Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (13 page)

DONNIE JEFFCOAT:
Double Dare
was in a studio.
GUTS
was in a studio.
Nick Arcade
was in a studio. So it was a real challenge for our production company on
Wild & Crazy Kids
, which was
on location
, to keep it together. We had a lot of organizational issues, and I don’t mind saying that. The production company did a pretty good job, but there were some times when they really pushed our hours as young people. It was one of these things where I’d show up and they’d go, “This game is going to work just like this, and this will explode at this time,” and it would be a complete, major failure. We’d have to, a lot of times, have backup games planned, which always threw the day off. We shot two shows a week. It was a lot for
everybody
.

FRED KELLER:
To go and do a three-camera kids’ show in the Arizona desert on location was quite a challenge. We were doing a twenty-two-minute show in about two and a half days. Very tough show to do,
Hey Dude
.

DAVID LASCHER:
I loved the amenities. It was like the Ramada Inn or something. I turned seventeen, and it was my first bit of
freedom
. We became really close friends: Christine Taylor, Kelly Brown, Joe Torres, director Ross Bagwell . . . We were really tight.

GRAHAM YOST:
The production moved from the Ramada to the sumptuous Radisson. The thing about the Ramada was that the pool was right there. We had to walk a little further at the Radisson.

FRED KELLER:
The first thirteen episodes were very bare-bones. We were staying in the little Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Tucson, and we didn’t even have a dolly for the camera. By season two, we had the dolly, we were at the Marriott—everything bounced up as the show was more successful.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
I was not a person who had ever been to the Wild West. I’d never been on a horse. I had no idea what the environment was going to be. I had never even been to the West
Coast
before. I had no idea what the dry heat of the desert was going to be . . . until we got there!

FRED KELLER:
One time we put a thermometer on the sound guy’s hat; he’d been sitting above the set with his boom, and it was, like, 125 degrees. When we were rehearsing with the kids at the Ramada area, there was a Coca-Cola machine and we kept hearing this rattling sound . . . Son of a gun if there wasn’t a
huge
rattlesnake that had gone to cool itself
in
the machine! We had to get a snake wrangler to take it out into the desert because Tanque Verde, where we were shooting, is protected land.

KELLY BROWN:
The last day after we wrapped the first season, we all got on the plane, but we had to get off because it was too hot to fly. They shut the airport down.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
The horseback riding was hard, too. That was another challenge for the suburban Pennsylvania girl that I was.

DANA CALDERWOOD:
At night, we would test all of the stunts on
Double Dare
.
Needs to be bigger! Needs more water balloons! It’s good, but NOT MESSY ENOUGH!
We had kids—production assistants, mostly—who would do the testing. Or sometimes we would do it ourselves.

TIM BARTELL:
Every time they had an idea for a game or something, they’d bring a kid in to test it. I’d call my friends, “Hey, can I borrow your teenage son?”

LISA SHAFTEL:
I was the smallest person in the shop where we worked at Showman Fabricators. I’m five-foot-two and at that time was probably 115 pounds. I would get pulled off of whatever I was working on, and they would use me as a guinea pig to go through the obstacles and the props to see if kids could reach, if things were too big or too small. One of the things we built was a very simplified, vertical ant farm that was basically a large plywood box with acrylic, Plexiglas panels on the front side. Inside was a very simplified maze that was a wooden structure covered in industrial carpeting. It was 95 percent finished, and they called me over to test it out. I climbed up inside . . . and the distance back up was too far. I couldn’t reach and I got stuck inside it. I had to sit there for a while as the carpenters unscrewed all the Plexiglas panels and got a ladder to get me out. It was kind of like, “You will never believe what happened to me at work today.”

BYRON TAYLOR:
Basically, we would be
guessing
when we would draw up the designs. It would be complicated by the factors of the mess being put on it and the kids going through it. After putting them in the studio, we would have to rework pieces occasionally.

JAMES BETHEA:
What was amazing about our set on
Nick Arcade
was the thing people didn’t get to see: the scale. Ten thousand square feet, and half of our soundstage was dedicated to blue-screen sets, full-scale, for the interactive Video Zone at the end of each episode. At one time, we had the largest blue-screen set that had ever been built.

ANDREA LIVELY:
Being on that immense set and walking around, seeing what the kids would see on the monitors, then looking at the end result—it was one of those experiences where I went, “Wow, cool!” But I didn’t realize how cool it was until I could really look back on it now and see how groundbreaking it was.

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
The Link Set on
You Can’t Do That on Television
was just supposed to look like monkey bars with a blue sky background where kids might play or hang out.

ROGER PRICE:
At the instigation of our designer, John Galt, we lit the Link Set—that strange structure from which the shows were hosted—entirely with fluorescent lighting. That had never been done before, for the simple reason that it was not technically possible. And now we are getting into areas that I barely understand. Apparently, the light from fluorescent tubes strobe at a different speed from the camera shutters, so that while everyone in TV realized that fluorescent lighting would eliminate many other problems, it was not possible to use because there would appear to be a slow pulsing of the picture exposure. John Galt had found a way to synchronize the fluorescents with the cameras’ thirty-frames-per-second shutter speeds, and thus eliminate the slow pulsing of light. The soft and all-over light from the fluorescents allowed the actors more freedom of movement without being rooted to marks or walking along only carefully plotted lines. It also cut out the problems of shadows from boom microphones, which had always been an issue. So a lot of the anarchic freedom we displayed was entirely due to a technical innovation developed and perfected for the show by a man who was one of the many undiscovered geniuses in Ottawa. On our pilot, I believe we were also the first in the world to use high-definition video cameras on location or, I think, anywhere. And that was another Galt innovation. He didn’t invent them, but he did know about them.

BYRON TAYLOR:
How to integrate kids into the Video Zone on
Nick Arcade
was a lot of fun, because they were shot
like
a video game, like with side-scroller and overhead angles.

CURT TOUMANIAN:
Some of the games were a lot more interactive than others, like the one where kids would throw a Styrofoam ball at the characters. What we would do is hook the camera up to the Amiga Computer, and when the kids would stand in front of the blue screen, their image would appear and they could interact with certain layers of the computer graphics. We had objects that would fly across the screen. If the kid didn’t duck, the computer would detect that as a collision. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything like that on TV prior to that. And I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it
since
, either.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
When we first came to the set for Clarissa’s room, it was done in all pink and was very frilly. Like
most
girls’ bedrooms at the time on those kinds of shows. But I had the set designers literally take black car paint and make checkered walls on top of the pink wallpaper. One of the camera guys on the set said, “She’s possessed by the Devil!”

DAVID ELLIS:
If I had painted checkers on
my
wall at that age, I would have gotten my rear end tanned inside and out. But it was necessary to show that edge of Clarissa’s personality and also the liberalness of her parents by having her expressing herself that way.

BYRON TAYLOR:
What I pitched was painting
purple
squares. I thought that would look kind of cool, that black would be too stark. But Mitchell informed me he hated purple, so there wasn’t going to be any purple on that set.

JOE O’CONNOR:
Mitchell hated the color purple.

LISA LEDERER:
That was absolutely a rule: We couldn’t use purple. At the very end of the first meeting, Mitchell said there’s only one criterion when you go to shop the show:
No purple
. I looked at him and went, “You’re kidding, right?” I mean, seriously, I can’t dress a teenage girl in purple? It was a very big deal. There could be no purple in his office; there could be no purple on the show. He didn’t even like it when people
wore
purple.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
I don’t remember Mitchell’s anti-purple mandate, but I had an anti-green mandate. We couldn’t have green walls or people wearing green. One: Green slime doesn’t show up very well on green. Two: In the NTSC television system, when you’re wearing green, it changes the color of your skin tone. It’s math. I had to explain all this stuff!

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
The anti-purple origin is completely arbitrary and methodical.
Clarissa
is the first big show that I ever ran. And I had this advice from an old pro in the business who said, “The first thing you do when you go down there, come up with something arbitrary that everybody’s gotta do and stick to it and never explain it.”
Stick to it and never explain it and that way you’ll prove that you’ve got the balls to run the show and they’ll all have to just mentally give in to you
. He goes unnamed. So I go down there and it was in the back of my mind, but I knew I had to assert myself. And we’re in wardrobe and I actually had an idea about wardrobe, which is that, because I wanted the show to appeal so fervently to girls and boys—which was a big breakthrough—I wanted her to wear pink
and
blue, and that was the balance of her wardrobe. And in the set, I wanted it to be pink and blue. So I decided that purple would ruin that, so I just said, “No purple in the clothes,” and then Lisa Lederer would say, “Why?” And I said, “It doesn’t matter. No purple.” And in the set design I would say, “No purple.” And so then it
grew
, right? Inside I was laughing a little bit; it was a weird little thing. And by the way, Lisa snuck in a bunch of purple plenty of times.

BYRON TAYLOR:
Of all the people I’d ever worked with up to that point, I’d never had anybody say something as crazy as that. Ultimately, there was an art director who came in to direct the rest of the series; I had very little contact with it after that.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Mitchell taught Byron how to create a sitcom set. Where the staircases go and that kind of thing. Mitchell dragged, kicking and screaming, a lot of the people in Florida into how to make a sitcom.

MARK SCHULTZ:
The engineering department had a lot of trouble with Mitchell because they’d break their backs to make something work and he was very critical. He didn’t have any technical knowledge, and yet he treated those people very poorly.

DAVID ELLIS:
One alteration I made was that with Sam coming through the window later in the first season, I realized we had to do something more elaborate with the outside of that window. Before, it just looked like the house was sitting on top of a cliff. So we did some model homes outside with some branches and things to give it a little more respectability.

BUDDY SHEFFIELD:
Because we had a small budget on
Roundhouse
, we decided to use that to our advantage.
The idea was to strip it down to what’s essential. We didn’t depend on things like scenery or makeup or that kind of thing, because we felt that didn’t add a whole lot to the comedy.

BYRON TAYLOR:
For whatever reason, they wanted a turntable that would have scenery on it, like a Broadway set that would revolve. It seemed like an interesting conceit, but technically difficult and tremendously expensive. That also ran counter to what they were trying to do.
Roundhouse
was basically going to be like
In Living Color
for the Nickelodeon crowd. It seemed more fun for me to approach it in a scaled-down way, where the sets would be more “schematic.” You were always aware of the environment, wherever you were: You were always in the roundhouse, basically. Then there was the aesthetic of dumpster-diving, because those would be laying around in a roundhouse. Not that the set would be made out of junk . . . but that’s what it wound up looking like.

BUDDY SHEFFIELD:
The original idea was that the set was an abandoned roundhouse that these kids had come to in order to take it over and do a show. I don’t know if that ever came across. In the initial opening, we played that out, but later on it wasn’t as important.

TIM BARTELL:
I pretty much took Byron’s design and engineered it and drew it up for the Aggro Crag on
GUTS
. I would say it probably took about twenty people and about one month to build it. One of the challenges was we had to build it in such a way that it could be taken apart, stored, and rebuilt later. So we ended up building a substructure out of speed rail and foam and latex—a lot of foam—and created little areas with that structure here or there that would plop on the mountain. It was the extra “skin” of it. That allowed us to crawl up inside of it and work on the electronics and gags.

MARK SCHULTZ:
We had elaborate harnesses of cable on the underside of the
GUTS
mountain that ran all these actuator infrared beams through activators, much like when you walk into a grocery store and the door opens for you. This would all be run to the MIDI sampler. So if a kid interrupted a laser beam and it triggered a bunch of Styrofoam boulders, I would have an earthquake sound effect that the kid would trigger, and the MIDI sampler would play the effect live on the air.