Original ‘Hey Arnold!’ Artwork Destroyed in L.A. Fires
A massive, cherished, football-head-sized piece of cartoon history is now gone because of the Los Angeles wildfires.
The destructive blazes that broke out early last month didn’t just ravage the city that the entertainment industry calls home. The wildfires also destroyed so many vital pieces of memorabilia and production mementos that the creatives responsible for all our most culturally impactful media held dear. L.A.-based, Emmy-winning art director and animator Steve Lowtwait is among the thousands of artists who are currently reeling from the fires that claimed houses, businesses and property across Southern California, and the Golden Age Nickelodeon veteran recently revealed that the Eaton fire that destroyed part of his home also burned his life’s artwork, including his original sketches from the creation of Hey Arnold!.
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However, as Lowtwait revealed recently on Twitter, there is a small silver lining in that he saved photographic evidence of a few of these formative, culturally invaluable drawings:
Hey Arnold! was Lowtwait’s first gig in the animation business after graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design, as the artist joined the show as an intern when it first started production. Partway through Lowtwait’s internship, Nickelodeon brought him on full-time as a background designer, as featured in the above sketches, before Lowtwait moved up to become a storyboard artist. Lowtwait worked on 59 total episodes of the beloved Nickelodeon series about a bunch of city kids comically navigating urban life, including the first and most formative Hey Arnold! episodes in existence.
Sadly, Lowtwait and his family lost their entire garage in the fire, which contained the entirety Lowtwait’s artwork from his impressive animation career — Lowtwait also spent considerable time working as a layout artist and supervisor on Rugrats. Lowtwait, his wife Leslie and their 12-year-old son Brody are now staying at a hotel as the fire and smoke damage to their home rendered it uninhabitable, and their friends have set up a GoFundMe for the reconstruction on the Lowtwaits’ behalf.
