Tear Jerker / The Pop Arena

• Nick Knacks Episode #020, Vegetable Soup, praises the timeless anti-racist morals, but laments that most viewers only seem to remember how creepy the puppets looked. The ending abandons the usual formula of doo-wop music and plugs, to juxtapose a Japanese man's recollection of internment camps, with a 2018 news report of young Mexican immigrants being locked in cages.
• Nick Knacks episode #45: Dennis the Menace:
  • Actor Jay North was abused physically and verbally by his aunt and uncle when he made mistakes or didn't perform up to their standards, and did not tell anyone, even his mother, about the abuse for fear of retaliation from said aunt and uncle. North started to draw dark drawings on the backsides of scripts or pretending he was one of the children from Village of the Damned to cope. There's even a clip from a comedy sketch done on Not Necessarily the News that features an adult North as rage-filled and Ax-Crazy. In light of what Greg discusses during the episode, it's a big time Harsher in Hindsight moment.
  • The end of the episode has Greg state that the abuse of child actors is still very common, and concluding that Nickelodeon has not always succeeded with the prevention of the abuse of child actors. To drive the point home, footage of Amanda Bynes on The Amanda Show plays over Greg's speech. Like the Vegetable Soup episode, it forgoes the usual doo-wop music at the end.
• Nick Knacks episode #79: Make the Grade episode highlights a season three episode featuring a girl named Megan, a child prodigy who aces every question she selects. Greg points out that her breezing through questions seems to uncharacteristically strike a nerve with host Robb Edward Morris, almost as if she's too good at the game. One commercial break later, she's only one question away from making it to the Honor's Round. When she picks her final category...she gets a Fire Drill and ultimately loses to Frank, a kid who only buzzed in a total of once and got it wrong. With all of Megan's points now his, he manages to get the final question right and win the game. Greg rightfully points out that Megan is quite visibly pissed when she loses the Fire Drill; storming off to Frank's seat without a word to Robb. Because of how broken Fire Drills typically are, Greg makes the assumption that production wanted to break Megan's streak in-between the commercial break due to her speeding through the game.
• Similarly to Dennis the Menace, Nick Knacks episode #80: The Patty Duke Show talks about how Patty Duke was basically overworked and exploited by her managers-cum-guardians, John and Ethel Ross. They went as far as to make the show in New York to get around California's much stricter child actor laws, so there were basically no restrictions on how long Patty had to work. She would often end up working twelve-hour days on the show so she could film her two parts as Patty and Cathy, and this was often in addition to the parade of interviews, commercials, and singing in an attempt to make her a teen idol. And then they would have her go home and do chores to keep her from getting too full of herself. To top all of this off, she was suffering from bipolar disorder, which did not get diagnosed until she was an adult, as well as drug abuse. The only way she managed to escape was to marry one of the show's directors, who was thirteen years her senior, which finally helped her to get her ex-managers fired and allow her have some control over her life. Even then, it still took her some time get her life back in order, especially after said marriage failed after only two years.
• One moment from Nick Knacks episode #82: Eureeka's Castle tells the story of a little girl who got to see the taping of an episode of the show, only to be absolutely crushed finding out that the characters she loved so much were only puppets. A Hard Truth Aesop about how regardless of how real and relatable some characters or shows on tv may seem? At the end of the day they are all just fictional and you have to accept it eventually. R. L. Stine himself recounted the event:
  Well, Here's a horrible story: We got a letter from this mother who's family was going to visit New York and their 9-year old daughter was this HUGE Eureeka's Castle fan. She asked if they could come to the studio and watch us tape a show. And the producer was like "yes you can." So the family comes to New York with the 9-year old daughter, they walk into the studio… the puppets are all rehearsing and the puppeteers are all walking around and the 9-year old daughter bursts into hysterical tears. They couldn't get her to stop for 10 minutes. She was crying her eyes out… because she thought they were real. She didn't know they were puppets. Can you imagine? And they couldn't get her to stop crying. Horrible, just horrible.
  — R. L. Stine, "Eureeka's Castle Co-Creator R. L. Stine on the show's inception, success and ultimate demise" AV Club, November 8, 2013
• Nick Knacks Episode #088, Flipper delves into the complexed and oftentimes tragic nature of training marine animals for entertainment and the practice of attempting to reintegrate them into nature. The show itself often had Flipper moved on the ocean (with the first episode even dropping one of the live dolphins into the sea via helicopter) or beached in ways that DEFINITELY couldn't have been pleasant for the dolphins. A clear case of Values Dissonance for the time of people using training methods barely 2 decades old and failing to understand how these animals work.
  • Going further we learn how Ric O'Barry, animal rights activist and the dolphin trainer on the show was called in to check on Cathy, one of the original Flippers. She died in his care after years of being forced up to the surface where sunburns and gravity destroyed her body. Cathy committed suicide by drowning herself in her aquarium because she couldn't take the pain anymore. Not to mention O'Barry's rather controversial and oftentimes futile animal activism of releasing captive sea life back into the wild.
  • As an example given of the often fatal attempts to reintegrate animals, Greg talks about how Keiko, the original Free Willy whale died after only a couple years of being released in Iceland. There‘s also how in 1996, O'Barry and his team released two dolphins (formerly in a training program for the Navy) which ended up maimed and starved; needing to be recaptured to be saved.
• The Sample Platter episode for Power Rangers Super Megaforce's "The Legendary Battle", which Greg started writing on November 18, 2022, ended up taking a turn after Jason David Frank's untimely death the next day. While Greg still ends up criticizing the episode for not living up to its potential, he ends the episode by memorializing Frank, praising the dedication he had to Power Rangers and martial arts, and the huge influence he had on the lives of fans.
• Overall, his history of Nickelodeon Studios in Nick Knacks episode #094 is one long tragedy. One could say that the concept of a functional filming studio/theme park attraction was nowhere close to feasible, and it barely took 3 years into its 15-year life cycle for the cracks in the plan (filming every single day, even when the focus of the network changed and there wasn't really a show to be had) to be revealed. Overtime the crew shrank from 450 on a good day to a skeleton crew of under 100 people before it ultimately shut down in 2005.
• Nick Knacks episode #98, The Adventures of Superman goes into the downward spiral of George Reeves and everything he went through in his failure to escape the focus of being Superman. From being hurt by children who wanted to test Superman’s invulnerability, up to almost being shot, to his struggles of even finding work outside the show. And of course, Reeves' death in 1959 via gunshot to the head, and how the mystery of his demise has actually eclipsed his life.