Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (20 page)

CRAIG BARTLETT:
I was the only boy in a family of four kids; my sisters provided me with that raw material. I’ve always thought in all my writing, the girl characters are a little smarter, they’re driving things, they’re kind of in charge. And the boys are clueless and goofy and can do the pratfall stuff. More pure ego lurching around, crashing into things, and the girls are more trying to drive things. All that stuff I think is true, and I like to write that stuff.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
The women characters kind of ran things on
Rugrats
. It started with Stu. Jack Riley came in, and I thought he was miscast because he was always playing these downbeat, sarcastic characters. Melanie Chartoff then played her character so upbeat, like a yuppie. There was a character sketch of the twins’ mother, and she was always wearing workout clothes with this female symbol on her sweatshirt. Angelica’s mother, Charlotte—my favorite character—was
always
on the phone. The father bowed down to his wife as the alpha dog of the group. All the women were like that on
Rugrats
.

DENIS HANNIGAN:
Some feminists were concerned that Angelica was being portrayed in a negative light, but I talked with Paul and he said to keep doing her music the same way. He wanted her strong. She was fun to write for.

PAUL GERMAIN:
When I was a little kid, in fifth grade, there was this bully who was picking on me, and it turned out she was a girl. I was terrified of her. This became an emblematic thing in my life: a girl bully. I thought it would be cool to do a girl bully on
Rugrats
.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
I heard about that. It’s funny that there was a girl who used to beat him up and that Paul identifies with Tommy. I kind of identified with Tommy, too. I tried to think about my earliest memories, and that would put me into Tommy’s head.

CHUCK SWENSON:
Men are in something of a backseat these days. You see that in popular culture: movies about men being goofballs, guys who are incapable one way or another. They’re children, like the Adam Sandlers of the world. Or even George Clooney—the Sexiest Man in America—gets played in
Up in the Air
. It’s a real representation of the popular psyche.

HOWARD BAKER:
Didi was just as dumb as Stu. Betty was so strong that it became her weakness. Later, when the Carmichaels came along, the mom was such an overachiever that she became a joke. They were
all
pretty inept.

VANESSA COFFEY:
Stu was a new dad. And I thought Grandpa was a strong character. Obviously, Chuckie’s dad is goofy, but we wanted it to be funny. We felt safe with it.

CHRIS RECCARDI:
Ren & Stimpy
was a man-driven show. That comes more from the sensibilities of the thirties and forties, when cartoons were all male-driven. I don’t know that there was any sexism going on. Cheryl Chase was a professional voice actor. Lynne Naylor was working on it and also did some great voice work on it, too, because they couldn’t afford to pay anyone else.

CHRISTINE DANZO:
As a woman, I was delighted to be working on the show. I laughed all the time. I was not the only female. In fact, it was almost a fifty-fifty mix on the first six episodes.

CHERYL CHASE:
There were women in the office at Spumco, where they made
Ren & Stimpy
. There were a lot of artists hanging around. Lynne Naylor was an artist. I never felt it was a boys’ club.

EDDIE FITZGERALD:
There were lots of conversations over lunch with a bunch of guys wondering how we could get more girls in there. John would say things like that: “I feel like I’m in a locker room or something!” At the time, not many girls had that sensibility; some did, thank God. We were always delighted when a new girl came to the studio, and I never
ever
saw any discrimination there.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
Cartoons in general are a kind of “boys’ club” and most cartoonists are guys, but there are some very talented girl cartoonists, too.

HEATHER SHEFFIELD:
In the beginning, I was the only girl on the writing staff, so I did more girl-focused stuff. The first thing I pitched that made it on the air was a Reebok pump bra that inflates like a pump shoe: small, medium, and Dolly Parton.
A League of Their Own
was in theaters, and I pitched a parody of it for boys who threw like girls. Eventually, my dad put quite a few women on staff, but prior to that, I was the only girl.

LISA MELAMED:
The girl characters on
Hey Dude
were as interesting and as complicated as the boy characters. My first episode was about Danny, and it was nice to be able to pull from my own relationships in my teenage years and write about that. One story I wrote—“Sewn at the Hip,” when Melody’s best friend came to visit—was so intensely about my relationship with my best friend that I sent her a check. I didn’t come in with a particular female agenda, but I always knew I wanted to write about the living drama of being a teenage girl.

RON OLIVER:
I’d like to say
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
was a boys’ show, but I have a feeling it was split down the middle, because we would switch off every episode with there being a girl protagonist or a boy protagonist. They were quite conscious of that at Nickelodeon. We were one of the first shows that actually tried to straddle the middle line and succeeded at it.

KARIM MITEFF:
Girls at the time tended to not be big video game players. So we had to figure out a way to make
Nick Arcade
appealing for girls. James and I did our own focus testing and found that girls definitely liked video games, but they liked the kinds of games where they could discover things or where there was some kind of magical device or something that gave them a hidden power. So we incorporated that into the endgame and that got the girls excited. Girls did seem to be less proficient in the endgame. Could have been hesitancy, to some degree. Not as quick to perform . . .

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
I believed that boys and girls had a lot more in common. Part of that was growing up with older sisters who could beat me up sometimes. I didn’t grow up with the same sort of stereotypes. So the distinction was never really an issue for me, and I thought that if we could create a cool girl who boys liked and girls wanted to watch, then we could prove it to America that we could make a show with a girl protagonist.

TOMMY LYNCH:
The premise of
Alex Mack
was based on my father, who was a nuclear physicist and kept radioactive materials in our garage when we were kids. I always wondered what would happen if I ate them, and that was the basic idea of
Alex Mack
, which was originally written for a boy: Alex. Herb Scannell, who was president of the network at the time, called me up and said he loved the script and that he had only one note: The lead should be a girl instead.

LARISA OLEYNIK:
Which I think, obviously, was a great choice!

TOMMY LYNCH:
I did some very little changes, and Alexandra—a girl—was born.

ALISON FANELLI:
I actually thought for a while that Ellen was kind of wimpy. I would get upset with how Will and Chris would write how Ellen would be pining for Pete, but Pete would have a new crush in every episode. I did love that they made her an A student and that she stood up for what she believed in and challenged authority and all that stuff. She gave Pete good, levelheaded advice. Katherine was absolutely key in giving Ellen a good role. She and I always had a very special relationship and still do. She always asked for my input on the script.

LARISA OLEYNIK:
I never gave it much thought, but I liked that Alex was a tomboy. My clothes were comfortable, and I didn’t have to worry about getting them wrinkled. That’s all I cared about when I was twelve.

LISA LEDERER:
Sometimes, as a woman, I find it offensive that men need to write things to teach me what strong women are all about. But when Mitchell would talk about this, it wasn’t like he was trying to show girls how to be strong girls or that he was trying to show women how to be their quirky, unique selves. It felt like an authentic voice coming from him. There was never anything weird or offensive or creepy about it all, for me.

RACHEL SWEET:
I don’t care whether you’re male or female, young or old, white, black . . . doesn’t matter. If you can write something that people identify with, that’s what matters. Mitchell doing a show about a young girl never bothered me at all. I never felt he had to be it to write it.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Gerry said that men can’t write for women. And I said, “That’s not fair; that’s not true,” and that Mitchell should write them. And she agreed that she was wrong.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
The first thing I said was if Mitchell was creating it, I wanted to make sure there was a woman writing or directing it, because I didn’t think he could get it without having a woman there in a top creative role. A few months later, they brought me the pilot and I said there was no woman writer and no woman director and that I was not going forward on this show. They were busted because they didn’t have the nuance right. Geoffrey Darby knew I was right, so they fixed it.

SARAH CONDON:
Mitchell hired female writers, obviously, and was very respectful of that. He would often say, “How would you feel?” or “How did you feel?” or “What would happen if this happened to you?” He was quite wonderful about that, and really talked to Melissa a lot, too.

LISA LEDERER:
I was really excited about being able to put something on TV that people might not have seen before, especially around a young girl. Clarissa didn’t behave the way young girls had been behaving on TV. For me as a visual person to try to describe that to a viewing audience through wardrobe, those are the kinds of problem-solving challenges a costume designer really loves.

HERB SCANNELL:
That’s what I set out to do as director of programming: make sitcoms and news shows for kids, put lead girl characters and race diversity in shows that hadn’t been done before. It was like having a palette of paint where they used only black and white and all of a sudden there were all these colors available to us. That was the beauty of working at Nick.

RICHARD PURSEL:
This is the most loaded question of the lot. An entire book could be written based on this one alone.

BILL WRAY:
We did a cartoon called “Man’s Best Friend.” Nickelodeon wanted twenty seconds cut from that. Maybe a little more. We were all stunned that John wouldn’t make the cuts, because Nick was giving him an ultimatum. “Nope, I’m not cutting
one second
from that cartoon. It’s genius.” Which it is, but this was when we were beginning to get a lot of success, and John was feeling it. “I am the most successful Nickelodeon thing. I’m giving my heart and soul to this thing.
Don’t fuck with me!
” And this was the highest-budgeted film we’d ever done. I heard rumors that we got close to spending $250,000 on it. A
lot
of money for a cartoon back then. Nick wanted their investment back, they couldn’t get it, and they had to shelve this expensive cartoon. I went to Jim Smith thinking he could reason with John, because I’d talked to Bob Camp and Bob wanted to cave, thinking Nick had a point. Jim was like, “Fuck Nick.” And that was the catalyst.

BILLY WEST:
Nickelodeon loved the fact that
Ren & Stimpy
was delivering Christmas to them. It was raining gifts and presents and revenues. They loved all that. But I think they kind of wished that it wasn’t the content that it was.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
I don’t think
Ren & Stimpy
was too offensive. We introduced farts and boogers to cartoons, but kids fart and pick their noses and laugh about it all the time. Things that offend
me
are ugliness, slasher movies, and reality shows.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
The first six episodes were not that scary. What happened
afterward
was scary. When the show was a success—and it was a giant success right off the bat—I had dinner with John and he said, “Now that it’s a big hit, you have no right to tell me how much it’s going to cost, when I’m going to deliver it, or what the content is.” And I said, “John, you know what? I really don’t care what it costs. And I don’t even care about the delivery. But the content
is
important. I can’t let you do that.”

WILL MCROBB:
John became fixated with George Liquor, who also ended up in “Man’s Best Friend.” Nobody at Nick wanted George Liquor. That created a lot of bad blood.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
There were
massive
storyboards brought in about George Liquor, who was not a character we had bought. When we originally saw
Ren & Stimpy
, there were sixteen to twenty characters. And we chose just those two characters.
Doug
had tons of characters, and
they
had to hone it down, too. If there are too many characters, you don’t know who to focus on. You can’t depart from the show you’d been successful with.

VANESSA COFFEY:
John had tried this before. I had thrown one of his storyboards away: “Are you kidding me? You’re
not
doing that to Ren and Stimpy.” And then it was “Man’s Best Friend,” with a memo saying he couldn’t deliver it on time and on budget. Basically, “We’ll get it to you whenever we get it to you. F U.”

CHERYL CHASE:
Ren & Stimpy
got a little too violent for me. I don’t like too much violence in cartoons. And creative people sometimes lose control and make bad decisions.

BOB JAQUES:
Vanessa Coffey asked me to animate new scenes for “Man’s Best Friend” to replace the objectionable content so it could be aired. Out of respect for John and his position, I declined to do so.

VANESSA COFFEY:
When we got it, we couldn’t air it. I walked down to Gerry’s office and said, “We can’t air this.” And we didn’t.

CHRIS RECCARDI:
I agreed it was scary, but “Man’s Best Friend” was something new, you know? It looked gorgeous. I felt like they could have aired it, but the show was getting a lot of attention and there was a lot of fear about what parents would think.

THOMAS MINTON:
Nick banned the episode, and John resorted to floating it as a bootleg VHS tape just to get it out there. This was all front-page news in
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
in September of 1992. Around the same time, John was fired by Nick.

VANESSA COFFEY:
I was the last person who wanted John to leave the show, but he gave us no choice. You can’t be in production with a producer who’s out of control.

THOMAS MINTON:
It was front-page entertainment news because a creator had been canned from his own megahit creation. Hardly Nick’s finest hour. A great deal of subsequent animosity was exacerbated and perpetuated in print media interviews given by people on both sides of the issue.

MIKE FONTANELLI:
I had friends on both sides, and there was a lot of resentment. For some reason, there’s still resentment years later. The people we’re talking about have not moved on.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
Lots of people have their own opinions, as is their right. You can never get everyone to agree on anything. But not all opinions are equal.

JIM BALLANTINE:
The sad thing about the breakup is that it was painful for
everybody
. I don’t think the show ever really recovered from it. We were getting death threats. Nickelodeon was still a small handful of people at the time who had never had to deal with a tough situation like this.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
During the summer break between season one and two, Gerry Laybourne invited me and the main creative crew to New York to wine and dine us in congratulations for the success of the show . . .

JIM BALLANTINE:
There was a point where John flew out to New York to meet with the Nickelodeon executives, basically to say, “Just give us more money and more time because we’re brilliant and we’re making the best damn cartoon on TV.” While John was in New York City, Bob Camp went to John’s door and drew a huge pair of balls that was repainted by the time he returned.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
Gerry made a toast to us—telling me I had put Nickelodeon on the map—and once we started talking, I asked Vanessa and her if they personally liked the show. They assured me they loved it, so I took the opportunity to ask if they would trust my crazy story ideas more during the second season. They promised they would.

WILL MCROBB:
John truly believed that kids wanted things that were disgusting. Many conversations we had were about how grossness was good and grossness was art.

CHRIS RECCARDI:
John and I went to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles on Gower Street and you’d see the likes of George Foreman there. A lot of heavyweight people, African-American culture, entertainment business. Generally, we were the only white guys in there at the time. We’re at lunch and John came up with this idea for “Ren’s Toothache” where the gum holes get stinky and so disgusting. He’s describing this entire thing to me, and right in the middle of it, this giant black guy at the table next to us goes, “Hey! Hey, hey!” I turn around and look at him. “I’m trying to eat my food here! And you guys are talking about boogers and pus!” That ended up going in the show. That kind of stuff happened a lot.

WILL MCROBB:
That’s what Nick wanted, but there was a line. “John, you can’t do a blowjob joke on
Ren & Stimpy
.” “But no kid’s gonna get it; it’ll go right over their heads!” Every time I’d make a counterargument, his response was, “It’s not like I’m showing them fucking.”

HOWARD BAKER:
Spumco had issues with getting things done all the way sometimes, and some shots would be ripped out of an artist’s hand and just thrown in the box half-baked.

JIM BALLANTINE:
Compared to television animation that’s made today, these were
very
generous budgets, but John’s demand for perfection kept the productivity very low. John would not allow a storyboard or a layout to move on to the next stage of production unless it was perfect. And the interaction with Nickelodeon became more and more confrontational.

VANESSA COFFEY:
We had sheriffs trying to get our materials from John out of his studio.

EDDIE FITZGERALD:
If
John was at fault for his so-called perfection, it reminds me of the Pope telling Michelangelo to hurry up with the painting of the Sistine Chapel. John was creating the future of the animation industry.

FRED SEIBERT:
Though John clearly has a large group of minions who believe that he does no wrong to this day, I thought he did a lot of things that were uncool. And I think that
Nickelodeon
did some things that were uncool.

HOWARD BAKER:
We all want to do good work, but I’m afraid John didn’t understand that by selling a show to a TV network, he also had a responsibility to get it done under some parameters. I was the last step to getting each episode done, and I had to have all my ducks in a row or things wouldn’t go forward. John behaved under the impression that the overseas studio would stop whatever they were doing to work on his show. They would not. The studio was a business and had
other
screaming clients, too.

MARY HARRINGTON:
The sixth episode of
Ren & Stimpy
took so long to come out, we had to premiere it as the “Lost Episode” of
Ren & Stimpy
. They had turned that bad situation into a very funny one. It was all about creative freedom in the past, but now it was, “How much money is MTV Networks willing to spend on
Ren & Stimpy
?”

LINDA SIMENSKY:
The airing schedule for
Ren & Stimpy
was episode one, then . . . episode one. Then episode two. Then back to episode one. Then episode three. Would that make
you
happy?

EDDIE FITZGERALD:
Somebody who was in the position to know said to John, “I have the statistics of how the show is viewed. And the repeats exceed the previous week’s airing.”

VANESSA COFFEY:
Yes, we got good ratings with
Ren & Stimpy
with few episodes . . . but the ratings for
Doug
and
Rugrats
were over 2.0, too. That whole
block
raised the ratings for Nick, not just
Ren & Stimpy
. And ultimately, we couldn’t syndicate it the way we could with
Doug
and
Rugrats
.

JIM BALLANTINE:
We were under an enormous amount of scrutiny, and the show was starting to receive a lot of publicity.

CHRIS RECCARDI:
It’s been impossible to get the straight story because there’s so much drama. I only know the facts: They were missing airdates; they were not delivering episodes.

BOB CAMP:
Is somebody saying otherwise? If so, they’re liars.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
We actually only missed one deadline. For the sixth episode of season one. “Stimpy’s Invention” was late because Nickelodeon had told us to stop production on it after they saw the storyboard. We were told we’d have to write a new story and draw a new storyboard from scratch. When I told them that would make the show late, they didn’t seem to understand why. They thought you could just snap your fingers and new cartoons could appear—for free—out of the air instantly. Vanessa had already signed off on the story outline, but Will McRobb had been against the story from the beginning. He kept telling me we shouldn’t make a cartoon about “mind control” for kids. I had no idea what he was talking about.

BOB CAMP:
We got away with great shit all the time, because Vanessa Coffey fought for the show all the time. She was John’s greatest supporter.

VANESSA COFFEY:
John wasn’t the only one who had battles at Nick. So did I.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
My relationship with Vanessa was great until the end. She liked the heartwarming scenes, and I pushed for the stuff I knew kids liked. So we would together concoct a bipartisan cartoon show.

BOB CAMP:
Vanessa was always supportive, and Will McRobb was a good writer and helped a lot. If we didn’t have notes, the shows would probably not have been so successful.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
I literally had to beg Vanessa to let me put “Stimpy’s Invention” into production. But by that time, we had lost a month through no fault of our own. “Stimpy’s Invention” and “Space Madness” were both rejected by Nickelodeon before I talked them into letting me do them. And they turned out to be our two most popular episodes.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Of course John was difficult. He was also
brilliant
. But then he would get angry at the network and put something in because he’s crazy. He’d say, “Oh, I’ll get them for killing this! If I can’t do butt plugs, I’ll do
this
!”
Okay . . .

RICHARD PURSEL:
John figured he’d teach the execs a lesson and have his worst artist do the changes they wanted. Of course I saw it as a chance to shine, though my drawings were pretty bad. Nick didn’t want Ren to pray for “girls and cars,” so my change was “huge pectoral muscles and a fridge with a padlock.” “Magic boogers” became . . . “magic nose goblins.”