Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (11 page)

BECCA LISH:
The thing about recording a cartoon is that you can’t control which of the many things you do will end up in the final product, so you just do stuff and trust the editing process. Generally, in recording Judy or any of the characters I played on
Doug
, I would do a few takes “as written” and then take some liberties, throwing in an improvisational handle before or after the written line. If we kept doing more and more takes, I might stray further afield. There was certainly more adult stuff that came out in improvisation, but I don’t recall ever being told not to say anything.

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
We were all keen improvisers at
Rugrats
and had to make up our own “walla”—or ambient crowd noise—a lot. Michael Bell and Charlie Adler, one of our directors, could get pretty inventive and
blue beyond belief
 . . .

BECCA LISH:
We could be a bit silly knowing that nobody listening would really be able to understand what was being said.

ALAN GOODMAN:
We never thought about what we were doing as being for kids. We always thought of it as being something we were doing for us, to amuse us, to entertain us, but that was filtered through the parameters of making kids understand. But that didn’t stop us from doing the kinds of things we wanted to do.

HARVEY:
Alan Silberberg was the main writer for most of
Double Dare
’s run, and a lot of the time, his stuff was just way over the kids’ heads. But the kids knew these grown-ups were having fun for some reason and so that might be amusing to them. We amused
ourselves
, and in so doing, I think we amused the kids audience as well. And probably some parents, too, who were watching at the time.

JOHN CRANE:
In the second episode, we did a song called “Sex Education.” We thought it was really funny, and the music was good. It just didn’t cross our minds that it might be something kids shouldn’t be watching.

NORTON VIRGIEN:
We did a bold episode called “Naked Tommy” where the babies decided nudity was fun. Obviously, we staged it very carefully and kept it tasteful. My family had Maurice Sendak’s
In the Night Kitchen
at home, and in that book, the naked boy character was, well, naked. Tastefully so. I did a sketch of Tommy with small private parts showing that I felt we could use in one or two long shots without offending. The sketch was sent off to Nickelodeon and came back with a one-sentence reply:
Has Norton lost his mind?
Can’t really blame them for that one.

DAMIAN YOUNG:
With the Bus Driver Stu character on
Pete & Pete
, he couldn’t get too dark, which is where I wanted to go with him. He couldn’t get too existential, suicidal. There had to be something maniacal about him, but they kept telling me, “Let’s make it a character you can actually believe in, as crazy as he is. He can’t be doom and gloom all the time. There have to be moments where he gets excited and trusts the kids, and then gets betrayed.” I wanted to go
way
over the top . . . to the point of personal self-injury. That’s the stuff they had to rein me in on.

CRAIG PRYCE:
In “The Tale of the Mystical Mirror” we had a shot where the actress is looking at the mirror and you know she looks beautiful and young, but then we do a sweep pan without cutting and it’s an old lady standing there, which is her true image. Her eyes turn all blue and she starts screaming. I cut a bit early because they wanted to be on her too long, but it’s in the show and I’m sure it bothered some people. It was kinda cool, though.

RON OLIVER:
The tendency with the Sardo character was to go way over the top. I always fancied that Sardo was sort of like Norma Desmond in
Sunset Boulevard
. But the over-the-top campy stuff was like a veil that he kept over himself in order to keep us from knowing just how nasty he really was.

RICHARD M. DUMONT:
There were auditions in Montreal for a new series called
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
and I auditioned for the part of Sardo. At that time, my hair was a bit longer, so I tied it back into a small ponytail and tucked it under. I went in there and they said, “This character is supposed to be big and grandiose. We want something ‘burlesque-y.’” That was not how I was going to approach the character at all, but I changed things instantly. I took my hair out of the ponytail, and they said, “Yeah, yeah. Great. Great.” They seemed to like it, I kind of put on a mid-Atlantic accent, and there you go.

RON OLIVER:
The funny part is that he played Sardo like a great cameo queen, but Richard’s a married guy with four kids.

KIRK BAILY:
I probably made Ug bigger and broader because I was trying to fill the scene, make the scene move, keep it from being static. It was tough to be with four or seven kids in a scene and there’s no interaction while they’re just making sure to hit their beats.

JAMES BETHEA:
It
sounds
like fun being a contestant on a game show . . . until you’ve got the shirt on, and you’re standing in front of the lights of the podium, and some guy is talking to you, and you gotta keep track of the game, and all this stuff in your head . . .

PHIL MOORE:
I was trying to do what I could to keep kids in Relaxed Mode. If they saw
me
being crazy, nothing
they
could do would embarrass them. Yeah, that crossed the line sometimes. But I was looking at a kid who was about to soil his pants.

BARRY LATHER:
There were times when I knew I couldn’t push the choreography and get too provocative because it’s a kids’ show. I wouldn’t want to do anything that was too raunchy or that would make people wonder why it was on the show. We were on the lookout, but I knew how far too push it. We knew who our audience was.

RITA HESTER:
We skewed higher demographically. They didn’t market past eleven-year-olds, and they stayed on us: “Your material is a little too sophisticated.” We’d have to reel it in. It was a hard fit. In hindsight, they were fabulous to allow us to do such out-there things and forge new territory.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
We knew about all the conventional wisdom that kids want to aspire to older people and blah-blah-blah, but we didn’t really pay that much attention to that. The shows
had
to be really oriented to a ten-year-old I would say from ’85 on. And we had to protect little kids from our ten-year-old shows, so we created Nick Jr. and we created Face. That helped us to have a kind of safe zone for little kids that wasn’t so cloyingly sweet that older kids couldn’t watch the stuff and dip in and out.

JOHN BINKLEY:
After Nick decided to go with my show, they said they were “tapping out” at about age twelve. “If your show could bring in a few thirteen-year-olds or maybe a couple of fourteen-year-olds, we’d be thrilled.” Of course, I didn’t think it would appeal to anyone older, because I’ve learned in this business that kids like to look
up
at the age they’re watching. After it had been on for a year, though, Nielsens revealed that one-third of the audience was two to eleven, one-third was twelve to seventeen, and one-third was eighteen to fifty. I would not have predicted that a show designed for children on a children’s channel would somehow cross over and draw a family audience.

BENNY HESTER:
Our core audience was in touch with pop culture, so it didn’t matter what age they were. We were interested in the young kids, but we thought it’d be great for young parents, too. I didn’t temper the music at all. We weren’t interested in children’s music like the Wiggles or something like that. We wanted music that suited the show.

MARC SUMMERS:
Keep in mind, I was this thirty-four-year-old guy with a strange sense of humor and frame of reference. The parents would stop me every day and say, “I watch every day for that one joke you do for
me
.” I would be doing impressions of Henry Fonda, for godsakes. A kid doesn’t know who Henry Fonda is. But parents do. It was sort of like
Rocky & Bullwinkle
. It would work on two levels.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
There was so much going on that was so positive for kids that every now and then when Marc would say something slightly inappropriate, it wasn’t ever
that
bad. They didn’t notice his corny jokes because they were too excited about what was coming.

VANESSA COFFEY:
We did a lot of that with
Rugrats
. Stuff that was over the kids’ heads. It was intentional. We didn’t want to just have kids watch it.
We
wanted to watch it. We wanted it to be more of a crossover. And it did cross over. It got the first 4.0 rating in cable history.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
What makes a hit not just at Nickelodeon but on any of these networks is when a show reaches out of its demographic.

JOE O’CONNOR:
I’d go out walking around the Universal lot and these people in their twenties would get all excited when they recognized me. Because they looked a little young to have children, I’d ask, “Oh, you have kids?” And they would say, “No,
we
watch the show!” Which I found a little odd. I mean, the show was for little kids: eight-, nine-, ten-year-olds.

RICK GOMEZ:
Pete & Pete
had two fans: ten-year-old kids and college students who were stoned out of their minds, which is what I was. I’d go to a club to see Blues Traveler:
Dude! It’s Endless Mike!
Fucking stoned college kids.

DIZ MCNALLY:
The killer part was
Out of Control
was on two times out here. Saturdays at four thirty in the afternoon, then four thirty in the morning. And friends of mine who would be out having a few drinks would come in and see me on the TV going
Eee-ooo-ee! Ahoy, mateys!
And it was, “Oh my God! I just saw her down at the club!”

MARTY SCHIFF:
There were some fraternities that would stay up and party, and because
Out of Control
was on at four a.m., there was a drinking game where every time Hern laughed, they did a shot. There was an underground movement for cable very similar to what happened with viral videos on the Internet.

ROBIN RUSSO:
Double Dare
was huge with the frat and sorority groups. It wasn’t just kids watching the show. It got cultish.

JANEANE GAROFALO:
Pete & Pete
reminded me of things that had been done at the Children’s Television Workshop in the seventies and sixties, like
The Electric Company
. It sort of transcended age. Sometimes these shows—even
The Monkees
or the original
Batman
—have a quality that appeals to both children and adults. I assume it appealed to other adults, too, because I know I had friends who watched it as well.

CHARLES S. DUTTON:
I had a lot of friends who were adults who were hooked on
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
And I knew a lot of actors who would have loved to have been on that show.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
Ren & Stimpy
skewed the network, because it wasn’t just a hit; it was a phenomenon. When a phenomenon happens, it takes the network with it. Thereafter, it became clear we had a college audience.

MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG:
It wasn’t like they were sticking little shy kids in and saying, “Hey, go crazy.” I was already very opinionated and well-read. Taking, like,
Anna Karenina
to set and being like, “I’m gonna read this!” and having absolutely no idea what any of the words I was reading were.
That
kind of kid.

BOB BLACK:
When you’re a kid, there’s a certain glee you take in doing something outrageous or over the top. If we wrote a Barth’s sketch that was particularly gross or a particularly nasty firing squad bit, they would actually
want
to be in that rather than saying, “That’s pretty extreme . . .”

MICHAEL SPILLER:
There were things that Little Pete did that pushed the envelope and you would hope an impressionable ten-year-old wouldn’t mimic that behavior. One day, someone said something in front of Danny Tamberelli and I said, “You’re not allowed to do that. That’s a SAG rule. If you curse in front of a child, you’re fined five dollars.” And I had a bunch of people believing it was a rule. Danny bought it hook, line, and sinker. We got to the point where someone would say something and Danny would say, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to report you.” This tradition carried on; it’s another tradition the show gave birth to!

WILL MCROBB:
It was a very square show masquerading as a hip show. The values were really like “love your brother” and “be good to people” and “honor your imagination.” There was some subversive behavior like staying up for eleven nights in a row, but if you remember the end of that episode, Pete and Mom are closer than ever and respect each other’s boundaries. We really honored the rituals of childhood. Maybe “square” isn’t the right word . . .

TOBY HUSS:
The most subversive thing about
Pete & Pete
will always be the people who all got together to make it. We’re all a little like that. It’s hard to explain. It was a little shimmering time back then. We’d look at each other saying, “Is this going to work? Are they going to let us do this?” I don’t think it’d be made today.

WILL MCROBB:
As soon as you start testing stuff, that’s where the problems start.
Pete & Pete
never got tested. When things get tested, that tends to lead to an outcome that is more mainstream than what you originally intended.

PAUL GERMAIN:
Nick was really into focus groups. Everyone in animation still does that. It’s a load of bunk. They’d send us research and we looked at it, but that was about it. After we went through the initial process of testing the pilot and we got great numbers, it was never really an issue for us.