Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (25 page)

RITA HESTER:
When they cut us off at fifty-two episodes and replaced us with
All That
, it was difficult for us. Right at the end of our last season, record executives had been showing up. We had four albums in the works with Giant Records. They even put a poster inside a cereal box of the
Roundhouse
cast with a big sticker on it that said the date of the record release. Suddenly, Nick canceled the show and said no to the record deal. I’m not bitter, because I love the fact Nick gave us the opportunity to do something on TV that might never have been done. But we had a clothing line all ready to go called Rebel Tags. We had an agreement with Pace Management to do a thirty-city tour with a huge advance, and everything went away when the show got canceled.

HERB SCANNELL:
All that stuff had been talked about, but I didn’t know if it was actually going to happen.

BENNY HESTER:
The tour was already sold in advance and the record contracts were already issued. We’d named the first cast album. Howard Benson, who’s a very well-known record producer, worked with me on it for weeks.

HERB SCANNELL:
The ratings for
Roundhouse
were never as high as the other shows’.

BUDDY SHEFFIELD:
The ratings were always good; I don’t think it was that. I never understood the politics going on there and why certain decisions were made, why the show was canceled.

BENNY HESTER:
Robbie Rowe had ambitions other than being a Nickelodeon executive . . . and eventually her husband put
All That
into our time slot—which kind of speaks for itself.

JOHN CRANE:
Always hovering over us was the idea that Nick would rather have a sketch show with kids as the stars. When it happened, it wasn’t a surprise. We knew that was always the case.

HERB SCANNELL:
We felt like we’d fulfilled what we said we would do, which was getting to a certain number of shows and either move on or spin off. That was our business model: fifty-two or sixty-five, then move on and try something else.

RITA HESTER:
It was a difficult pill to swallow for us.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
When I came onto
Rugrats
, Steve Viksten and I wrote the second episode together. We didn’t really know what was going on, but very quickly it became clear that there was a problem in a way, a disconnect between Paul, Gabor, and Arlene. That triangle.

PAUL GERMAIN:
I’m a strong personality, and as far as I’m concerned,
Rugrats
was my show that I would force my will on to push it in directions I wanted it to go. First of all, Arlene did not like Angelica. She thought the character was too mean and too cruel.
That
was a fight we had for a few months.

CHUCK SWENSON:
Arlene didn’t like her because Angelica was mean and was teaching kids meanness. The story guys’ point of view was they we were using her as a
foil
for meanness.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
You need that foil. You can’t have everybody be nice, because then it’s just pabulum. And we wanted it to be
their
world and didn’t want to make it so it was a negative
adult
foil. It needed to be a peer group foil.

CHERYL CHASE:
I guess it wasn’t any of my business. In the
New Yorker
, Arlene said how she hated this character. I didn’t know that. Angelica was meaner in the Paul Germain era, and after he left, Arlene made Angelica sweeter and nicer. She didn’t want the character to be a role model for her children. Personally, I think Angelica should have been the little brat, because you need to stir things up.

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
Having known narcissistic kids of both genders, I felt the little bitch was pretty true to life and that Cheryl did a great job.

MARY HARRINGTON:
It was really important to do research groups with
Rugrats
, and the moderator asked, “Should we take Angelica off of the show? Is she too mean?” And the kids
absolutely loved her
! It was a love-hate situation, the fantasy of getting back at the bullies. She’s one of the most loved characters on the show, and we tested that time and time again.

CHERYL CHASE:
Susan Sarandon was in the
Rugrats in Paris
movie and said on Rosie O’Donnell’s show that Angelica was her favorite character. I found out from a friend doing makeup at a press junket that somebody asked Clint Eastwood if he watched his own movies at home. “Heck no. At my house, it’s
Rugrats
. They’re on all day. And Angelica’s my favorite character.” Everybody has an Angelica in their lives.

VANESSA COFFEY:
If I’m not mistaken, she could be mean and conniving, but she would typically get in trouble for it.

CHERYL CHASE:
I didn’t think she was influencing kids the wrong way. Parents would tell me they used Angelica as an example of how
not
to behave.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
Arlene would come in every morning at nine and leave every day at noon exactly. There was a maintenance guy at Klasky-Csupo—long-haired hippie guy in a tank top—whose job was to come in at noon and say, “Arlene, it’s noon. It’s time to go.” We all started coming in later and later: I’d get there at ten thirty, eleven sometimes, hoping someone else would get in there first and have to deal with Arlene. She’d have all these notes, and it was usually, “Why are the babies fighting with each other? Why does Angelica say, ‘You dumb babies’?” Which is a line I wrote. “Arlene, any TV show needs conflict; otherwise the audience gets bored.” “I don’t see why the babies can’t just get along.”

CHERYL CHASE:
People wanted me to say it all the time when I’d sign autographs. They’d want me to put it
on
the autograph. It’s her tagline. It’s iconic. Whenever I say it, it just brings people back.

VANESSA COFFEY:
“You dumb babies” was about Angelica being jealous. Babies get a lot of attention and Angelica was jealous. She had her issues. She was raised by a mother who didn’t give her a lot of attention, because she was a working mom who was on the phone all of the time. Angelica was a complicated character. We needed her. She added a lot.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
I had to go through this every day for an hour if I got in there first. Eventually Arlene insisted that we take stuff out of it or she wouldn’t approve the script. I told Paul, “I’m taking this out, but I’m coming to the recording session and I’ll feed you the lines I took out. She won’t even notice it.” And that’s what we did for years. Gabor wouldn’t have cared—I don’t even think he listened to the tracks.

PAUL GERMAIN:
I never had any conflicts with Gabor. He wasn’t that involved. He would often back us over Arlene. I kind of felt sorry for her. It was humiliating for her.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
In defense of Arlene, she meant well. She just wanted her young kids to have entertainment that was really positive and helped people, but I wanted it to be funny. All of us writers were peas in a pod—there was a Harvard contingent and a UCLA contingent—and Paul was our quarterback.

PAUL GERMAIN:
Instead of approaching it through the back door and trying to make things nice, I would challenge her. There was a writers’ meeting where I said something ugly to Arlene, and for years I’ve regretted it. She said something that offended me, and I responded with something mean-spirited. After that, she just dropped out of the process. It was too much for her.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
Paul and Viksten had written a script in which some surfer character says, “Killer price on the stereo dude!” And Arlene said they couldn’t say the word “kill” or “killer.” Paul later said he didn’t even like the joke that much; he just wanted to fight with her. So he just screamed at her in that meeting, and she said, “Hey, look, I’m just trying to protect the children of America from you boys.” And Paul said, “Who died and made you protector of America’s children?” or something like that. And the look on Arlene’s face was like,
I’m gonna kill you one day.

MICHAEL BELL:
As actors, I don’t think any of us got involved in that. We showed up for work and didn’t want to know what was going on behind the scenes. We didn’t care that much.

CHUCK SWENSON:
I left telling Arlene it was her studio and she should run it exactly how she wanted. I believe and still believe the essence of story is conflict, and she does not. She didn’t need me to fight with. My life’s too short and I didn’t need it. “Find somebody else.” And they did!
Rugrats
became quite successful. And I was quite happy.

GABOR CSUPO:
Arlene could be difficult at times. But then so could I, probably.

LINDA SIMENSKY:
Arlene was a talented, passionate individual. She yelled a lot. Gabor yelled a lot. There was a lot of yelling going on.

CHUCK SWENSON:
I think Vanessa was on the other end of the phone. We had gone through something contentious, I can’t remember what. But before the phone got hung up on our end—we were on speaker—Gabor said something like, “Fucking bitch.” She took it with goodwill and grace. English is not Gabor’s first language.

GABOR CSUPO:
Arlene had it in her mind that she came up with the idea for the show, and she was being very protective of it and the way she thought it should be.

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
By about season three, it was like a war. And that was unfortunate because Arlene is not a bad person. She’s a really nice person. Her heart was in the right place. It’s just that she wasn’t thinking about what would make the best show. She was thinking about not wanting her kids to say a bad word or something.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
I think she honestly did what she thought was right, thinking she needed to be a good producer. I don’t have any bad feelings at all. In fact, the last time I saw her was just before the letter came out in the
LA Times 
.
 
.
 
.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
After sixty-five episodes, production basically ended and everyone was cut loose and found other things to do. It got so popular in reruns, Nick decided to make a
Rugrats
movie and make new episodes to support that movie. So they geared back up. Without Paul. Paul’s feelings were hurt that he wasn’t asked to come back, and there was stuff about credit being due.

PAUL GERMAIN:
I left
Rugrats
in 1992 or 1993. Right after that, I’d be looking for work and my agent would tell people he had one of the creators of
Rugrats
, Paul Germain. And she’d hear back from executives, “Oh, that’s not what I heard.” I was outraged because my name was on the screen as one of the creators. All of a sudden, I was getting locked out. For reasons that were never made clear to me, as the show was getting bigger and bigger, my name was not being mentioned in these articles written about it in the
LA Times
or whatever it would be. People were pretending I didn’t exist, and that was wrong. My entire writing staff had left by that time, and a bunch of them wrote a letter to the
LA Times
.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
Somewhere in there—we were in the first season of
Hey Arnold!
by then—all the writers on
Rugrats
wrote a letter to the
LA Times
defending Paul’s contribution to the series. There was a lot of pressure, and I signed it. All the writers signed it.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
Right before it came out, I saw Arlene in the parking lot and said, “Hey Arlene.” I walked up and I hugged her. We talked for a minute. The letter hit the next week and somebody told me she was furious about it. And she mentioned me. “I can’t believe the last time I saw him he actually hugged me.”

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
The only reason anybody knew Paul’s name was it was on the credits.
Rugrats
had become this massive hit and he wasn’t making any money off of it, and that didn’t seem fair. It created this
huge
problem, because Arlene felt betrayed by us and then Nickelodeon was really mad at us. But we all felt like, “Okay, Paul gets credit for the show and Gabor and Arlene get credit for the show. And that’s how it should be.”

STEVE VIKSTEN:
The letter was not against her or Gabor; it was just to set the record straight. They were going off saying they were the creators of
Rugrats
, and they didn’t mention Paul. It was Paul’s show! He had a guy editing dialogue tracks in his office all the time. And Paul would usually direct the actors.

CHERYL CHASE:
I wasn’t working with Arlene and Gabor, because Paul was the voice director. We were working with Paul specifically.

E. G. DAILY:
He was very meticulous. He’d have us do it probably a zillion times. Kind of like George Miller, the director I worked with on
Happy Feet
. Paul had an insight on how to play these characters, which is why I think it was such a huge hit: He really understood the kids’ mentality.

HOWARD BAKER:
He could be a pain, but he just wanted every episode to be a success and that kept me on my toes.

PAUL GERMAIN:
I directed all of the voice actors on the first sixty-five episodes. It was my booth and I ran it. Sometimes Arlene or somebody would come in and quietly hand me a note, and I would either address it or not. What
Rugrats
was beyond “let’s do a show about babies” was mine. I came up with it. Arlene designed Phil and Lil and she designed the characters Boris and Minka, and Gabor had pulled the design for Chuckie out of a drawer, but they were characters based on my writing.

LINDA SIMENSKY:
I thought it was Arlene’s idea.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
I will not take anything away from Paul, but it was Arlene’s idea.

MARY HARRINGTON:
It was Paul Germain’s, Arlene Klasky’s, and Gabor Csupo’s show. But Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere ran it. I supervised the first one hundred episodes.