
Nickelodeon Animation just got rolled into CBS Studios -- Paramount's post-Skydance housecleaning turned the once-independent animation powerhouse behind SpongeBob, Avatar, and Rugrats into nothing more than a branded label under CBS, with longtime CBS exec Alec Botnick now running the whole show while the old guard gets shuffled off to consulting gigs. Yeah after years of pretending Nick was still the wild creative playground for kids' TV, the corporate suits decided "scale and synergy" beats letting animators actually cook -- so now every new episode of your childhood nostalgia machine routes straight through the CBS machine while the era of standalone Nick originals quietly dies in a boardroom memo.