Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (27 page)

BOB MITTENTHAL:
I work for both of them, and I think there’s still some elements that make Nickelodeon more risk-tasking than Disney.

ADAM WEISSMAN:
I just finished a show at Disney where the lead actors got a Kids’ Choice Award . . .
on Nickelodeon
. Kids don’t care. They’re going to watch what they’re going to watch. It’s healthy competition. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles made really good music. Nick just took this other tack.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
The age of children’s television is really going. I don’t think it feeds your brain in the way it used to. Shows like
Pete & Pete
and
Clarissa
and
Salute Your Shorts
had sort of a quirky, not-straight-ahead quality. And that’s not how it is now.

WILL MCROBB:
Everything’s about wish fulfillment now: becoming famous or popular. What was great about
Pete & Pete
is we glorified
being a kid
. There aren’t too many shows that glorify what it’s like to hang out in your backyard with your friends trying to figure out what to do for the day.

ALAN GOODMAN:
Things like “Nickelodeon Takes Over Your School” was terrific promotion for us back in those days. There was a toy run
where we had the whole wish-fulfillment thing for a child. They got to run wild through a toy store for five minutes and grab anything that they could grab. All of those things were feeding this notion of,
I’m a kid and the world is mine
. That’s kind of what our orientation was.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
Very early on, we did
Rated K
, which ran for a bunch of seasons.

ANDY BAMBERGER:
Which spun off from
You Can’t Do That on Television
in a way, because we could have kids reviewing things with kid opinions. Kids would listen to kids, we found out.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
And on
Rated K
we did something called “Big Ballot,” which eventually gave birth to the Kids’ Choice Awards. Fred and Alan will say they created Kids’ Choice Awards—they created the name—but it all comes out of
Rated K
.

ALAN GOODMAN:
Yes, my partners at the time—Albie Hecht, Fred Seibert—and I created the Kids’ Choice. We still get a credit on the show.

HERB SCANNELL:
The Kids’ Choice was Albie Hecht and Fred/Alan.

ALBIE HECHT:
It’s one of the most proud things I’ve ever done in my life, but it didn’t start well. Fred and Alan were friends of mine from college, and they invited me to start this company with them, Chauncey Street Productions, and go in to do my first big pitch with them. I thought I had something great and came up with a great model and sketch, and I go in to meet Gerry—who I had never met but is a
legend
—and Darby—who I admired from
You Can’t Do That on Television
and
Double Dare
 . . . I go in there and pitch this big idea where we’re gonna do a live, two-hour broadcast in a place like Madison Square Garden with three rings to it—like a three-ring circus—with acts in each one, and we’re gonna have fifteen thousand kids screaming and yelling, and . . . there was brutal silence. At the time, I always thought silence was good—that I had stunned people—but subsequently learned it’s
bad
. The first words back that Gerry ever spoke to me were, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”

DEBBY BEECE:
It started off awful. We struggled to get that thing going. It took many years to become good. Those first several years—
cringe
. It was such a big hurdle. We didn’t have access to talent, we didn’t have money. It was scary.

HERB SCANNELL:
The first year there was a busload of people who wouldn’t clap. They were Eastern-European deaf people. I think ALF won best actor. Say no more, right?

MICHAEL KOEGEL:
The first time I worked the Kids’ Choice Awards—and for
years
—it was like, “Best actor: Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger . . .” Always the same people. And they would not return our phone calls. They were movie stars and Nick meant nothing to them. Now Will Smith hosts it, but at the first Kids’ Choice Awards, the only celebrity we got in the theater to accept an award was Charles Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit. And we had to confirm he’d win an award, because he wouldn’t come to lose.

DEBBY BEECE:
It
was
a good idea. We just didn’t have any resources to really do it. But that never stopped us before . . .

ALBIE HECHT:
I wanted the award itself to be something that would differentiate ourselves. Something people can actually use, that’s a toy. Scott Webb and his creative folks took that and came up with different ideas. One of them was a kaleidoscope, originally without the blimp. That was not substantial enough, so then we did the blimp with the kaleidoscope
embedded
in it. The blimp was one of the most popular of Nickelodeon’s logos, so that’s why we went with it. Those first couple of years, we had 250 to 300 people. Maybe 500, tops. The breakout year was when we got Whitney Houston, who was just at the apex of her career. I think it was 1995.

HERB SCANNELL:
Jeffrey Katzenberg started DreamWorks Animation, and we both had a common enemy in Disney. He delivered Mel Gibson from
Chicken Run
via helicopter at the Kids’ Choice Awards in 2001. From that point on, it was a matter of, “Who do you want to get? Jim Carrey? Tom Cruise?”

ALBIE HECHT:
Before the Internet, the polling for the Awards was done at a park or chain like McDonald’s. There was always a great deal of promotion, marketing, and sponsorship around it.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
Gerry had had a very conservative attitude as far as merchandising and licensing Nickelodeon products. It really was very important to her, to consider what she used to call “parent trust.” That we would not try to force kids to dress like Nickelodeon characters and eat sugar cereal.

DANA CALDERWOOD:
They hadn’t been corporate before. They wouldn’t let advertising in. Casio asked us to put their name on the
Double Dare
clock. For a million dollars. And Nickelodeon didn’t do that. They said, “We’re not Disney.”

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
Yes, we turned down a million-dollar offer with Casio on the
Double Dare
clock.

SCOTT WEBB:
I had more than one discussion with lots of business departments within Nickelodeon who were like, “Listen, I have a $100,000 deal on the line. Is it really important that the logo’s orange? It can’t be black-and-white for Pizza Hut?” Or, “Can we do it differently because we’re dealing with Kodak?” That’s what I was up against.

VANESSA COFFEY:
We wanted to put out high-quality things that represented the shows. The concept behind the original Nicktoons block was we were making original programming and the kids would tell us when they wanted the toys—instead of the other way around.
Rugrats
was our first big licensing success. It didn’t happen until we started syndicating it during the week. Then the toy deals started coming along with the licensing. It was a slow process, but it was a big success.

LINDA SIMENSKY:
Nick was
always
happy to license. There was
You Can’t Do That on Television
soap back in the early years.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
Just as the advertising world had been skeptical about the cable TV world, licensing was slow to come to Nick. We were difficult; we did not want to sell kids short or out. We didn’t like putting logos on things. We wanted to be doing something creative and new. We had many heart-wrenching conversations: Most of our shows didn’t have a shot at licensing, like
Salute Your Shorts
, because it was a short-lived series. Even if you look at what’s merchandised from Nick now, it’s only a few of their shows that are everywhere. It’s the nature of the merchandising world: being risk-averse.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH:
Growing up on Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan and things like that, to me it was endless pleasure. I love the idea of going into a drugstore and seeing
Rugrats
toothpaste or going into Burger King and seeing frozen chicken nuggets in the shape of
Rugrats
characters. And I think that, if anything,
Rugrats
had all sorts of early information for how to make an art form spread across different marketplaces, different presentations.

WENDY LITWACK:
When you’re on Nickelodeon and it’s cable, the advertising dollars are not as intense. When you take something and now Wendy’s kids’ meals are sponsoring it, they get input and tell the network what to do and don’t do.
Doug
suffered when it changed to Disney because of network intervention.

JIM JINKINS:
Disney bought ABC, created “One Saturday Morning,” and began to court my company, Jumbo Pictures. So, should I stay with Nickelodeon, who is through with me . . . or get bought by Disney, where we get to create sixty-five new half hours of
Doug
, a feature-length movie,
Doug Live!
for their theme park, toys, books, additional funding for development and production on many new series . . . ? To quote a famous movie line,
They made an offer we couldn’t refuse
.

CONNIE SHULMAN:
Hands down, I prefer the old
Doug
! The new
Doug
just wasn’t the same. Hard to put into words. Perhaps not having Jim around as much and Tom McHugh—definitely awesome, but having to readjust to a new Doug—and I missed all the gang crammed in the studio, waiting for their turn for the big group scene. Someone just dimmed the magic a bit.

JIM JINKINS:
I will confess that I took my eyes off
Doug
too much during those Disney days once I got overwhelmed with all my responsibilities. The Nicktoons
Doug
stories were the most autobiographical, and I was the most hands-on with their creation.

DAVID CAMPBELL:
At Nick, we had been making handmade jalopies that were fun and broken-down and had to be fixed, but were interesting. Disney makes Lexuses. Once the quirky, little creative company gets put into the System, its edges get rounded out and things get smoothed over in all kinds of ways. If you like bumpy, beautiful vehicles that are harder to drive and they do things that surprise you, then you’re not gonna like the Lexuses—they’re too sleek and smooth. I think that’s why kids tend to like the Nickelodeon episodes better, because they’re quirkier. But you get old and your joints get creaky; my friend runs a Lexus dealership, so I own a Lexus now. But I still remember my jeep fondly . . .

JIM JINKINS:
I mostly agree with
Doug
fans who think the original 104 eleven-minute
Doug
stories made for Nick were the best. Except for “The Dark Quail Saga,” written by Joe Fallon for Disney’s
Doug
.

BILLY WEST:
This was when Disney was going to mimic Nick. And if they couldn’t do it, they would buy it one piece at a time.

MELISSA JOAN HART:
I had such a blast on
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
at Disney. They were
the best years of my life, but I wasn’t very proud of the character. She was sort of wishy-washy and whiny, and it wasn’t as much fun to play her. I wouldn’t be friends with Sabrina, but I would be friends with Clarissa.

JOE O’CONNOR:
I liked Melissa much more on
Clarissa
than I did on
Sabrina
.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
I was really circumvented on the pilot for
Clarissa Now
. I
wanted
to make a prime-time show out of
Clarissa
, let her grow up, have boyfriends . . . but the network executives said to me, “Well, network audiences don’t like any of that ‘postmodern shit.’” They didn’t like the talking to the camera and the fantasies. As if network audiences were different than cable audiences.

CHUCK VINSON:
For a network like CBS to realize, “Hey, Nickelodeon and Melissa . . . something’s happening here! Let’s try to do something!” you know that comes from years of bringing that show up to standards where people could talk about it like that.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
We also tried to do an album. The group was Clarissa and the Straitjackets, and it was called
This Is What Na-Na Means
.

RACHEL SWEET:
The record company didn’t really know what they wanted to do with it, and honestly, it was just an afterthought after the show was almost done, so . . .

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
It was “too good,” and Sony Wonder determined it would be impossible to market the thing as a kids’ album. So they slashed up the original Straitjackets album, made it much shorter, and added in a bunch of silly audio noises and quotes. I took my name off the project.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
We got lucky the first time out of the box with
Double Dare
. It gave them a lot of misplaced confidence that we would always be so lucky.

HARVEY:
They did a lot of other game shows to try to re-create lightning in a bottle, which everybody does: Once something happens, you try to duplicate it. And quadruple it, and quintuple it . . .

ABBY HAGYARD:
There are a number of people I have met over the years who say, “We’re going to do a show kind of like
You Can’t Do That on Television
!” Every time I hear that, I say, “Good luck!” You really have to put a lot of ingredients together to make something look that effortless.

MARC SUMMERS:
They did a show called
Finders Keepers
. Major disaster. Wrong host, wrong concept.
GUTS
might have come close, and
Legends of the Hidden Temple
to a certain extent . . .

ROBIN RUSSO:
Marc and I went on to do another show called
What Would You Do?
Which I called
Why Are We Doing This?