickelodeon's animation production studio was originally known as Games Animation, located in Studio City, California. In 1993, Nickelodeon approached Joe Murray to create its first fully original in-house series: Rocko's Modern Life. In March 1998, the then-new Nickelodeon Animation Studio was opened in Burbank, California. In September 1999, Nickelodeon opened a digital animation studio in Manhattan, which took over animation of Nick Jr. series such as Blue's Clues.

Throughout the 1990s, Nickelodeon continued with its "experimental" approach to animation. Hey Arnold! creator Craig Bartlett explained that the network gradually shifted away from creator-driven content during the later years of Herb Scannell's tenure as Nick president. In his opinion, the animation department "grew more and more corporate, and less like you had a personal touch".

In May 2002, Nicktoons TV, a sister channel named after Nicktoons, was created.

In 2016, Nickelodeon moved its animation facilities to a different building in Burbank that houses both animated and live-action properties.

Animation showcases
The following three shows are sometimes excluded from Nickelodeon's lists of Nicktoons. Some shows that were spawned from these showcases were picked up by other networks, such as the KaBlam! segment Angela Anaconda (greenlit by Teletoon and Fox Kids) and the Random! Cartoons pilot "Adventure Time" (greenlit by Cartoon Network).

DreamWorks co-productions
The following shows were spun off from DreamWorks Animation's film franchises. While they were co-produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio and Viacom owns half of each show's copyright, Nickelodeon has excluded them from their Nicktoon compilations since 2016, when DreamWorks was purchased by NBCUniversal and stopped licensing their characters to Nick.

Miniseries
The following miniseries were produced by Nick Animation, but they were never green-lit for full seasons.

Acquired shows
Please see Non-original shows broadcast by Nickelodeon for a list of cartoons that have aired on a Nick channel but were not produced by Nickelodeon.

Trivia

 * Since 2004, new Nicktoons have often been moved from the main Nick channel to a sister network after getting cancelled. 2017 holds the record for the most shows being moved to the Nicktoons channel, with four: The Fairly OddParents, Harvey Beaks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Bunsen is a Beast.
 * Not including preschool shows, Winx Club is the only Viacom-copyrighted show to move to the Nick Jr. Channel instead of NickToons.
 * Many episodes of the fifth season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were burned off on NickToons in mid-2017, but the show returned to Nick to premiere its three-part finale on November 12, 2017.
 * SpongeBob SquarePants holds the record for longest-running Nicktoon, both in number of episodes and years running.
 * The Rugrats Pre-School Daze miniseries holds the record for shortest-lived Nicktoon (18 days in the U.S. and just 5 in the United Kingdom).
 * The Fairly OddParents was the first Nicktoon to reach ten seasons, even before SpongeBob SquarePants.
 * Doug, Rugrats, Winx Club, and Harvey Beaks aired on all four networks.
 * The ninth season of SpongeBob SquarePants took almost five years to air all 26 episodes, lasting from July 21, 2012 to February 20, 2017. This is the longest time a single Nicktoon season has lasted on the main Nickelodeon channel.
 * Several Nicktoons have never finished airing on the main Nickelodeon network. As an example, two episodes of As Told by Ginger remain unaired in the United States as of 2019.
 * In North America, almost all Nicktoons are distributed on home video by Paramount, which has been a subsidiary of Nickelodeon's parent company Viacom since 1994.
 * From August 1993 to October 1996, all Nicktoon videotapes (and all Nickelodeon videotapes in general) were distributed by Sony Wonder.
 * Shout! Factory has held the home video distribution rights to Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, The Angry Beavers, CatDog, The Wild Thornberrys and Danny Phantom since May 2011. Shout! also had the video rights for Hey Arnold! and Rocko's Modern Life from then until 2018, at which point their rights reverted to Paramount. They also hold the video rights to The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius since June 2021.
 * After DreamWorks Animation ended all partnerships with Viacom, distribution rights for their three Nicktoon co-productions (The Penguins of Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, and Monsters vs. Aliens) transferred to 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, who released all of the Legends of Awesomeness and Monsters vs. Aliens DVDs.
 * Most Nicktoons are majority-produced in the United States with their final animation processes outsourced to service companies in South Korea. Exceptions include:
 * The Nickelodeon episodes of Doug, co-produced with the French studio Ellipse Programmé (or Ellipsanime).
 * The Nickelodeon episodes of Winx Club, co-produced by Nickelodeon Animation Studio and their Italian sister company (through Viacom), Rainbow Group. Nick Animation handled script writing, voice recording, animation approval, and some of the music production while coordinating with the Italian team.
 * As it is technically a live-action show, Mr. Meaty has not been recognized as an official Nicktoon. It is still a ViacomCBS-owned production.
 * When Nickelodeon repackaged the Action League Now! shorts into a half-hour block, the "new" show was occasionally advertised among the full-fledged Nicktoons. The package show is otherwise excluded from all of Nick's Nicktoon lists, and it was not produced by Nick Animation.
 * To date, Rugrats is the only Nicktoon (and the only Nickelodeon franchise in general, for that matter) to receive a star on the.