The Brief

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For many millennials, '90s Nickelodeon shows such as Hey Arnold!, Doug, and Rocko’s Modern Life represent a golden age of animation, with theme songs and music scores often just as weird and offbeat as the characters and storylines.

Take the theme song of Hey Arnold! — an earworm that introduced a generation of young TV viewers to acid jazz, funk, hip-hop and more, even if they didn’t realize it at the time.

Hey Arnold! composer Jim Lang is taking the show's music on tour, with a few stops in SoCal.

LAist’s Robert Garrova caught up with Lang to talk about the show’s endearing music legacy.

On whether he and the other musicians on the show set out to introduce young people to new musical genres

Lang:  I wish I could take credit for being that intentional about it. But we weren't really hoping to introduce anybody to jazz. That was just a wonderful kinda side benefit of the way the show played out.

Was the music too good for a kids' show? Take for instance the theme music for the fan-favorite Pigeon Man episode

Lang:  I don't think there's any such thing as music that's too good for a kids' show. I think children have the hugest imagination for absorbing things that they've never seen before, for being delighted by the unusual.

Those things [music scores] all work because the writers and the animators and the background artists and everybody did such an incredible job before it ever showed up at my studio. That's it. You just kind of shut up and get out of the way and let the image kind of play through you in a way.

On what it felt like being at Nickelodeon in the '90s when the bosses were saying, 'Hey, yeah, let's do some acid jazz on a kids show'

Lang: Well, the women that started Nickelodeon and that ran that company in that era were a really unusual breed, and they were super adventurous. They didn't discourage, you know, people doing crazy stuff.

On what fans' reactions are at the live shows

Lang: Oh, it's just such a love fest. It is nostalgic. The music is meaningful to them because the show, after five seasons, there was a sound to it, and people found it relatable. So getting to hear a band actually play that stuff live, it sounds familiar to the audience in a way that I think people were just thrilled by.

Before the 1980s, tribal leaders of the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation were struggling to care for their people. That’s when, like many tribes, they decided to open a bingo hall on their reservation in San Bernardino County.

The enterprise eventually became the powerhouse Yaamava’ Resort & Casino, a place famous across the Southland for its snappy “you in?” slogan and roster of concert billboards, featuring the likes of Pitbull, Stevie Nicks and the Jonas Brothers.

The tribe is celebrating 40 years of gaming. But in between the high-limit gaming rooms, intimate performances and the  biggest gaming floor in the West — with over 7,500 slot machines — you’ll find a story of self-determination in the face of California bureaucracy.

A brief history

The Yuhaaviatam’s homeland is the San Bernardino mountains, valleys and high deserts. They were previously known as the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, but recently reclaimed their ancestral name, Yuhaaviatam (yu-HAH-vee-ah-tahm), which means “people of the pines.” According to the tribe, the community was forced to leave after decades of violence, colonization and displacement.

One big change came in the mid 1800s when a San Bernardino militia killed Native people. The Yuhaaviatam’s leader at the time, Paakuma, who was known outside the tribe by his Spanish name of Santos Manuel, led the couple dozen remaining members out of the mountains.

The tribe moved around the region, but the federal government eventually placed them on the San Manuel Reservation in 1891. Johnny Hernandez Jr., the Yuhaaviatam’s vice chairman, told LAist it was a time of hardship.

“ We were put up against the hillside there with non-fertile land and really in an area where people probably didn’t think that we were going to survive,” he said.

The Yuhaaviatam had to rebuild largely on their own. The tribe got by financially with apricot orchards and other small ventures. When members needed money, they’d sell some of their livestock or hold bake sales. Hernandez said it wasn’t enough to fund what people needed.

The bingo hall origin

The entrance of San Manuel Bingo.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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By the ‘80s, other tribes across the United States were in a similar predicament. Looking for ways to generate other forms of revenue, some turned to bingo halls, often outside the jurisdiction of states’ gambling regulations, as their economic springboard.

Under the leadership of tribal chairman Henry Duro, the Yuhaaviatam proposed opening a high-stakes bingo hall. According to newspaper reports, they faced immediate opposition.

Local officials feared the operation would disrupt nearby neighborhoods and foster illicit activity. One critic was San Bernardino City Councilmember Steve Marks, who reportedly instructed city officials to find “every legal way possible to stop the project.”

“ I think from the community, there was a lot of concern about having gaming in their backyard,” Hernandez said, who’s Duro’s nephew. “Everybody understands that gaming can lead to issues with not only the person, but the families …  so we really take that responsibility seriously.”

City leaders tried to push the bingo hall off the reservation and even tried to delay construction in court. The Yuhaaviatam had talks with San Bernardino to find a solution, but according to reports in October 1985, that effort broke down.

San Manuel Bingo could hold 2,500 players at a time.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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A view of San Manuel Bingo in its heyday.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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Ultimately, the Yuhaaviatam moved forward with building San Manuel Indian Bingo on the reservation, which opened on July 24, 1986. It was a hit. They had sold out nights.  People even climbed over the back walls to play.

“A funny story that my chairwoman Lynn always tells is that those ones that really were against [the bingo hall] and had the biggest concerns were the first ones in line to go into the bingo and to game,” Hernandez said.

He grew up next door to the bingo hall and would sit outside to watch the stream of people go in and out. He said the building looked like a box compared to the casino they have now. But inside, hundreds of hopeful bingo winners packed rows upon rows of tables.

“ They would have costume contests and everything, and it was real lively,” Hernandez said. “I remember a lot of people were excited to be there.”

When the bingo hall opened in 1986, it soon became popular.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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Employees at the bingo hall.

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Courtesy the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation

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As controversial as the bingo hall was to some, it was also a source of employment for San Bernardino. Kenneth Shoji, the tribe’s spokesperson, told LAist how when the hall opened, much of the area around was in an economic downtown.

“ The air base had closed. Kaiser Steel was closing. Santa Fe [Depot] had down-scaled significantly,” Shoji said. “Many people who came to work here were coming from those industries.  In fact, many tribal elders … also came from those businesses.”

The rise of tribal gaming

San Manuel Indian Bingo opened the door to financial stability, but tribal gaming enterprises still faced trouble in California. State and local leaders wanted to shut them down.

One fight ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Two Native reservations, Cabazon and Morongo, ran bingo and card games in Riverside County, which began a few years before the Yuhaaviatam’s enterprise. Officials argued the state had the right to ban tribal gaming to discourage gambling.

The Supreme Court ended up siding with the tribes in part because California already permitted multiple forms of gaming, like horse racing, card games and a state-sponsored lottery.

The ruling led to the creation of the  Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a landmark piece of legislation that Congress signed into law in 1988. It paved the way for tribal nations to run more profitable forms of gaming, like craps and slot machines.

Casino games at Yaamava’ Resort & Casino.

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Cato Hernández

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LAist

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The act established regulations that split gaming into three classes and created a system where tribes would have to make agreements with states before offering the highest level.

Randall Akee, a professor of economic development in Indigenous communities at Harvard University, told LAist it took awhile for California to get on board.

“Tribal gaming really as an industry, larger scale in California, took off in the post-2000 era,” he said.

That came with the passage of Prop. 1A and Prop. 5, which permitted compacts for Class III gaming on tribal lands in California. The deals have been moneymakers. According to the National Indian Gaming Commission, California and northern Nevada (which are calculated together) lead the nation in gross gaming revenue, bringing in $12.6 billion in fiscal year 2025.

Akee said the Yuhaaviatam people have created a large gaming footprint in California despite their small population and geographical size. Overall, the tribe is one of San Bernardino County’s top employers with nearly 8,000 employees, according to Shoji.

A miniaturized version of Yaamava's tower.

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Cato Hernández

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LAist

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A display celebrating 40 years of the Yuhaaviatam's gaming enterprise.

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Cato Hernández

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LAist

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They’ve also expanded their gaming enterprise into new, larger buildings. When San Manuel Casino (as the bingo hall was later named) opened in 2021, it was rebranded to Yaamava’ Resort & Casino. The $760 million expansion, with a 17-story hotel tower and 432 rooms and suites, brought their footprint to over 700,000 square feet. A parking structure now stands in place of the former bingo hall.

Hernandez said tribal gaming has helped his community thrive. They use the revenue to pay for critical resources, like supplying medical care to elders, hiring teachers for schools and buying generators to curb power outages. The tribe has also donated over $450 million to local communities.

“  I think the thing that people always forget or don’t understand is that every time we buy a piece of land, we’re just going to throw a casino there,” Hernandez said. “First and foremost, we’re a tribe. We have the needs for our people, and [want to] protect our cultural resources.”

The Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation is a financial supporter of LAist. Like other funders, the tribe has no influence on our coverage.

Lineage Logistics has removed all food waste inside the Boyle Heights cold storage that burned down in June, the company and air quality officials said this afternoon.

Now, Lineage has seven days to remove debris, power wash and disinfect certain areas.

The fire started on June 17 and burned for about a week, displacing many Boyle Heights residents and causing widespread air quality issues across the region.

Then putrid odor from an estimated 88 million pounds of food rotting inside the facility began to blanket Boyle Heights and surrounding communities.

Lineage said total cleanup cost is expected to run more than $100 million.

"The City gave Lineage 45 days to remove the biohazard food waste; today is day 60 on the City’s timeline," said L.A. City Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes Boyle Heights, in a statement today.

The food waste removal, Jurado added, "does not erase two months of odors, pests, and disruption."

South Coast AQMD said it has received more than 4,900 odor complaints from surrounding communities since July 12 and has issued 38 notices of public health and safety code violations.

Last week, a L.A. City Council committee voted to withhold permits to rebuild the warehouse, pending a full investigation by the fire department. That motion heads to the full City Council for consideration.

In a last-minute move, state legislators added language to a bill on Friday evening that street safety advocates say would threaten a long-planned project to slow speeding cars on Forest Lawn Drive near Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

The proposal, which would amend a larger bill if approved, targets projects that would reduce lanes on roads that provide access to “two or more adjacent cemeteries” in cities with populations over 2 million. Los Angeles is the only city in California large enough to meet that requirement.

Since 2022, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and the city council office of Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, have studied and planned to reduce the number of lanes along a one-mile stretch of Forest Lawn Drive. The proposal would cut the number of lanes to three — two through-lanes and one center turn lane.

The stretch of road is the point of entry for Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills location and Mount Sinai Memorial Park. The cemeteries are home to the graves of famous actors such as Debbie Reynolds and Brittany Murphy, at Forest Lawn, and comedians Don Rickles and Bob Saget at Mount Sinai.

Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks and Mortuaries, which operates a chain of cemeteries including the Hollywood Hills location, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying against the project at the state and local levels, according to an LAist review of lobbying activity. Mount Sinai has also advocated against the project.

“After years of work to finally make this street safer, Sacramento is threatening that progress because powerful interests objected,” Michael Schneider, CEO of Streets for All, said in a post on the street advocacy group’s website condemning the bill’s language. 

The project

According to the L.A. Department of Transportation, Forest Lawn Drive has seen more than 95 collisions, resulting in four deaths, since 2013. Earlier this month, a driver died on the road after their "vehicle collided into a tree and became engulfed in flames,” according to the LAPD.

In response to concerns about speed and safety, the Department of Transportation proposed reducing the number of lanes. The project would also install plastic posts to separate vehicular traffic from cyclists.

Both cemeteries along the affected portion of Forest Lawn Drive have opposed the project from the start, saying the reduction in lanes would “create severe gridlock.”

The city’s analysis of how traffic could be impacted show that the lane reduction would result in a driving delay of about 15 seconds during weekday evening rush hour and by a little more than a minute and a half during weekend peak hours, when traffic is heavier.

The project was set to break ground earlier this summer before state legislators and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass requested city departments to pause work, citing "significant community opposition."

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass during a talk with LAist's public affairs show AirTalk.

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Courtesy of Loyola Marymount University

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Bass is facing Raman in a runoff race for the L.A. mayor’s seat this November. The project has become a heated campaign issue with Bass wanting to block the work and Raman supporting the project.

“This last minute amendment to the legislation is clearly meant to stop one road safety project in my district, which is designed to save lives while keeping travel times nearly unchanged for commuters,” Raman said in a statement shared by her campaign.

L.A. Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman at a press conference to speak in support of safety updates following a fatal crash that occurred on Forest Lawn Drive, on Tuesday, August 18, 2026.

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Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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Los Angeles Times

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The mayor's office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment

The bill

If the added language is approved, State Senate and Assembly bills 194 would require Los Angeles to get approval from the City Council and the mayor and hold a public hearing before reducing “the number of vehicle travel lanes on a street that provides the only access to two or more adjacent cemeteries.”

The proposed bill change comes at the tail end of the legislative session, meaning lawmakers would have until midnight on Aug. 31 to either advance or reject the legislation.

A joint statement from Forest Lawn and Mount Sinai cemeteries said the legislation, if passed, would represent a “momentous victory.”

“The proposed legislation places important safeguards around any future effort to reduce vehicle lanes on the only street providing access to these adjacent cemeteries,” the statement reads.

Lobbying money

Records held by the California Secretary of State show that Forest Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries paid a lobbying firm $125,000 between April and June to advocate the governor’s office and state legislature regarding “transportation issues.” No additional details are available.

Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, who represents the project area, confirmed to LAist that he heard from Governmental Advocates, Inc., the lobbying firm retained by the cemetery. Zbur said the firm and other stakeholders reached out to his office about “the harmful impact of the proposed projects on access to the cemeteries and the surrounding area.”

According to city records, lobbyist Rick Taylor and Associates received $360,000 from a law firm working on behalf of the cemetery between 2025 and 2026. Reports filed with the L.A. City Ethics Commission about the lobbying activity list opposition to the Forest Lawn Drive transportation project as the subject.

Status of the project

According to an Aug. 24 statement from the mayor’s office received before the proposed state language was introduced, alternative plans that preserve the four lanes of traffic and include protected bike lanes “are being reviewed.”

The mayor’s office said the project will break ground following additional community outreach.