"The Fairly OddParents" (weeknights at 8) follows the adventures of 10-year-old Timmy Turner and his wacky fairy godparents, Cosmo and Wanda. They grant Timmy's wishes but don't always get them exactly right.
With a premise like that, it's no wonder kids have taken to the show. But the verbal give-and-take and sharp storylines are what keep the parents tuning in.
Take the episode in which Timmy wishes he could be older. Wanda and Cosmo transform him into an adult -- but he's bald, his back hurts, and he has no job.
"Captain Kangaroo and Fred Rogers completely appealed to the kids themselves," said Robert Thompson, head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "The Nickelodeon approach -- which is a smart one -- is to not only appeal to the kids, but to the whiny, smart-aleck adolescents those kids will become, as well as the parents."The show, which trails only "SpongeBob" among all broadcast and cable children's programs, is Hartman's brainchild. The Michigan native, who long dreamed of cartooning for a living, first received acclaim for his artwork as a kindergarten student. "The teacher had us draw a picture of her. She raved about [his] for like a week," Hartman, 39, recalled during a recent telephone interview. "She hung it up on the wall. All the other kids felt a great sense of humiliation."
By the time he reached high school, Hartman wanted to enter into animation full time and eventually attended the California Institute for the Arts.
He joined Hanna-Barbera in the 1990s. There he wrote and directed episodes of the Cartoon Network series "Dexter's Laboratory," "Cow & Chicken," and "Johnny Bravo."
It was as his tenure was ending at Hanna-Barbera that he came up with "The Fairly OddParents."
