Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (4 page)

ALAN GOODMAN:
You know, in one stretch, we did twenty-two episodes, and I think Melissa asked me for three line changes. That’s it.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
Whenever you’re working on any show with a central character, you start to do everything you can to make sure the character fits the actor like a glove. So I started writing around Melissa and would put in things she would actually say and do to make Clarissa even more like her.

LISA LEDERER:
Mitchell used to describe Clarissa as someone he admired. As a woman, I was grateful for that. Yes, Melissa is near and dear to our hearts as well, but her character actually became a living person to us, and we all felt a responsibility to continue representing her as Mitchell’s original idea. She was a savvy girl, and we liked that about her.

LISA MELAMED:
I knew Christine Taylor liked to sing, so I wrote an episode where her character would sing. I knew Joe Torres was an artist, so I did an episode where I had him draw. Stuff like that always makes the show better because it brings something really authentic to the actors.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
That was sort of fun to see an episode being about something that was an interest to us.

MARJORIE SILCOFF:
There was a very sadistic element on the
You Can’t Do That on Television
set, okay? If they knew you had a weakness, they would
pounce
on it. You did not tell them what the kids said about you or if your family had a nickname for you. What a lesson for an eleven- to fourteen-year-old! I’m lucky to say, they didn’t find any of mine at the time.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
There are some things I might question in retrospect—fat jokes about Lisa, and a certain amount that was probably over my head at the time in terms of what was tactful or funny. Probably not always the healthiest thing for kids.

BOB BLACK:
The fat jokes didn’t make sense with Christine McGlade, because she was
tiny
. It was like, “What the heck?” And Lisa was not a stick, but still . . . There’s just too much that’s happened in the world in connection with teenage girls being afraid of being fat, and I don’t think we need to add to that.

KIRK BAILY:
I did feel at one point, “Donkeylips is going to have another name we refer to him by, right?” As the counselor, they made fun of me—not for weight but for cluelessness. But Ug was an
adult
.

MICHAEL BOWER:
When you’re that young, you don’t realize you’re being made fun of, in a sense. In that moment, it didn’t really bother me.

STEVE SLAVKIN:
I wanted
kids
, and I wanted them to be as natural as they could be. I didn’t want them with a lot of makeup or combed hair. I wanted to see them fumbling; I wanted the lisp and the stutter and the weirdness. You embrace them for their kid-ness. Michael Bower just did it. There was no concern that would mess him up or that the other kids would make fun of him.

HEIDI LUCAS:
In the episode where Donkeylips had a crush on Dina, we were supposed to go to this dance together—the invitation was originally supposed to go to the character of Michael. There’s this scene where the girls are in their cabin and Telly and ZZ are basically telling my character that I
have
to go to this thing even though I really don’t want to. And I said something mean about his hair or his breath or what he was wearing . . . and in real life, it hit me:
I don’t know this person
. That’s not what I would have done in real life. You don’t make judgment calls like that. I wasn’t certain my opinion was the right one, though, and I was thinking at the time that we were getting paid to perform the script that people were getting paid to write.

STEVE SLAVKIN:
Michael Bower’s a really nice guy, and he’s a really talented actor. He actually sort of brought the character of Donkeylips to life. Kids get bad nicknames in their lives. I think this was one of the first times on TV when a weight-challenged child got a mean nickname. And a kid watching this would go, “This is real. We know kids like this.” Or, “That’s
me
and I can identify with that.”
Salute Your Shorts
wasn’t some sugarcoated Saturday morning sitcom.

HEIDI LUCAS:
The problem with that is at the end of the day, he has to go home looking like Donkeylips. And that’s a problem I didn’t realize until way later. I could have said something to make him feel better, but I didn’t have the mental capacities to, because I was twelve.

TREVOR EYSTER:
I did feel bad for him in many ways—and looking back now, worse—because he was being made fun of in a way that was not something he could change.

MICHAEL BOWER:
Now I want to get in better shape for my health, but when I was younger, I thought if I got skinnier, I would lose the extra income from acting. Since I was paying the bills and really supporting my family, I was nervous about it.

MEGAN BERWICK:
He takes care of his brother and dad. He was the person who pulled through for his family and had these responsibilities since the time he was
really
young. When I was eight or nine, I had an agent who told me I either needed to lose five or ten pounds to be the lead girl or gain twenty pounds to be the fat character actor. They say that kind of thing to
all
kids.

KENAN THOMPSON:
Shit like that, I wasn’t really paying attention. I was cool being me, because I was having fun. I knew I didn’t fit certain free shirts we would get, but I was like, “Just give me a bigger size or I won’t wear this shit.” It wasn’t like I was going to places and they were turning me down because of how I looked. If
that
was happening, then I probably would have changed certain things. It was more about the people who cared about me wanting me to take care of myself. But I was chillin’. What can I say? I like hamburgers.

TREVOR EYSTER:
At the time, Bower’s defense mechanism maybe was a rough exterior. I was the “brainiac” sharing a dressing room with him, and one day he came out and said, “I just took the biggest shit of my life! I swear to God, it was
this
size!” Ewww! Gross! To a geek, it was something I just absolutely couldn’t relate to. I tried to politely laugh.

DANNY COOKSEY:
Michael Bower didn’t have to make a joke, because he was there and he would go for it. He was like Chris Farley.

MEGAN BERWICK:
There was this girl on set, one of the extras. And she was really pretty. And snobby, too. Michael goes up to her and says, “I thought you were really, really pretty . . . until I got to know you.” You can’t tell a girl that! But that’s just the way he was.

MICHAEL BOWER:
They enjoyed me, but I don’t think they got my humor, because I was sort of a weird, fat kid. Tim Eyster and me, we had contradicting egos. Now that I know he was a homosexual . . . I got that vibe back then. I was eighteen, nineteen, and knew something was different. But he was very talkative and techie and . . . very
Jewish
. He was analyzing
everything
. And I’m one of those free spirits: “Just let it happen.” That was a conflict, sharing a room with him.

TREVOR EYSTER:
I felt very ostracized. For me, going through that geeky, nerdy, awkward prepubescent phase happened in front of the camera. Whether in high school or on set, I was this lanky—well,
lanky
would imply
tall
, and I wasn’t even tall—awkward-bowl-haircut mama’s boy with glasses that had a kinda high voice.

HEIDI LUCAS:
I don’t want to say I was Tim’s protector, because by no means did I go out of my way to protect him . . . but I felt like a big sister. Almost. He made me smile in a very innocent way. If he tried a joke and it didn’t work, who cares? It’s just Tim.

MEGAN BERWICK:
Tim drove me
insane
. He was used to being the youngest, and I was younger than him, so there was all this funny competiveness between us. But at the same time, he just
annoyed
me. Like a little brother annoys you. Arghh! I didn’t hang out with him. I hung out with all the other kids. I mean, he’s a really nice guy, but . . .

VENUS DEMILO:
Tim was hyperactive and he was the youngest person in a group of kids. He was still part of the group. We all liked each other. But we might have picked on him more. He was kinda nerdy.

TREVOR EYSTER:
It was really tough. What complicated it for me was that I was going through a sexual identity crisis. I’m probably the only cast member who doesn’t qualify as straight. Turns out Danny Cooksey was cordial when he needed to be, but we’re in the bathroom and I hear them talking about thinking I’m a “fag,” you know? Later on, it turned out I met a girl who knocked my socks off, and I realized I didn’t bat for the
other
team 100 percent either. Which was a whole different realization much later.

RICK GALLOWAY:
Things were a little cliquey on
Welcome Freshmen
. Chris Lobban and Dave Rhoden got along real well. Jill Setter and Jocelyn Steiner got along really well. So that left me as kind of the oddball of the group.

DAVE RHODEN:
Dude, I was a
total
dick
to Rick Galloway. I owe that guy so many apologies. I was probably trying to overcompensate for being a nerd, and Rick was a dude that we always picked on. The worst thing I ever did was we were in our little break room and we were eating dinner one night and Jill Setter was talking about how her school was doing an adopt-a-whale program and I turned to Rick and said, “How does it feel?” Because Rick was a little chunky back then. And he got up and cried; he left. I didn’t know . . . that Rick had been
adopted
.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
Rick was a handful. He was attention-starved because he was homeschooled and didn’t get to be around a lot of kids all of the time. As a result, being on set was paradise for him. There were all these people around to talk to and he just loved it. As a result, he could be pretty unfocused and needy at times.

RICK GALLOWAY:
I love Bob Mittenthal. He was always very sweet, very nice, even when things got very crazy. Or seemingly.

DAVE RHODEN:
Bob and I had a great relationship, and in fact, at one point he came to me and was like, “Hey, I noticed you’re not doing all those one-liners and zingers on Rick anymore. Is something wrong?” I was like, “Nah, my mom told me I shouldn’t be doing that anymore.” And he was like, “Oh man, that’s too bad. I thought that was hilarious.”

BLAKE SENNETT:
When I first started, I wanted the others to think I was cool and not bad as an actor. My character was cocky and charming, and I wanted to be that. In the first episode I was in, I had to hurl a baseball with incredible velocity and accuracy so it could sail into home and get the guy out. I had to do that! I can’t throw a ball that incredibly far! I’m not an athlete. I was worried they would think I was an idiot.

SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ:
Early on in
Roundhouse
, I was playing the mom, and it just stuck. Buddy Sheffield continued to develop it, but I’d like to think my inflection and my delivery had something to do with it.

BUDDY SHEFFIELD:
The mom was just a compilation of every TV mom. The things she was concerned about were what every other TV mom was concerned about. And the dad was a self-contained dad. That’s why I put him in the roll-around chair with the TV and BBQ and everything attached right to it.

JOHN CRANE:
I played a number of characters, but one was the dad who was this big, bombastic idiot. I grew up watching
All in the Family
, and I always thought my character was kind of clueless like Archie Bunker. Blue-collar, too. One of Buddy’s things was that the dad would always say, “Pull my finger!” He wasn’t exactly the classiest guy around. Especially when the chair came around . . .

CRYSTAL LEWIS:
The chair was definitely like a cast member! Sometimes it seemed to have a mind all its own. It cracked me up that it would have new additions every week, regularly being transformed to fit sketches and episodes. We weren’t really encouraged to climb on it. Also, it might run you over if you weren’t paying attention.

DAVID SIDONI:
The first week, it was just a fight:
Everyone
wanted to play on that thing.

SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ:
John Crane had tricks with that thing. He could make it go fast and spin it around and stuff. It was really difficult to maneuver, but I never worried he was going to run into me. No one else could be trusted with it, though.

JOHN CRANE:
I was playing the dad on the show because I was about ten years older than the rest of the cast. Micki Duran was seventeen when we did the show, and I was thirty. The rest of the guys and girls were twenty-one, twenty-two. I was married. I had kids. If I hung out or went for a drink after the show, it was usually with Rita, Buddy, and Benny.

SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ:
The role you play in a show makes its way into your relationships. And everyone played my kid. Even though I wasn’t old enough to be anybody’s mom on the show, I did feel somewhat maternal about everyone. I still do.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
I don’t really know where I stopped being myself and started being Pete. Or the other way around.

TREVOR EYSTER:
Sometimes it’s, “Oh, sorry I called you Sponge!” It might be a new friend who’s a fan. I really don’t care, because I felt very, very married to that character. Sponge and I are one. I’ve been both heralded and harshly criticized for that.

VENUS DEMILO:
I’ve always participated in dance and cheerleading. I’m an active girl. So my character fit. It did definitely resonate with me.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
I was essentially playing myself. It was a strange mix. Even just Roger’s choice of us using our real names created for me a bit of uncertainty: “Am I supposed to be me? Or a character?”