Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (14 page)

ALBIE HECHT:
Then we did the pilot and we said we’re going to have a place that becomes a character in the show. That became the Extreme Arena, which Byron created beautifully. For the endgame, we came up with the biggest challenge we could. Magda Liolis was an athlete, and she hooked up this idea for “crag” and mountain climbing. She came up with that term:
Aggro Crag
. Kids still e-mail Mike O’Malley and me looking for a piece of it!

JAMES BETHEA:
The Video Zone answered the question of “couch potato” problems involving kids playing video games on
Nick Arcade
. It was very physical. Watching executives and other adults who would come to try it out was hilarious.

ANDY BAMBERGER:
It’s very disorienting. If you went left, on the camera you’d be going
right
. What you’re viewing is the opposite of what you’re doing.

KARIM MITEFF:
We had to give kids time to adjust, because it was such a new thing. About one in eight kids didn’t get it. They had difficulty with the physicality of it.

ANDREA LIVELY:
You had to be really coordinated. We were allowed to do it, but a lot of us felt like such fools because it was tricky and hard.

JAMES BETHEA:
Nobody was funnier than Karim, because he would kind of lose himself, grunting and talking to himself and to the objects and the screen. He would take it so seriously, like we had dropped him in a war zone.

HARVEY:
On
Double Dare
, the place would be going ape-shit with so many moving parts and a lot of kinetic energy at work, and Dana Calderwood was always so calm. I never saw him flustered. There was something almost like a Zen Yoda character to him.

DANA CALDERWOOD:
Double Dare
was live-to-tape. In other words, it never went into an edit room to piece it together after we shot it. It literally came to thirty minutes exactly. We wouldn’t stop for commercial breaks. We would actually lay down two-minutes-and-two-second holes on the videotape, which later became a commercial. When we delivered the show, it was completely done and edited. Occasionally, we would “pick up” or redo a shot, but there wasn’t anything that happened that you didn’t see on the show.

BRUCE GOWERS:
Because
Roundhouse
was live-to-tape, that’s where the speed came in. Obviously, if something went wrong, we’d stop; but it very rarely would. The viewer could watch as the kids were even involved in the scenery changes to make it run faster and more smoothly.
Roundhouse
was totally continuous. There weren’t any stopped tapes like there were on so many other comedy shows.

ALAN GOODMAN:
Clarissa
broke a lot of rules in terms of typical sitcom presentations. It wasn’t the first series where the actor comes out of the show and talks to the camera, but it was the first one for kids that did that.

SARAH CONDON:
Part of what Mitchell was trying to do, honestly, was having some fun with the graphics and the way we shot her. A really “cable” version of a girl show. Like being a little more creative in terms of breaking the fourth wall.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
I don’t really think about it as “breaking the fourth wall” when characters do it on TV. In my mind, TV doesn’t have one at all. When you’re watching the news and they’re talking to the camera, they’re not really breaking the fourth wall. And I loved
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
. So that was definitely an influence. I had specific rules on how she would talk to you like you were in the room with her.

CHUCK VINSON:
I spent
hours
talking to Mitchell about how
Clarissa
would break the fourth wall. There was a whole big formula. And it was quite wonderful: Once we got into that formula, we never really stepped over those boundaries.

LISA LEDERER:
I was very immersed in the Downtown scene in New York. That whole rock-and-roll punk scene was about redefining the way we looked at what we found attractive and interesting. The people I was hanging out with, we were going out to art shows for Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, and in some ways that informed what I personally did on
Clarissa
in a positive way, because it drew from experiences that other people might not have had. I used to ride the subways, and they were always this great mash-up of kids from different boroughs and different backgrounds, different ethnicities, bringing that whole beautiful panoply of visuals to bear on a train. I paid really close attention to what the kids were wearing. It was visually interesting and somehow familiar . . . yet it didn’t look like everything else on TV.

KATHERINE DIECKMANN:
From the beginning,
Pete & Pete
was all about this melancholy and emotionality of childhood as much as it was absurdist. We sort of took that approach to talking about childhood, which was not sentimental and not corny and not obvious. It was more about the strange things that happen in childhood and how truthful those are. Put that into our Downtown New York shared sensibility, and that’s really what
Pete & Pete
was.

WILL MCROBB:
We really got off on putting together ideas that were on the surreal side of things. The ringing phone episode—that Nickelodeon wasn’t too crazy about—was “let’s do a story about a phone that nobody ever picked up.” Or the summer vacation where nobody knows the identity of the guy who brings them ice cream every year: an emotionally traumatized story about a guy who can’t handle intimacy . . .

JOE STILLMAN:
Or the idea of finding the same inspector inspecting your clothes throughout your life. We would try to find subject matter that would do two things: be relevant to a kid . . . but with a twist. It wasn’t like, “Yeah, you lost your first tooth.” It was something you couldn’t find anywhere else.

WILL MCROBB:
But we never wanted to be weird for weird-sakes. We were always hopeful we could make it organic. And I think coming from a kids’ perspective made it easy.

ADAM REID:
You Can’t Do That on Television
was a world where the adults were being outsmarted by the kids. The dad was a drunken politician. The mom was a blithering idiot who never took off her dish gloves. The adults were definitely not equal to the kids.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
Not only was the dad a drunk, but he was a
politician
! Senator Prevert, which is a takedown on politicians. And Barth’s Burger was a critique on the fast-food industry at a time when the organic food and vegetarian movement was spreading. You could go on and on!

JOSH MORRIS:
Fart jokes are one thing, but Barth’s Burgers is something you wouldn’t be able to get away with today. They had jokes about cutting human meat into burgers. That’s dark! That’s
Sweeney Todd
!

RON OLIVER:
There’s a really powerful element, the idea of abandonment by one’s parents, that we had in “The Tale of the Super Specs.” We already had the idea of the “faceless,” with those people in black hoods coming toward you, but then we had Sardo being the nice comic foil . . . until he feels like
he’s
out of control. He’s the only adult, it seems, and even
he’s
lost control by the end.

ABBY HAGYARD:
Barth, the Principal, Mom and Dad, the Librarian—all the adults were just
weird
. The house was just
weird
. The school, the world they inhabited was
weird
. That’s what that show was all about.
Kids are fine; it’s the rest of the world that’s messed up
.

JOSH MORRIS:
It was very fresh—you’d never had a fart joke on kids’ TV before. Ever. Dark parents. Dark themes. That’s what Roger brought with him from England. And Geoffrey brought it to America, and it was very fresh. What kind of dark parents and dark kids were ever reflected anywhere except for maybe Mark Twain before that? Nothing, but in Britain, it’s their fodder for humor.

ROGER PRICE:
I assume the Monty Pythons were imprisoned in similar establishments as I when they were younger. You need a quirky sense of humor to survive being British.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
We got a big kick out of really showing things from a quirky kid’s-eye view of the world.

GABOR CSUPO:
Nickelodeon wanted something different, something unique. And we were a studio that was known for doing these kinds of things, like when we were doing
The Simpsons
with all the colors in little different ways you hadn’t seen before.

VANESSA COFFEY:
I had said to Gabor, “I don’t want realistic-looking characters. But I don’t want them to look like nonhumans either.” We went back and forth on design. Arlene Klasky’s a graphic designer, but I don’t believe she had anything to do with that.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
Sure, the design for Angelica’s doll Cynthia is kind of scary. But that whole series is kind of scary if you really look at it. Everyone was weird. The designs are extreme. Especially when you consider it arrived on the
cartoon
landscape. The edge we had was when you turned on those shows, they didn’t look like anything else that was on TV.

LINDA SIMENSKY:
Kids are more open-minded than adults are when it comes to that kind of thing. The joy of the pilot was its unique look that was very Eastern European–looking with a little anime mixed in, and putting that in front of kids.

PETER CHUNG:
I was into Japanese animators at the time—Osamu Dezaki, Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri—and they had made a big impression on me. What I admired about them was they treated animation as filmmaking, not as cartoons. I did apply some of that to the
Rugrats
pilot in the sense that I tried to give the world of the babies a little bit of ominousness. They’re very small and everything is intimidating.

NORTON VIRGIEN:
Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson—two of Disney’s greatest animators and mentors to many in my generation—came around to see the pilot with a few of us. When the lights came up, they both seemed in shock. Trying hard to be polite, they nonetheless tried to talk some sense into us: “Do you really think that audiences will be able to connect to characters that don’t have . . . appeal?”

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
It was rather thrilling hearing my character's voice emanating from this wild-looking creature when I was invited to see the pilot at Klasky-Csupo a year after we’d recorded it. What a trip!

PETER CHUNG:
They’ve become popular, so people have learned to accept it. But before that time, there were no characters that looked like that.

VANESSA COFFEY:
Peter Chung directed the pilot and set the tone for our show and how it was going to work. I wish we could have had Peter do our whole series, but he gets bored. He wanted to do something else.

PETER CHUNG:
They asked me to stay on and direct more episodes, but by that time, I knew I was going to do
Aeon Flux
, so I couldn’t commit to
Rugrats
. I think I was working on
Aeon Flux
while I was working on the title sequence for
Rugrats
.

CHUCK SWENSON:
Everybody really liked what Peter did—he’s a consummate draftsman, and if you follow animation, you can see his style with the really wide-angle shots that are really distorted—but it was difficult to maintain that quality. The pilot Peter did was pretty much all action. There were just a few short lines of dialogue at the end, a little bit of setup dialogue. The show became
much
more verbal, which helped in terms of production because it was just talking heads. Easy to animate, easy to cut . . .

HOWARD BAKER:
That was a shame, because I thought the show did lose its special point of view and just became about talking babies.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
Really, what we had was the legacy of Peter’s design. It guaranteed the show was going to be weird-looking for its entire run. Peter Chung was kind of extreme. He wasn’t that interested in stories. He was interested in visuals . . . and, essentially, the strangeness of childhood. If it had been more Peter’s show, it would have been a stranger and more alienating show than it really was.

PETER CHUNG:
I always felt growing up as a baby that I was an alien in a world that didn’t understand me.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
Peter is a fascinating guy who I’ve grown fonder of in other circumstances. But at the time, I was like, “Who the hell is this guy?” Here was this weird Asian guy sitting there and all this shit’s happening—all the writers are coming in, people are coming to pitch new stories and stuff—and he’s sitting there just staring and drawing and not very polite. You’d say, “Hi, Peter.” Nothing. He wouldn’t even say hello to you. At one point, we were all sharing this new phone and I’d get back to my office and there’d be a Post-It from Peter, and it would say,
You got a phone call—Peter.
And I’d go out and he’s drawing and I’d say, “Peter, who was it?” “I don’t know.”
Are you doing this to torment me? Do you hate me? Or are you just so focused?
And I don’t really know the answer, by the way.

PAUL GERMAIN:
Peter Chung doesn’t talk a lot. I used to find him sleeping under his animation desk because he was so dedicated. He’s a nutty and brilliant guy, and his animation is some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen.

PETER CHUNG:
I don’t know how to work any other way. Because I’m not efficient, I end up spending more time on something than somebody else would. I’m constantly trying to challenge myself and do stuff I don’t know how to do. That’s how you learn. It just required a lot of trial and error. One of the problems I had was working with a bunch of animators I’d never worked with before. Scenes would come back from animators who were freelancing—most of them—and I’d have to redo them myself. It seemed like a waste of time to give them back to the animators, because they were just going to come back wrong again.