Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (22 page)

BOB POMANN:
Doing the sound effects for
Doug
was almost like doing a movie: It was very time-consuming for me. I had to work every night, including weekends. I gave up time with my kids.
Doug
became my girlfriend. I felt like it was worth it.

DAVID CAMPBELL:
We were there from nine in the morning—sometimes earlier—until midnight or later. Sometimes we’d stay until three or four in the morning writing premises, because Mister Kriegman or Master Coffey would say, “This sucks. Come up with something better.” It was pretty intense, but it was fun.

VANESSA COFFEY:
I didn’t use story editors at all in the first seasons when Mary and I were doing it together. Then we were doing three series and six pilots and developing
Rocko’s Modern Life
. I needed help, so I brought Mitchell and Will in.

WILL MCROBB:
Mitchell had a huge hit show. He was a scientist of comedy. But people running their own shows he story-edited admired him less. If he had been more beloved, I wouldn’t have gotten those jobs. I think he had a more pedantic style—preaching his theories—and I was just a wide-eyed enthusiast. And I think that was easier to digest.

DAVID CAMPBELL:
It might have been a Waterloo moment when there was a script meeting at Nickelodeon and Mitchell said something along the lines of, “Doug would never do that.”

MARY HARRINGTON:
When I was working with Mitchell, who was our story editor on
Doug
at the time, helping us give notes to Jim and his team, there was an episode when Mitchell said, “What if Doug did
this
instead of
that
?” And Jim was like, “But that’s not how it happened!” I felt like we were giving story notes about this guy’s
life
!

ALAN SILBERBERG:
I never felt rewritten by Jim Jinkins. But I know that Jim and Dave Campbell were very involved in the scripts, going line by line through them. I always felt that the shows got better.

DAVID CAMPBELL:
There was an episode of Doug finding some money and he goes and returns it to the police. Our writers were up in arms against it. They were like, “What kid is gonna find money and return it to the police station?” So Jim and I had to take the weekend off and go to the country and write this episode. Every now and then, you’re inevitably gonna have a clash.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
Mitchell offended me so many times. The last time he offended me, he said he wanted me to do something some way and I didn’t want to. Then he told me just to try it. So I tried it and we were having a conference and I had to call Mitchell and I said, “We tried it. Paul doesn’t like it, Arlene doesn’t like it, no one likes it. I have a roomful of writers here who agree it doesn’t work this way.” And Mitchell said—and this was the end of me and Mitchell—“I don’t fucking care if the whole Writers Guild West disagrees with me. I want it this way.” We went to Paul and said, “We’re quitting if Mitchell doesn’t leave.”

PAUL GERMAIN:
Little by little, it grew worse until it became clear to me we couldn’t go on like this. I had writers telling me, “Either he goes or I go.” Honestly, I like Mitchell, but I wish I would have taken a stronger stance with him from the beginning.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
He went and fired Mitchell, but at that point I had already quit, and was too proud to come back. When Paul fired Mitchell, he found out that everybody else—including the
Doug
guys, who are the nicest people on the planet—had already fired Mitchell. “Goddamn it! Why am I the last guy to fire Mitchell?”

MARY HARRINGTON:
I’m sorry things didn’t work out with him. Mitchell was a significant part of getting Nicktoons up and running. Especially in the writing areas.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
The hard thing about Mitchell was that we’d have an outline for a story, but we couldn’t go to script until Mitchell approved it and he was down in Florida shooting
Clarissa
. Paul would be going crazy because we wouldn’t hear from Mitchell all day and we
had
to get the script in. It was insane that they had Mitchell as the gatekeeper on our show while he was shooting
Clarissa
. I blame Nick for that.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
To give Mitchell credit where credit was due, in the second or third season, we were doing all of these crazy things, and Mitchell noticed this, saying we didn’t need to lose the silly comedy but that we should write in different genres. So every five episodes we’d write a “WH”—“Wreak Havoc”—episode. Then we’d do a Tommy episode. Then a Chuckie episode. Then one about the kids being afraid. We would do an “experimental” episode every tenth, I think. They were all genres we created so we could keep the series fresh with something new. And that was thanks to Mitchell.

KEN SCARBOROUGH:
Will was great, but
Doug
wasn’t his show. He was at times in a hard place, because what he was doing—like all of us—was making sure everybody was happy. There were some weird screaming fights about whether or not the show was too mean. Jim was a professional and would calmly reiterate his idea of what the show was. He’s an expert at keeping it in. I had a story editor I brought in—a guy who I’d work with in the past who was very abrasive—and we sometimes were all shocked at how this guy would fly in Jim’s face while Jim just sucked it up.

DAVID CAMPBELL:
The thing that sticks out the most for me as far as what made Jim Doug and Doug Jim—and this was really intrinsic to all the stories—was this crazy emotional extreme where he imagines the worst thing that could possibly happen to him . . . and almost at the same time imagines the best thing that can happen. He actually manages it pretty well, like a straight, even, calm, sweet, kind, gentle person. Which he is. But his inner emotional life has much more turmoil.

VANESSA COFFEY:
We never had an argument. The only thing Jim ever said to me was, “
Ren & Stimpy
is getting so much attention because of John. I feel like the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” And I said, “Jim, you have no idea how thankful I am that I have you. You don’t need the oil.”

WILL MCROBB:
Jim was the anti–John K. He was a genius too, but in a self-effacing, low-key way.

KEN SCARBOROUGH:
Jim was always wanting
Doug
to be a safe place for kids who were like him, without blood or scary things like that. Nickelodeon was at the time trying to push the edges of what cartoons did, so in some ways they didn’t know what they’d gotten with
Doug
. I think it was a much gentler show than they’d wanted it to be.

DEE LADUKE:
Hey Dude
was about a very secure place where the scariest thing was a snake in the road. We knew we would never have a
Degrassi
thread. We wanted to present growing up to be something that’s liberating, exciting, and not something that would consume you in a bad way. It was age-appropriate and parents trusted us at Nick to be aware of our targeting a very narrow demographic.

WILL MCROBB:
What’s the point of being safe? Let’s be raw. We weren’t educational TV, for sure. We hoped our irreverence and the voice we were speaking in would inspire kids. I don’t know if kids still read
MAD
magazine anymore, but all of us were sparked by
MAD
and National Lampoon in a formative time in our lives. We just wanted to bring that spirit to kids and wanted them to question authority while being clever. And to not take anything too seriously.

HARVEY:
When we were in Philly with
Double Dare
, the stage crew were just as eccentric as . . . I mean, you would never let your children near them if you had any. They looked like what would be hanging out at a bus station and sleeping under a tree or bench. But they were rock-and-roll stage crew guys who also did television. You know what roadies are like.

KENAN THOMPSON:
The crew members were our favorite people. They were always laughing, always seemed a little edgier. Be cool with the tatted-up guys, the guys walking around with drills and hammers. And you learn your professionalism from everyone else.

BYRON TAYLOR:
On
Double Dare
, we didn’t use the same green slime that Geoffrey Darby used on
You Can’t Do That on Television
, because if it sat on stage under the hot lights, an oatmeal-based slime would bake like a rock. And if we didn’t get that off the set, we’d have chunks of greenish plaster. We used applesauce. That was my favorite, with a little bit of food coloring, little milk powder. Something to make it opaque.

DANA CALDERWOOD:
GAK was just sort of a general term they came up with.

BYRON TAYLOR:
One of the crew in Philly started calling it GAK and everyone followed. I can’t remember his name, but his nickname was Skunkhead because he had a punkish strip dyed down the middle of his head.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
There was no genius of Will McRobb or someone in New York coming up with “GAK.” All I will say is it came from the stage crew.
They
called it GAK. And we picked it up. That’s the story. Now, where the
stage crew
got the name from, I’m not telling. Sorry.

MARC SUMMERS:
In 1986 to 1990, we had, shall we say, a “colorful” crew. I love them dearly, and found them to be some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with throughout my career. But without mentioning names, there was a certain amount of recreational
drug activities going on, and “gak” is the street name for heroin. And that’s where it came from. Klinghoffer and me laughed our asses off, because Nickelodeon apparently didn’t do their research and didn’t know. And when we told them, they about shit themselves. “Should we pull this stuff off the market, or what the hell do we do?” So they were hoping that it never got out, and apparently it never did.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
I wasn’t there on
Hey Dude
for the “tequila story.” There’s a different story for why I stopped drinking . . .

GRAHAM YOST:
We had one night when it got really stupid and we decided to play indoor mini-golf. From Dave Brisbin’s room to Alan Goodman’s room at the Ramada. Whoever sank a putt had to drink a shot of tequila. We got absurdly drunk and then had a script read-through at ten the next morning. The three of us were
so
hungover and were looking at each other saying, “We are the stupidest people in the world.”

ERIK MACARTHUR:
I thought
Salute Your Shorts
was cool, and we had a good time. But the people running it were a little bit crazy and it was a little bit nuts. This was a time when there was a lot of coke going around. It tells you what that time was in the nineties. People walking around with big block cell phones, playing it up Hollywood-style and stuff. But we had a blast.

MICHAEL BOWER:
There was drug use on the set. Not from the cast—just some of the older people. I don’t really appreciate that. I have an alcoholic brother—he’s changed his life for the better now—but it was something that crept its way into the show. It was sad to see, but you can’t control everybody.

TREVOR EYSTER:
I didn’t even know about it until I got filled in a little later on. None of it was of such use that it put anyone at risk. I have nothing but
amazing
things to say about the crew.

COURTNEY CONTE:
I don’t remember any of that. Not that I recall. I’m sure they had beer and stuff, but I don’t remember drugs.

KIRK BAILY:
I never
once
saw that on set. It might have been kept from me, but I never saw it. We made one or two trips to Vegas—the crew—when we needed a break from this inane and hilarious show, but it wasn’t outrageous partying. It was just hanging out together.

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
There was a time when Roger Price called an impromptu meeting of the crew, and being the protective—and maybe a little crazy—guy he was, he brought a gun to the meeting, announcing that if anyone tried to give or sell drugs to any of the kids on the show, he would kill them. There was, of course, less laughter in the studio that day.

BLAKE SENNETT:
I don’t want to say
Salute Your Shorts
felt less professional, because that sounds negative and that’s not how I feel. But it felt like summer camp. It was laid-back. I got into that vibe, and I was showing up half an hour late every single day. Eventually, Courtney Conte called me into his office and basically said, “You can’t be late anymore.” I was taken aback. I thought the vibe was so chill! “We’re just riding the wind, man!”

DAVE RHODEN:
You got to remember, here we are—these kids in ninth grade with a driver who’s assigned to us to take us out for meals and/or our own catering service, and an entire theme park that was our backyard to play in.

KENAN THOMPSON:
All these free clothes and these access badges where we could sneak into Universal Studios. It was an “access granted” situation. That was some serious shit, you know what I’m sayin’?

DAVE RHODEN:
Eventually you’re making more money than your schoolteacher. Teenagers are probably hard enough to raise, and then you throw in some extra benefits they’re not used to handling. We could
all
get a little cocky and arrogant.

ADAM WEISSMAN:
Imagine you’re a substitute teacher in seventh or eighth grade. You have a classroom full of kids and you not only have to instantly become the leader of the group in a way that makes them engaged, but you also have to get them to do their jobs, and you have technical considerations, and limited hours because they’re minors and can only work a certain number of hours a day. It’s very challenging.

DAVE RHODEN:
Something we didn’t catch right away was that every single thing we said was picked up by the boom mic, which means every director, producer, soundman,
anybody
listening, heard it. I think it was season two when Chris Lobban—who was always kind of a hothead—was kind of pissed off about the directing or something like that and was bitching about it behind the set one day between cuts. Somebody brought him aside and told him, “Hey, you gotta chill out, because everyone is listening to what you’re saying.”