I came of age in the late '80s and early '90s, and in retrospect, I'm not sure there was a single more powerful influence on those formative years than Nickelodeon. _Pinwheel_ and _Danger Mouse_ colored my earliest memories, _Double Dare_ and _Mr. Wizard_ arrived a bit later, _Salute Your Shorts_ and _Ren & Stimpy_ spoke to me as a pre-teen... it seemed that as I grew and matured, so did the network, catering its programming to meet what I wanted or needed at that specific point in my life.

Looking back at it here, through a wide-angled lens, I was startled by how much of this material has lingered in my long-term memory banks and still, subtly, feeds my personality today. That's where _The Orange Years_ makes its hay: coasting through a laundry list of beloved short-run TV shows and catchy pre-commercial bumpers, refreshing fond recollections in its audience while serving a dash of backstage skinny to better humanize the men and women behind this little network that could. And that's really what it was, at least in the early days: a boutique cable channel, catering to a very specific market, in an era before that was a proven formula.

The peeks behind the curtain are wonderful and inspiring - happy conversations with stars, creators and executives who are still jazzed about the product, twenty years after moving on - but the greater urge to service nearly every original property with some degree of inspection grows tiresome after nearly two hours. Should've been twenty minutes shorter.