Trivia / As Told by Ginger

• Actor-Inspired Element: Miranda was originally conceived as a white girl, as seen in the unaired pilot "The Party". She was changed to black both to match her voice actress Cree Summer, and to add more diversity to the cast. The same happened to Darren.
• Actor-Shared Background: Lois is Jewish, like her voice actress Laraine Newman.
• Adored by the Network:
  • Although not aired regularly, Ginger does see some love on TeenNick programming block The Splat, which has praised the show as "revolutionary in its realism and storytelling. It deserves to be on The Splat." While the block primarily focuses on 90's Nickelodeon programming, Ginger was one of only two 2000's shows to have aired at the time of the block's launch (All Grown Up! was the other).
  • In March 2016, the first 12 episodes of the series were aired across three consecutive days.
  • The previous month, they also aired one episode as part of a "#UPickTheSplat" week where Twitter users would vote for what shows they wanted to see. The episode "Come Back Little Seal Girl" was also a contender as part of an online poll earlier in the week, but lost to the Hey Arnold! episode "What's Opera, Arnold?"
  • They also aired the pilot episode for the first time ever on TV in any country, something they did not do with any of the other unaired Nicktoon pilots known to exist. Previously, it was only available as a DVD bonus feature.
  • In October 2016, they aired the first four of the eight episodes of Season 3, then unaired in the US.
• The Character Died with Him: When actress Kathleen Freeman passed away, they killed off Mrs. Gordon. The episode, "No Hope for Courtney" is dedicated to her.
• Completely Different Title: Known as Ginger no Seishun Nikki (Ginger's Youth Diary) in Japan.
• Creator's Favorite: According to an interview with Jeannie Elias, Carl Foutley is her favorite role.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: "Hello Stranger" is Emily Kapnek's favorite episode. "And She Was Gone" is a close second.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • With Darren being one of the few exceptions, pretty much all the young male characters on the show were voiced by women—even the monotone Chet Zipper was voiced by a woman (Hope Levy, to be specific).
  • Mrs. Grimley from "Driven to Extremes" was by Billy West.
• Descended Creator: Emily Kapnek voices Noelle.
• Dueling Shows:
  • A Slice of Life show concerning a red-haired girl named after a spice being raised by a single mother and her melodramatic adventures at middle school with her two best friends as well as an eccentric younger sibling? There is some speculation that this show was Nickelodeon's attempt to compete with Pepper Ann (although said series ended its run at the time Ginger began its own). However, Pepper Ann was more focused on comedy, while Ginger was more serious.
  • In a way it dueled with All Grown Up! as well. Both are slice of life series with middle school protagonists, though AGU is also a Klasky-Csupo series. However, in an inverse to the example above, Ginger was almost ending production at the time All Grown Up premiered.
• Fake Nationality: Lois's voice actress Laraine Newman (American) also voices the French exchange student Jean-Pierre.
• God Never Said That: In the 2000s, there was a rumor that Emily Kapnek said the plan was for Courtney to be in love with Ginger until Executive Meddling put a stop to it. There's no record of her actually saying that, and she denied that was ever the plan.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: In "Piece of My Heart", the Patterson's doorbell sound is the familiar "buzzer" one of the Pickles' residence in Rugrats.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Only two DVD's were released. One contains the special "Far From Home", the unaired pilot episode "The Party", and the series premiere "Ginger the Juvey". The other contains the finale "The Wedding Frame" and the episodes "Stealing First" and "Dare I, Darren?".
  • In 2013, the entire series was released on iTunes, including the unaired "high school" episodes. The series was also released on Amazon Instant Video the following year. Unfortunately, the episodes were removed from both services in January 2015 for unknown reasons.
  • The show's increased popularity in the mid-to-late 2010's could be credited to the fact that most episodes were easily be found on YouTube at the time, albeit mostly in the form of low-quality, slightly-sped-up VHS recordings from Nickelodeon Australia. For some reason, Viacom didn't go after Ginger episodes as much as other Nicktoons until towards the end of the decade. Aspen Vincent, Dodie's voice actress, even stated that she re-watched the series on YouTube at the time.
  • Some bootleg sites have a set of high-quality TV recordings from Nicktoons Network (known simply as Nicktoons since 2009 and from 2002-05) and the short-lived UK channel Nicktoonsters.
  • There is another circulating set of episodes recorded off of Nickelodeon around 2006, except for the high school episodes, of course...
  • Torrents exist of the master-quality iTunes copies of the complete series. However, the episodes "Sibling Revile-ry" and "Detention" each contain a few seconds of blatant "glitching" in the image and audio due to what appears to be a transfer error that somehow slipped past Viacom. "Lunatic Lake" also has a loud audio blip when Lois bids goodbye to the others.
  • Averted as of 2021 thanks to Paramount+. The "glitching" was fixed in "Detention", but is still present in "Sibling Revile-ry" and "Lunatic Lake".
  • Also averted with the show getting a regular spot on the NickRewind lineup in February 2021. This marks the first time the show airs on the block with regularity, and the first time it aired on the block at all since a one-off airing of "April's Fools" on April 1, 2017. Additionally, the series has also started airing Fridays on Nickelodeon’s channel on the free Pluto TV service, who began carrying the show on April 30, 2021.
• Make-A-Wish Contribution: A girl named Leandra, who had a bone marrow illness and was a Make-A-Wish patient, was a fan of the show and watched it during her treatments. Her wish was to be a character on the show, so she appeared and voiced a character named after herself in a scene of the episode "Butterflies are Free", in which Ginger, Macie and Dodie greet her by name.
• Missing Episode:
  • The episode "Battle of the Bands" and the series finale movie "The Wedding Frame" did not air in the United States until the series was added to Paramount+ (then CBS All Access) in January 2021, finally averting the trope. In October 2016, the four episodes preceding the former ("Detention" through "Dodie's Big Break") premiered on The Splat, nearly ten years after the last "new" episode ("Stuff'll Kill Ya"). More detail on this below under Screwed by the Network.
  • The Thanksgiving episode "Ten Chairs" (also the last regular episode) was not available in the US between its sole airing on Nicktoons in 2004 and the series' launch on CBS All Access. In other countries, the episode was part of the normal rotation.
  • Likewise, several episodes which Nicktoons skipped over in their rerun rotation are now available on Paramount+ in the United States:
    • Nicktoons' rerun rotation did not include "Sleep On It" nor "Ginger's Solo". The former was also pulled from reruns from the regular Nickelodeon after a few years. It is unknown why they were pulled, although it may have been due to petty parental complaints (in the case of "Sleep On It", possibly over Hoodsey visibly wetting himself or the girls' comments on bedwetting being "disgusting"; in the case of "Ginger's Solo", possibly over Clover appearing very underdressed). "Sleep On It" aired for the first time in over a decade on The Splat in March 2016.
    • Nicktoons' regular rotation also did not include "Stealing First" nor "Piece of My Heart". The former was treated as a holiday episode and the latter was believed to have been treated as a Valentine's Day special, even though it didn't always air on that occasion.
    • For a brief period in early 2007, several episodes were also pulled from the rerun rotation (specifically, "Cry Wolf", "The Right Stuff", "Gym Class Confidential", "Fast Reputation", "Losing Nana Bishop" and "Next Question"). Unlike the two episodes mentioned above, these episodes returned a few months later.
  • A recording of "The Right Stuff" from Nick Australia, however, cuts out a girl saying "I see a strap that's waiting to be snapped" right before unhooking Courtney's bikini. It is unknown if this was a deliberate network edit or simply a problem with the video encode.
  • Subverted in Canada: From September 2014-February 2015, Nick Canada aired the show on weekdays, its rotation containing all episodes in chronological order (with the exception of "An Even Steven Holiday Special", "April's Fools", "The Easter Ham", and "Foutley's on Ice" AKA "Far From Home", which only aired on special occasions on or around holidays). Nickelodeon US and Nicktoons reran episodes in a random order and premiered many episodes Out of Order.
• The Other Marty: The original pilot had Tara Strong voicing Blake, and Bradley Pierce as Darren. The roles are filled by Kath Soucie and Kenny Blank in the main series.
• Playing Against Type:
  • The usually dull and slow speaking Ben Stein as fast-talking realtor Buddy Baker.
  • Cree Summer, usually as a heroic Sassy Black Woman or an excitable child, as a scheming Beta Bitch.
• Network to the Rescue: CBS All Access (which was in the process of becoming Paramount+) added Ginger to its service for streaming in January 2021, which meant that every episode of the series was now available (with "Battle of the Bands" premiering in the United States there).
• Screwed by the Network:
  • In June 2004, after constant scheduling changes, Nickelodeon stopped airing new episodes after "Fair to Cloudy" ("Heat Lightning" was the last new episode to air in terms of actual air dates, but it comes before "Fair to Cloudy" chronologically). The show remained on the network for a few more months before being removed in January 2005. Aside from a few sporadic or special airings, the show didn't even have a permanent timeslot for most of the calendar year. It finally returned in 2006, but it was almost entirely relegated to early-morning timeslots, and to add salt to the wound, Nick never aired the five remaining episodes (plus a three-part movie) despite Ginger remaining on the network until December 2008 (its final timeslot being Saturday mornings at 6:00 AM).
  • The series finale "The Wedding Frame" was released straight to DVD in late 2004, leaving all of the "high school" episodes unaired for over a decade and resulting in a huge continuity gap for fans who had never seen said episodes; the movie includes three new characters who were introduced during this gap (Orion, Simone, and Buddy Baker), plus Ginger and Darren had already broken up for reasons that can only be explained through the unaired episodes.
  • The show did not fare much better treatment on sister channel Nicktoons (known as Nicktoons Network from 2005-09). The network aired the then-unaired episode "Ten Chairs" once in November 2004 as part of a Thanksgiving marathon and finally aired the first high school episode "Stuff'll Kill Ya" (a Very Special Episode centered on caffeine addiction) at 7:30 AM in November 2006 with no fanfare. The rest of the episodes were initially lined up to air over the following days but were pulled at the last minute (Some sources claim that the last episodes aired through November 2009, but this is not true). Similarly to Nick, the show was relegated mostly to early-morning timeslots until its last airing on the network at 4:00 AM on January 3, 2009.
  • The series got what was perhaps its absolute worst treatment when Ginger aired Saturday mornings on CBS as part of the inaugural line-up of their Nickelodeon-themed block, beginning on September 14, 2002. Though it was promoted as consistently as the block’s other programs, it only lasted two months on CBS before its timeslot was taken over by coverage from NFL games on November 30 of the same year. When the Nick on CBS block gained back the 11 AM hour on February 1, 2003, Ginger‘s spot on the line-up was taken over by fellow Klasky-Csupo series Rugrats, which got severely mistreated itself by CBS.
  • Although Ginger does air occasionally on NickRewind, a programming block on TeenNick (which never aired the show likely because it premiered after 1999), it generally only airs every couple of months.
    • The show's 15th anniversary on October 25, 2015 was not acknowledged in any way on TV nor on social media, despite TeenNick airing a marathon of Rocket Power for its 15th anniversary the previous year. They made up for this by finally airing half of the unaired high school episodes in time for its 16th anniversary the following year.
    • Despite having a Thanksgiving episode, Ginger was the only Nicktoon with such an episode that was not included during the week of Thanksgiving 2015, which was dedicated to Nicktoons and their Thanksgiving specials.
• Title Sequence Replacement: After Macy Gray replaced Cree Summer as the singer of the theme song, Nickelodeon attached Gray's version of the song to reruns of early episodes.
• Tuckerization: Ms Zorski is named after Emily Kapnek's drama teacher.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The unaired pilot was quite different from the show we know of today. The main difference were the designs and art style. The hair styles were different, Miranda and Darren were both white, and the style was much more similar to the Rugrats (Deranged Animation and all). Perhaps the biggest difference is Courtney being more of a traditional Alpha Bitch and her brother, Blake, being an Annoying Younger Sibling and radically out of character compared to how he is in the show. (He crashed the party in his underpants!)
  • The Patterson family were originally white (and Darren had blue hair), with Will being younger (rather than older) than Darren; in the unaired pilot, he was only a year older than Courtney rather than a high schooler. Darren's headgear would also make annoying squeaks whenever he talked.
  • "A Lesson in Tightropes" had its ominous opening run even longer after Ginger walks by Simone in the hallway; she'd come across Dodie and Macie talking in the cafeteria and they'd stop as soon as they see her, confirming that Macie knows about Darren and Simone too.
  • Apparently, Nickelodeon had wanted "The Wedding Frame" to have a less conclusive ending just in the case the show's producers decided to reverse their decision to end it. The proposed "less conclusive" ending supposedly involved Lois discovering she's pregnant.
  • "No Hope for Courtney" was supposed to end with Mrs. Gordon coming out of retirement, but because her voice stress Kathleen Freeman passed away, they killed her off instead. The episode is dedicated to her.
• Word of Saint Paul: Melissa Disney was asked what Ginger would name her daughter in the Distant Finale. She responded Sophia, because it "sounds artistic."
• Write What You Know: Emily Kapnek based the Foutleys partly off her own family—where she was raised by a single mother in a lower income household surrounded by more affluent two-parent families. "And She Was Gone" was directly based off an experience in school, where she'd written a story about a girl who killed herself, and had the school psychiatrist concerned about her.