Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (19 page)

CONNIE SHULMAN:
I grew up in a very Baptist white area where there was no diversity, and it was creepy. Jim did an incredible job with having diversity in
Doug
without shoving it down anybody’s throat or making some sort of political statement. It was just pure colorful joy. There wasn’t a question of, “Oh, you’re green, so you don’t fit in.”

DAVID CAMPBELL:
People criticized it and said it was stupid and crazy. But I like it. Forget about race and inclusivity; kids liked it because it was
weird
.

JOHN CRANE:
As a parent now, there is some material that I think of on
Roundhouse
as slightly racist, more adult. One of the sketches we did—it was really funny and I think
I
wrote it—was a parody of
Where’s Waldo?
with Alfred. It was a sea of white faces and his black face in there.
Can you find Waldo?
And he’s the only black guy in the thing.

SEYMOUR GREEN:
That was a little funny: Waldo being a black guy and kinda sticking out. The way the whole show was set up was okay, and if you watch more than that episode, it wouldn’t make you feel uncomfortable. That’s one thing I liked about the show: At the end, we’re all involved in it and it’s a family. We as a cast were able to say it if we thought something was uncomfortable.

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
Brodie Osome’s dad did take exception to the racial content or undertones of some scenes on
You Can’t Do That on Television
.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
One could say they were making fun of 1980s dictators, but when you deconstruct it, the scenes with the firing squad exposed the most racist notion that White America had of what Latin America was. There couldn’t be a show now that would feature a racist description of Latin Americans and Spanish speakers. The Latin-American lobby would bat down the doors to take the image off.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
We were always inventing things and doing things because they seemed funny at the time. The “amigos” at the firing squad? It’s a cartoon. There was nothing racist on
You Can’t Do That on Television
. Just like the violence was all
cartoon
violence. We tried not to think about it.

ABBY HAGYARD:
Everything on the show had a deliberate edge of irreverence. One of the sketches featured one of the black kids asking Dad where he came from and Les Lye’s character said, “I was hoping
you
could tell us that.”

JUSTIN CAMMY:
It may have been coded, but they never made fun of my Jewishness.

MARJORIE SILCOFF:
At first, I was very uncomfortable about being the Jewish kid. Luckily, Justin was there, too, so there were two of us.

MICHAEL BELL:
I was reading for Drew on
Rugrats
, and then later on they asked me to do Grandpa Boris. I had a background with Jewish history. My grandmother and grandfather from both sides of the family came from Russia. For years, I could imitate them and brought that to the role. People from the Anti-Defamation League started complaining that Grandpa Boris was a caricature that Hitler had designed to create animosity toward Jews.

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
I loved the relationship between Minka and Boris, and their squabbling was so familiar to me from my own family. For Minka, I mustered all memories of the
bubbies
from the Fairfax district and my own long-gone grandmas into a Yiddish gibberish tirade. And this was Didi’s mother from the Old Country, so I kept that same strident falsetto pitch, then added an accent.

PAUL GERMAIN:
Boris and Minka were based on my grandparents named Semen and Minka, but I didn’t want to use “Semen” for obvious reasons. We were all Jewish and we were doing the older generation. Michael Bell was doing it, Melanie Chartoff was doing it, and I was writing it. It was
years
later when some group was angry that Boris was a stereotype and I thought, “Maybe
you
think he’s a stereotype.
I’m
doing my grandpa.”

MICHAEL BELL:
That was inane and a waste of everybody’s time.
I’m
Jewish! That’s what my grandfather looked like! They came from small communities; they were not beauties. My grandmother was a cute little potato! My grandfather was a potato!

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
According to my mother, it resembled anti-Semitic caricatures promoted by the Nazi propaganda film
The Eternal Jew
that she had seen as a young girl. She thought I was parodying her late mother, a pudgy, uneducated Austrian
bubbie
. I shared her fears with the staff—comprised of lots of reformed Jewish folk—who didn’t want to back down from what we felt were affectionate and distinct portrayals rather than hostile stereotypes.

MICHAEL BELL:
We presented the Hanukkah show to an Orthodox synagogue and they
loved
it. They roared and cheered. A whole synagogue full of Jews and not one of them stood up to say they didn’t like how we represented Grandpa Boris. But they cut back on Grandpa Boris anyway, because they didn’t want further troubles with the Anti-Defamation League.
What? You’re going to let
them
decide how the show should
run?

DEE LADUKE:
My consciousness was not high enough when I wrote the original pilot for
Hey Dude
, and the Mexican-American boy who was added later was something I had never thought of. I’m really happy that character got added.

FRED KELLER:
Because we were dealing with the West, it was much better with the Native-American character getting involved and becoming the expert of flora/fauna. That was natural. It was one of the more important things
Hey Dude
did.

KELLY BROWN:
I thought they brought the character of Danny on because there was such a positive Native-American feel out there and they wanted to bring that character to life. I never thought of him as a token Indian. And Joe Torres wasn’t Indian. I think he was Mexican.

LISA MELAMED:
I’m fairly certain he was Mexican.

MICHAEL KOEGEL:
They wanted me to find the character of Danny, who was American-Indian. They put me on an airplane and I called every school on every Indian reservation in the local Tucson area. I talked to school administrators, and they let me meet any kid who was interested in being an actor. It had to be a boy, of a certain age . . . I was walking around with my video camera and my tripod over my shoulder. It was a wild adventure. Finding an actor who was Native-American was really tough. Ultimately, we fudged it because Joe Torres was really Mexican-American. He had a
little
American-Indian blood in him, but once you get in that part of the country, there’s a fine line between what’s an American Indian and what’s a Mexican Indian. It’s a cultural divide.

FRED KELLER:
The problem was finding an actor who could do it at the age group and do it at the budget that could be pitched for each episode. We weren’t doing these things in Hollywood or New York City. In Hollywood, we’d say, “I need a one-armed paper hanger with red hair who has a parrot on his shoulder.” And fifty of them would show up.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
Orlando was a pretty shallow talent pool as well. I don’t think we had a lot of Asian kids on
Welcome Freshmen
.

MICHAEL KOEGEL:
Bob had his hands tied, because they would not let us cast that show out of New York City. All those kids were from Orlando.

CHUCK VINSON:
When you take a look at the story on
Clarissa
, it’s somewhat of a small cast, and it got to the point of bringing on whoever was best when it came to the task of being a day player. There was a little bit of, “Yeah, lemme try to get some Asian people here or some black people here.” When we did a high school play or restaurant scene, you do see more people of color, and I would make sure to open that door a little bit more. But it was very limited down in Florida.

RON OLIVER:
There were issues with the cultural differences on the
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
set, because even though D.J. had assembled a really good, smart crew, they were primarily French. Most of them spoke English, and I studied some French in high school, but I’m not fluent. So it was a little bit tricky sometimes, and we’d have communication breakdowns here or there.

ELIZABETH HESS:
Like a good Canadian, I went off to study in England. I came to New York with all my Canadian accent bashed out of me and had a standard British accent. And all the agents said, “You’ll never work unless you lose that thing.” And I thought, “Oh! I’ve spent all this time and money . . .” So I thought whatever happens, that’s my voice. When I was cast as the mom on
Clarissa
, there was actually some concern about my accent because it’s very transatlantic.

ABBY HAGYARD:
Sometimes a joke on
You Can’t Do That on Television
would originate in Roger’s British and we would have to translate it to Canadian.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
Then there was the Americanization of the show we didn’t understand. In the “College” episode, the script kept referring to colleges I’d never heard of—Vassar, Barnard. What the hell is that? And in Canada, we don’t call things “pop” or “soda.” We only say “soft drink.” I call my mom “mum,” obviously. We would say “aboot” . . .

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
Roger always said the reason he picked Canada was that we didn’t have accents. For American ears, obviously, we had an accent, but to us, we didn’t at all.

VANESSA LINDORES:
We were told not to say “eh.” Other than that, we had no idea we had accents. I live in the U.S. now, so now I hear it. It’s funny.

CRAIG PRYCE:
When you get the right elements visually, I don’t even think you can notice. There’s always this thing about “oots” and “aboots” and that kind of stuff. There was a real coproduction element on
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
with people involved both stateside and also sometimes Quebecois.

ROSS HULL:
There were key words that I learned very quickly not to make the mistake about. In Montreal, it was different than Ontario English, so we kind of had to modify it a little bit. There was “roof” and a few other key words that we had to learn how to say. Or “sorry” instead of “sore-y.” That’s a big one. To this day, as a Canadian broadcaster, people will write to me and say, “You sound American.”

FRED NEWMAN:
Jim had a Southern kid on
Doug
with Patti Mayonnaise, and that was kind of rare for a series at that time.

CONNIE SHULMAN:
I’m from East Tennessee, and some people are better at losing their accents than others. I guess I didn’t do that. I’ve been up here a long time, and it’s the kind of thing where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

BECCA LISH:
Connie is unusual in that she actually sounds like that. I think she initially auditioned for Skeeter too, but who could now imagine Patti Mayonnaise sounding any other way?

WENDY LITWACK:
To go with the Southern accent true-to-life was very bold. Most other kids’ networks would never have done that. They go for the very homogenized, pasteurized, all-American talent.

COURTNEY CONTE:
Nickelodeon wanted us to look like the UN. They wanted a little bit of everything.

ABBY HAGYARD:
We had Brody and at least three or four black kids. There were some Native Canadians, there were some Asians on the show. We had someone who was Inuit. We had people of different cultural backgrounds. We had French, we had people from different countries. We had a very diverse set of children on that show. I am Caucasian. Les was Caucasian. That was just happenstance. I like to say that I’ve remarkably kept my figure, having had 260 children!

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
There was also the fact that one girl who might be your girlfriend in one scene was your sister in another.
That’s
where there was some of the funniest off-camera dialogue.

ADAM REID:
Les and Abby thought it was great that they had this multiethnic, very diverse family. That was part of the beauty of the show. When you’re in it, you don’t think it’s special. Of
course
there would be representations of all these ethnicities on the show. That’s what school is, that’s what communities are. Why wouldn’t this be reflected on television?

CHUCK VINSON:
We were doing an episode of
Clarissa
during the time that the Rodney King trial led to a verdict in favor of the cops, which started a riot. LA was just
on fire
. We were doing an episode where Clarissa goes back in time, and I needed torches to show the chaos in this scene. So I used to make small, little statements within scenes when I could. You know, show what was going on at the time.

VENUS DEMILO:
I didn’t think about it in terms of race at all. We were all so different. We came from all walks of life. We were so many different races, all together. On
Salute Your Shorts
, it was more about girls against boys than it was about race.

DAVID SIDONI:
The girls on
Roundhouse
would say the guys tended to be immature and childish on set. I would say they were right. We didn’t care. We had fun! It was the guys against the girls. We’d be playing with remote-control cars and other games and video games. Just being boys.

JASON ZIMBLER:
Being a guy on a young girl show? Bravo. Lucky to get a gig on a show that’s doing such unconventional work. It didn’t need to be about “guy power.” Although there was “Ferguson Explains It All,” when we kicked her out of the opening titles and my character rewrote it. We even redid the titles for that episode.

SEAN O’NEAL:
Being on
Clarissa
? Geez, I was the “best friend.” I was “the guy that climbed through the window.” I had this idol status, even though I was a nobody. I still have that to go on. “I was that guy on
Clarissa
.”