Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (2 page)

This oral history of Nickelodeon is created from a series of original, one-on-one interviews conducted by the author. Some quotes have been appropriately modified for purposes of clarity.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
It was sort of us going through the things a lot of kids do . . . but we were doing it on TV. I can go back and see myself growing up before my very own eyes—for all the world to see.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
It’s part of how I became who I am now. I’ve heard the same thing happened to me said by people who grew up watching the show. It was okay to be weird and be a little bit off and not be completely status quo. It sort of molded me. I still burp and stick things up my nose.

ELIZABETH HESS:
Of course, both Melissa Joan Hart and Jason Zimbler were going through huge changes. They went through puberty over the course of
Clarissa
. They both learned how to drive during the course of the shows. Jason’s voice changed. Melissa’s body went from a girl to a young woman. All those sorts of things.

JUDY GRAFE:
Something everybody noticed was when Michael Maronna’s voice was changing. We were all like, “What does
that
mean? Is he still going to be Pete?” Then once he was becoming an early teen idol, all the young girls were coming to the sets all atwitter over him.
That’s
something we noticed, too.

ALISON FANELLI:
Some weeks were horrid because we were going through puberty and I might have this big pimple on my forehead while I’m trying to shoot a close-up. I got to a point where
every
scene they were putting powder on my face, because we were just oily teenagers. After a while, they were more conscious about giving us different dressing spaces instead of trading off in the same space. But mine was near Michael’s and Danny’s. Oh gosh, yeah. It was super awkward.

VANESSA LINDORES:
Growing up isn’t easy. Doing it in front of a lot of people doesn’t make it any easier.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
This entrance into puberty was being captured on film. For myself, it was kind of jarring.

LARISA OLEYNIK:
It’s definitely embarrassing when you’re literally growing up in front of people’s eyes. You’re doing wardrobe fittings and it’s like, “Oh! I have hips now! I’m not just the beanpole I used to be!” It’s awkward, but no more awkward than it would be otherwise. It would have been more awkward if I had just been going to junior high being like, “What do I do?”

HEIDI LUCAS:
There was something female-related that I went through on
Salute Your Shorts
, and I felt completely secure with the female crew that was there. I knew I could take a problem or concern to anyone and they would wrap their arms around me physically and figuratively to help me through any problem.

HERB SCANNELL:
Things were, by and large, sympathetic. Most of the kids had family structures they were living in, and our job was to let them continue being kids.

JASON ZIMBLER:
Those people helped to raise me. They made me funny. They made me a good person.

ALISON FANELLI:
But parts of it
were
really awkward and hard. In the “What We Did on Our Summer Vacation” special, I was eleven or twelve and working in the photo booth costume. It was a yellow T-shirt and a green jumper that was a skirt. Something went wrong with the microphone, they yelled cut, and one of the crew members came over, got down on his knees, and went right for the microphone, which was wrapped around my waist under the dress. My mom came
flying
out of nowhere: “No! No! No!” That was the first time I was conscious to, “Oh, maybe I should be more aware that he was grabbing me!” It was totally professional, but . . .

JESSICA GAYNES:
I was the youngest of all of the hosts on
Wild & Crazy Kids
. And I was a
girl
. Sometimes it’s shocking how we’d get one crew person who would be
clueless
. There was one time where they said, “Put them in their spaces.” One of them thought it would be funny to say, “Jessica’s in her
hole
!” I heard it. And everybody who heard it, their jaws dropped. One person said, “What are you doing? She’s a minor! Do you want to get
sued
?” Those incidents are scarring. Young girls can’t handle that.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
The crew on
You Can’t Do That on Television
introduced me to pornography.
Playboy
was always lying around.

ADAM WEISSMAN:
You’re going through hormonal changes on your own, you’re feeling awkward in your own body, you’re trying to figure yourself out . . . and then you thrust that awkwardness in front of the cameras, in front of people, doing scripted TV, which you may or may not have been trained to do. You have to deal with the pressures of a TV show, and two or three hours a day in short increments, you get pulled off the set to go to school. There’s somebody knocking on the door every twenty minutes, saying, “Okay, it’s time to come back to the set!”

JUSTIN CAMMY:
That is the totally unglamorous nature to making a TV show: The days are long, it’s really boring, you’re inside an overly air-conditioned studio. Most of the time you’re waiting for lights to work or cameras to be set. It’s a fun job, but nevertheless a job.

MICHAEL MARONNA:
I didn’t think of it so much as a career. I had my individual pursuits—was into my Nintendo, playing outside . . .

LARISA OLEYNIK:
I was able to maintain a relatively normal life. We all just got up, went to work, and then did our homework. Then went to bed. And socialized like normal human beings on the weekend.

JOANNA GARCIA:
My parents were okay with me doing
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
because it was conducive to being normal and staying in school in Florida, then going up for a couple weeks to shoot in Montreal. I got the best of both worlds.

JACOB TIERNEY:
Those of us in the Midnight Society weren’t in the stories; we just kinda burned our little bits and played with the fire. They taped all of our stuff at the beginning of each season.

D.J. MACHALE:
That was a challenge, because it meant all the stories had to be set up very early on because we couldn’t do a campfire scene where the kids would say, “This is a story about a really scary . . .
thing
.”

JACOB TIERNEY:
We did it—the campfire stuff—so quickly. If memory serves, we’d do a whole season maybe within two weeks. Maybe four of them a day, and then we were done. It’s kind of a black hole in my memory.

JUDY GRAFE:
Danny’s mother made him understand that this was a temporary thing and that a lot of times what happens when kids who are actors grow up is that they find there’s nothing there for them.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
My parents were really good at keeping me grounded. I worked at a bagel store while working on
All That
. I played rec soccer and baseball during all the shooting of
Pete & Pete
. They made sure to work really hard so I wouldn’t have a Michael Jackson upbringing or anything.

DANNY COOKSEY:
It’s an interesting thing that happens when you’re successful and young; it changes everything. I was around a lot of people who were sort of affected by it, and it’s a weird chip that people carry around. You can either take the negative around with you or take the positive. Nobody comes out unscathed.

MELISSA JOAN HART:
I was working too hard to get into trouble. I wasn’t in Hollywood; I was in Orlando, and other than the two boys on
Clarissa
, I was the only one around my age. All the people around were like big brothers and sisters keeping an eye on me, telling me what’s right and wrong. I didn’t have to go drinking or do drugs or go to clubs or any of that, because I was having such fun being a part of this whole thing.

SEAN O’NEAL:
When kids are in the spotlight and they are not given room to breathe and they are sucked into the vortex of what this industry can do to certain people, that’s a shame. I went through some transitional periods afterward that took a long time to really get me solid. But man, the show was an amazing experience.

ADAM REID:
It wasn’t a big deal in Ottawa. None of my friends cared that I was doing
You Can’t Do That on Television
. Several times I would do these trips—Vanessa, Doug, Les, and I went and rolled Easter eggs on the White House lawn; we met George Bush!—and then we’d go back to school like nothing happened.

BLAKE SENNETT:
Any time you bounce back and forth, it’s weird. You’re the king of the universe and then you go back to school and you have no friends and you’re “that nerdy theater kid.” I felt like a dork in high school. But it was worth it.

ALISON FANELLI:
I got teased a bunch in elementary school. In high school, they knew that I was gone for four months of the school year and then I’d be back. The teachers were even used to it. I had a really tight-knit group of friends who knew what I was doing. When I was off set, I was Ally. I got to be me: go to school, go to homecoming dances, and play the oboe, and sing in the theater show. Growing up, no matter how big a show is—and we didn’t think
Pete & Pete
was all that popular at the time—you just gotta be careful of the friends you pick. I could tell which people wanted to ask about the show and hang out just because I was on a show, as opposed to my friends. That’s a good life lesson.

HEIDI LUCAS:
When life went back to normal, and the show went on syndication, I found a world of conflict. I had so much praise and support from my family. My true friends thought it was the greatest thing in the world. But then I would go to school . . . I could not escape enough. I had to have lunch in a teacher’s homeroom with a teacher because it was the safest place for me to go. Everybody wanted to beat me up. I had “kick your ass” threats all over my locker; I had “Heidi ho” written on my locker. It got so bad I was pulled out and was homeschooled for my last year and a half. That’s how bad it was.

MEGAN BERWICK:
A lot of kids who act go through the same thing where everybody hates you. The other thing is that you’re not in school enough in a year that you can actually be a part of any of the cliques. One of the things that struck me about junior high was how many lunch breaks I’d spend sitting in the bathroom alone. It wasn’t until college that I realized I was actually pretty and could date and all that stuff. I definitely
never
got asked out in high school. Not a single time.

TREVOR EYSTER:
I certainly would never have thought Megan would have had that trouble. Sure, she had braces, but she was bright, amazingly intelligent, quirky, charming.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
For me, it was typical, normal growing up. People made fun of people for different things. I made it out all right. I got a lot of kids on to the show because I lived in Jersey where we shot, so if they needed kid extras, I would invite people to come. That helped me make friends.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
The pilot was going to just be this fun thing I never thought would go any further. When we went off to do it, it sort of felt like a dream. I was really new to it at the time. The day we were going to fly to Arizona for
Hey Dude
was the day they were announcing homecoming in my school, and that was a big deal. I still went to school in the morning before we drove to JFK Airport to get on the flight. I was still really invested in my “real” life, as I called it.

DAVE RHODEN:
My parents would pick me up right from high school, drive me to the studios, and we’d be there until eight fifteen or eight thirty at night. Get home around nine to eat dinner and then try to crank out homework until around ten. On top of that, we had lines to memorize. Some teachers wouldn’t always collect our homework, but we would be told to do it anyway. So I would literally guess each night which homework assignments would be picked up the next day in class and work on those ones.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
I wouldn’t say my grades suffered at all. But I was involved with gymnastics at the time I started
You Can’t Do That on Television
and had to drop that activity. It might seem like an obvious choice, but it was a difficult one for me because I really enjoyed gymnastics.

ROGER PRICE:
None of the
You Can’t Do That on Television
kids were encouraged to leave school. Most of them kept up with their schoolwork. There was a limit on the hours they might work.

ALISON FANELLI:
My tutors on set were always very supportive of my academic career. Even if I were to have continued with acting or directing, they still would’ve encouraged me to go to college.

DAVE RHODEN:
Part of Saturday we would be tutored because we were missing a Monday of school every week. Imagine a bunch of rebellious teenagers in a little trailer with one lady at a time who would be tutoring us on multiple subjects. There was one lady they brought in to teach us foreign language. She’d work with Jocelyn Steiner on Latin, she’d work with me on Spanish, and she’d work with either Chris Lobban or Rick Galloway on French. On top of that, she was deaf.