🚨 | Taylor Swift is nominated in 3 categories at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards Mexico! 🇲🇽
Favorite Global Artist - Taylor Swift
Global Hit of the Year - Lavender Haze
Master Fandom - Swifties
You can vote via Instagram using #KCAMexico #TaylorSwift #LavenderHaze #Swifites or via web
source
7 notes
·
View notes
Chauncey Street creates the
Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards
The blood was quickly draining from the faces of Gerry Laybourne and Debby Beece.
Chauncey Street Productions –Albie Hecht, Alan, Fred– was describing a scene of hopeful optimism of an annual kids' award show Nickelodeon should produce.
"There'll be the biggest movie stars in the world while 10,000 kids will be screaming at the top of their lungs!"
"But why will any stars come to a Nickelodeon kids' awards show?"
In 1988, Nickelodeon was only three years into its Fred/Alan revival. Even with the network at #1 in the ratings, Nick management was, smartly, still working like the channel was an underdog. It allowed the staff to keep their creative and business edges, striving to be the best.
As much as Nick had grown, the general perception was that The Disney Channel was bigger. It wasn't true, not by a long shot, but Disney clearly had a bigger brand name in the public's –and the media business's– imagination. So the underdog needed to keep up the pressure.
We thought an annual Kids' Choice Awards, executed well, could be Nickelodeon's nail in The Disney Channel coffin. After all, Nick was the most popular kids channel on television, by far. This show would be the proof, like ESPNs ESPYS and MTVs Video Music Awards had done for their channels.
Gerry and Debby became convinced, as did the MTV Networks higher ups, that with cable in 50 million American homes in the late 1980s, and Nick at #1 in the ratings (not to mention the dominance of Nick-at-Nite), in addition to kids, parents –and please, movie stars were parents too!– were more excited about Nickelodeon than anyone realized. And the chance to be in the presence of a live Nick show would draw out the crowds.
Alan: A nice detail is what Gerry told me years and years later. “When you guys told me the idea I thought I was going to throw up. I was so worried celebrities wouldn’t come because we were still new. But I also knew you were right and we had to do it.”
It was still an uphill battle to mount the show. Budget would be an issue for several years, convincing Universal's Hollywood theme park to give us one of their pavilions for free was, to say the least, a triumph of negotiation (we promised that we’d feature the tour in the show!). And those movie star guests? That took a while.
From the very beginning, we were thinking about what the actual physical award would be. Albie was drawn to the blimp version of Nick’s logo that Corey & Co. had designed for Fred/Alan. It was his brainstorm that insisted the dirigible would double as a kaleidoscope.
Dan Schneider, Debbie Gibson, Brian Robbins frightened by King Kong on the Universal Studios Hollywood tour KCA 1988
The first show host was Tony Danza, then flying high on "Who's the Boss," Nickelodeon network ID singers, Eugene Pitt & the Jive Five and pop sensation Debbie Gibson. And maybe most prophetic of all, guest presenters included stars of the sitcom "Head of the Class" Dan Schneider and Brian Robbins. "Prophetic" because Dan went on to create Nick's iconic live action comedies like "Drake & Josh," "iCarly" and "Zoey 101." And Brian? Well, after several years of being a hit television producer with partner Michael Tollin ("Smallville," "All That," "One Tree Hill"), in 2018 Brian became the president of Nickelodeon.
Alan: Other details: We couldn’t get Eddie Murphy that first year. We couldn’t even get Judge Reinhold to accept on his behalf. Thank goodness John Ashton did the appearance. (He was the cop sidekick.)
Also if I’m not mistaken Alf won best actor for TV. Hey, they were kids.
Brian Robbins & Dan Schneider KCA 1988
Albie went on to become the Nickelodeon's president of production where he produced all the Kids' Choice shows until he becamse Spike TV's founding CEO in 2003. Not for nothing, after a steady build, the 1998 10th Annual Kids' Choice Awards was held at UCLA's Pauley Pavilion. The sold out capacity? 10,000 screaming kids.
1 note
·
View note