Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (5 page)

BLAKE SENNETT:
It’s hard to remember what’s real and what’s part of the show.

VANESSA LINDORES:
Pretty much played ourselves. Don’t recall being confused.

OMAR GOODING:
I was definitely playing myself: an excited kid doing what he loves!

RICK GALLOWAY:
I always had problems with the way people viewed me as my character. It was this feeling that people thought I was this stupid actor.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
Kevin Kubusheskie is another character who was kind of a dopey dimwit that wasn’t him. It was an exaggerated aspect of Kevin being kind of laid-back, kind of foreshadowing the “teen slacker.” But he wasn’t that.

ROGER PRICE:
No one in real life is as dumb as these kids sometimes appeared to be. And they were selected for their high intelligence. We exaggerated their existing character traits quite a lot. Otherwise, they were themselves.

MICHAEL BOWER:
I was a character on a Nickelodeon show named
Donkeylips
. There was no “development” on that, really. Every role you see on TV—unless it’s an older, really good actor playing it—is always 70 percent that person at that point in their life with the other 30 percent being from acting class or something. With me, they had one fat dude. They weren’t going to say, “Come in for Ug.” That ain’t gonna work. Even the casting director was like, “Oh. You’re here for Donkeylips.”

KIRK BAILY:
It was a combo of what was on the page and what me and Slavkin and some of the early directors fashioned over time. I grew up in a family of four brothers, and the TV shows in the house were
Three Stooges
and
Abbott and Costello
. I was exposed to that style really early on. I also did a lot of training in New York City. Movement classes. And I went to Boy Scout camp for six or seven years straight with counselors who definitely had the attitude of, “Get it right or pay the price!”

ARON TAGER:
That’s the secret of playing comedy and playing scary: You
believe
that what you’re saying is important to you. You don’t have to put on a Bela Lugosi voice. You don’t have to do a Boris Karloff. In fact, all the best scary actors never did anything but play it straight. With the right music and if the director leaves you alone, everything is fine.

D.J. MACHALE:
That’s Horror 101. In most horror movies, they’ll have that little bit of lightness to it to kind of laugh and wink at it. Going to “the funny” is a natural tension reliever, because all the stories are so hyped anyway.

RICHARD M. DUMONT:
Ron Oliver let me have the last line in “The Tale of the Super Specs” when the spirit tries to get the three of us. I jumped under the table and said, “Take the children!” That was just an ad-lib, but Ron and D.J. MacHale were both like, “Yes, yes, yes! You’ve got to put that in!”

RON OLIVER:
Of course, when he came back up, his face was all red and puffy because of the dry ice machine blowing at him. It was kind of horrible.

RICHARD M. DUMONT:
“The Tale of the Super Specs” was, I think, the first episode with my character, Sardo, and was when he said, “That’s Sar-
do
! No ‘mister’—accent on the ‘doh!’” It was always in the script. It was a wonderful, wonderful bit that came, as best I know, from the wonderful mind of D.J. MacHale.

SARAH CONDON:
It’s very different casting kids than adults. They really have to have the essence of the character in them.

HEIDI LUCAS:
I did not specifically work with anyone on the set for character development. Thankfully—and ironically—being a brat was something that just came easily for me.

MEGAN BERWICK:
The first day of filming, Heidi brought in three racks of her own clothing because she wanted to make sure she looked beautiful. I was like, “Wow!” One of the nice things was that I got a little cooler working with cool girls who taught me how to dress better.

HEIDI LUCAS:
That doesn’t make any sense. That I brought additional clothes to the set? That’s not my recollection
at all
! Keep in mind, I had just moved from Illinois to Hollywood. I literally packed two suitcases. So I didn’t have a lot of clothes to bring.

VENUS DEMILO:
We all definitely shared qualities with our characters.

KIRK BAILY:
Heidi wasn’t stuck-up. Not at all.

MICHAEL BOWER:
Heidi’s like her character. To this day, she’s in her own world. It has to be her way.

HEIDI LUCAS:
I promise this is not just me wanting to have the world think I’m not a brat, but there’s not a lot to me that was in Dina.

STEVE SLAVKIN:
Heidi was smart, funny, and extraordinarily talented. She was a great actor and a total pleasure to have around. Whatever we wrote for her, she made it better. All of the kids had a little bit of their character in them, and that’s what made them so interesting and real.

TREVOR EYSTER:
Steve is a very diplomatic guy, but I would have to confirm that everyone was very much their character.

MARJORIE SILCOFF:
They loved having kids with braces, and I myself had braces on my last one or two shows. They loved it because of how “normal” it made the kids look. It was frustrating that my awkward phase was caught on video for everyone to see, but there you have it. Making kids feel better about having braces.

ROGER PRICE:
I chose them for their potential, not for their experience. I tried to build up the self-esteem of the kids and let them always be aware of how important they were: to the show, to me, to the survival of Nickelodeon. This had the effect of calming kids down.

VANESSA LINDORES:
I did not audition. Carole Hay was my fourth-grade teacher, and somehow I ended up in her
drama class she was teaching outside of school. Roger Price came into the class and would choose children to put on the show. It still baffles me, but somehow I ended up on it . . . for a long time.

ROGER PRICE:
If you’re a girl who looks in the mirror and sees an imperfect face staring back at you, might you not take a little comfort from cross-eyed Vanessa being on your favorite show?

JUSTIN CAMMY:
Vanessa was cross-eyed and everybody constantly made fun of Lisa’s weight. I was clearly chubby for a period. Some of the kids couldn’t act and were clearly there representing a certain look or group. The show defied the star-good-looks mentality and let kids be kids.

ADAM REID:
The drama class was run in a very noncompetitive way. It was like Second City or Groundlings. It wasn’t like Roger came in the room and said, “You, you, and you are coming on the show.”

ROGER PRICE:
In the classes, it became obvious who was a future star and who was a spear-carrier. Nearly all of the kids got a chance to go in front of the cameras. But the ones that set my Geiger counter racing in the auditions were the ones that continued to do so in drama class and on set.

ABBY HAGYARD:
Alasdair had no reason to be jealous of a Kevin Kubusheskie or a Lisa Ruddy, because everyone was one of a kind. The kids were all taught that. You are what you are, and if you don’t get chosen for something, it doesn’t mean somebody else is better than you; it means that somebody fit the category better. If you’re four-foot-three and he’s six-foot-one, it’s not because you’re not talented. It’s because you’re four-foot-three.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
It was more of a collaborative ensemble feeling. No one was put in a special position, including me.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
There were those of us who were certainly not at the level of Christine or Lisa or Alasdair. There was a hierarchy and everyone knew what that hierarchy was. Roger had his favorites. He had a very, very special bond with Alasdair, and when Adam came around, it was clear he was deemed a rising star.

ADAM REID:
They would go through this
huge
process. The first thing was a height restriction. If you were over a certain height restriction, you were not going to go in. Roger was looking for short kids. They could grow up on the show and still look like a kid.

ALAN GOODMAN:
The fact is that Nickelodeon was really created between demographics. Personalities are built in, but it’s when you become aware of your own personality that your memories begin. That’s where that tween demographic kind of asserts itself: six to eleven. That’s where you’re coming into your own, becoming aware of your own personality. By the time you hit twelve, you’re kind of off into a new thing at that point.

DEE LADUKE:
When that hormone shift starts happening, that’s when you start to dream about separating from your family.
Hey Dude
being on a dude ranch was a romantic setting that most kids can only dream about, but that would still be a safe setting. Kids that age are just starting to be free: free to pursue relationships, free to have their first jobs. This was a show for eight- to ten-year-olds,
not
the older kids who were in it. It was an aspirational series for kids to think about where they’d be four years from now.

RITA HESTER:
We referred to our live theatrical work as “tween” entertainment, and we actually coined that phrase. We never heard anyone else say “tween” in the eighties. It was kids who were older but not yet in high school. It was skewed to kids who didn’t quite know who they were yet.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
And that’s the way almost all the Nickelodeon shows at that point in time came about: You need to find the group you are aiming at and then hope it is going to work “lower” and “upper.”

MIKE SPELLER:
I was still young enough where I could have fun with the kids on
Welcome Freshmen
during the downtimes but too young to try to be paternal, for sure.

KIRK BAILY:
Most of those kids were first-timers, so with me being an older actor, they vacillated between thinking of me as a mentor, a confidant, an older brother, or a father figure.

ABBY HAGYARD:
It was an absolute honor to work with someone like Les Lye. He was a legend and an unsung hero. Such a kind, sweet guy. And silly as hell. Over the years, my greatest joy—and it was hard to do—was to surprise him in something.

MARJORIE SILCOFF:
Making Les laugh was better than gold. Those of us who did that will take it to our grave. It was a real testament to him that he could appreciate the comedy of a teenager.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
Les Lye was a hoot even when he wasn’t on the set.

BRENDA MASON:
Les was in so many sketches that he often didn’t know all of his lines. You’ll notice he usually has a clipboard in his hand. His script was attached to it. I loved him and miss him.

ABBY HAGYARD:
The reason they hired an adult male actor and an adult female actor was because we provided the structure for the kids. Nickelodeon was doing the same thing for the shows it chose: providing structure to allow these producers of these crazy, unique shows to be a little more free-form and to take risks that they might not otherwise have been able to take.

JUDY GRAFE:
It felt like that’s what it should be. There was always in the back of
my mind that
Pete & Pete
was obviously about the two boys, so I was always aware that I was there to be a straight man, sort of. But every once in a while it would occur to me, “Okay, yeah, they get their influence from
whom
? Oh, let’s see: Mom and Dad!”

TOBY HUSS:
Hardy Rawls is a sweet, regular, solid man. And a guy like my character, dancing around saying “pipe” all the time, didn’t exactly fit into his worldview. But he was pretty generous. Sometimes I’d work to confound Hardy. Hardy rolled with everything. He’s a supreme nut.

HARDY RAWLS:
Most of the time I would look at Toby and say, “What are you
doing
?” There was no problem for me to react to that as an actor. And when Toby says, “Hold me, son. Hold me!” he would add lines like, “You have cold hands for a man, Don.”

CHUCK VINSON:
Elizabeth Hess was always fun. Joe O’Connor, I think, had to understand that this was a kids’ show and that the main character was a kid. Joe’s a great actor, but after a while you kinda have to take a backseat and understand that it’s
CLARISSA
Explains It All
, not
The Darling Family
.

ELIZABETH HESS:
Mitchell Kriegman told me after the second or third episode, “Elizabeth, I know you have a very big range as an actress and . . . you’re just not going to be able to use it all in this.” And I totally, completely understood what that meant. When kids tune into the show, no matter what happens in it, they know that the grounding in it is the mom. No matter how odd things get, Janet Darling will be there at the end of the day.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
To work at Nick, you had to believe in what we were doing, you had to like to play, and you had to like kids.

FRED SEIBERT:
We were not kids. We didn’t have kids. I’m not sure we
liked
kids.

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
I don’t have kids, although all my friends
act
like kids.

KATHERINE DIECKMANN:
We were all in our twenties, so we didn’t know what kids were like. None of us had children. None of us had any idea what kids were like . . . except maybe our own childhood—which Will McRobb and I referenced a lot. Will would write a bully and we would be like, “Just like Donnie Young.”

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
Pete & Pete
was sort of Will McRobb’s and Chris Viscardi’s idea of their unique childhood fantasy world. And that’s where Wellsville and all the quirky, left-of-the-dial humor came from.

JOE STILLMAN:
Will had a particular relationship with his father that had been a very informing principle for him in his life, some of it positive, some of it less positive.