Trivia / Big Nate

• Adored by the Network: Despite being intended for streaming, Nickelodeon loves to constantly air and promote this show. Nate even hosts their afternoon cartoon block AfterToons!
• Colbert Bump: The comic was relatively unknown before it got an island based on it in Poptropica (along with Poptropica creator and Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney recommending it), sparking interest in the strip for many kids who regularly visited the site.
• Content Leak: Nickelodeon themselves released a clip of the animated series, which was in limbo regarding a release date in 2021. On Sept 18, 2021, the network's game show Tooned In showed a clip of the short "Theater Antics". The short wouldn't be released until January 18, 2022.
• Creator Backlash: Lincoln Peirce did a lot of comics in his teens and early twenties that he isn't so proud of. He specifically mentioned once that he "drew comics savaging the teachers [he] didn't care for." He also did a comic in college called Third Floor that he called "a Doonesbury rip-off".
• Denial of Digital Distribution: Season 2 fell into this territory following the show's March 2024 removal from Paramount+, as only Season 1 is available for digital sale.
• Descended Creator: Developer and executive producer Mitch Watson voices Spitsy.
• Disabled Character, Disabled Actor: Amy uses a wheelchair like her voice actress, Ali Stroker.
• He Also Did: For the animated series:
  • Composer Frederik Wiedmann also worked on The Dragon Prince, Beware the Batman, Doom: Annihilation, and many of the DC Animated Movie Universe films.
• Inspiration for the Work: For the animated series, supervising producer Jim Mortensen cited that the stop motion look and animation of Rankin/Bass Productions directly inspired the show's look.
• The Other Darrin: Mick Wingert replaces Jack Black as the voice actor of Brad Gunter in "The April Fool".
• Saved from Development Hell: In 1991, the first year the Big Nate comic was published, Lee Mendelson (the executive producer of the Peanuts cartoons and Garfield and Friends) purchased the option from Lincoln Peirce to make a 2D-animated Big Nate series for Saturday mornings at NBC, and Peirce created a series bible. However, the day after the deal was finalized, NBC canceled all of their Saturday morning cartoons to capitalize on the success of Saved by the Bell (by way of creating the T-NBC block and filling it with tons of similar shows from the same producer and Saturday Today), sending the series into Development Hell. An animated Big Nate series was ultimately announced by Nickelodeon on February 19, 2020.
• Technology Marches On: Nate stated in a strip published in the early 2000s that "Nintendo is so nineties." After the releases of the wildly popular Wii and Nintendo DS, that isn't so true anymore.
• What Could Have Been: Nate was originally two characters: two brothers called Marty and Nate. Marty looked like the final character of Nate, and Nate had blond spiky hair, with a red shirt. The publisher of the strip, United Media, worried that Nate looked too much like Calvin, so the final character combined Nate's name and Marty's looks and personality. Marty's name was recycled into Nate's dad's name.
• Working Title: The strip was originally called Neighborhood Comix.

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