Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (6 page)

WILL MCROBB:
My father and Mr. Wrigley have similarities. My father was ROTC, lots of stories of driving tanks . . . The perfect embodiment of these classic dad convictions. He was an outdoorsman and I was content to read in my room. At one point when I was younger, he became completely fed up with me farting as much as I did. It was a pivotal moment when I saw his sarcasm and humor come together in a perfect storm. “We’re going to build you a farting room.” He sketched the dimensions on an envelope. It was rewritten to become one of our “sixty-second”
Pete
’s, called “The Burping Room.” A lot of that dad stuff was an homage to my father.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
I did the vein-popping stuff sometimes; my dad was like that when I was growing up. I always had to keep from laughing. And the more I snickered at his lectures, the more his pecs would twitch and his veins would bulge.

BILL WRAY:
John would tell all these stories about his dad. About what a horrible, horrible person he was. John had a famous story that we used later on where he had spent the whole summer drawing a cartoon book to give to his father for Christmas and then his father said, “You wasted a whole summer on
this
?” and tossed it in the fire.

JIM GOMEZ:
There was the story about John’s dad burning his comics and all that. Initially, John used to portray his father as an evil ogre monster who lorded over him and made his life miserable. I never met his father, but other people who met him said he was the nicest guy. And I know he was helping John out a lot.

BILL WRAY:
You meet him . . . and he’s the greatest guy in the world and has been supporting John all this time so John could endeavor to make cartoons. Are they guilt payments, or was John a storyteller from day one? Nobody knows.

WILL MCROBB:
There’s a cruel streak in John and some of the characters he had. John had some anger issues that made their way into
Ren & Stimpy
.

JOE STILLMAN:
Will always had a lot of edge in his writing, and I think Little Pete is kind of Will’s id coming out from his childhood to get revenge on his father.

MICHAEL MARONNA:
Chris, Will, and Katherine probably made the show and designed the show at the right time. They—in their twenties and thirties—were still close enough where they could still clearly feel that nostalgia and see what resonates, what is fake, what is being used by the next generation that doesn’t ring true.

D.J. MACHALE:
That was the thing that kind of separated
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
from a lot of other shows. A writer would come in and say he had an idea for something—maybe a haunted car that eats people. “Okay . . . but
who are the kids
?” It’s when we’re
with
those kids that we can find out about the haunted car. We had real kids with real, interesting stories that
intersected
with whatever the spooky thing would be.

ROSS HULL:
When they had callbacks was when D.J. came in, and I really remember meeting him, because he had this presence about him. It wasn’t intimidating. I kind of felt like there was almost this instant connection in terms of just getting what it was he was trying to do. And I think he read my personality.

JOANNA GARCIA:
D.J. MacHale wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty and hang out with the kids. He was just a fun guy to work with. We always felt really connected to him.

JEFF FISHER:
I’m still a big kid, you know. You never lose that. That’s what D.J. was like, too.

ERIK MACARTHUR:
Steve Slavkin was a big, soft kid. He’s just a good dude. Has some kids of his own.

STEVE SLAVKIN:
I wouldn’t go so far as to say “father figure,” but I was twice their age, so maybe they thought of me as an older sibling. I definitely looked out for them. Wanted to make sure they were happy. Games for them on set, tutors, making sure they were safe at all times. Made sure we covered all the laws we needed to. Took care of their parents, made sure they were comfortable, and included them in everything.

JOE O’CONNOR:
Once, later on in the show, Sean O’Neal was doing something in the hallway and I went, “Hey, Sean. Stop that!” And he turned around and went, “Hey, you’re not my father.” He got to that age where he was getting a little rebellious. But he was right.

SEAN O’NEAL:
It was very much like having a mom and dad on set.

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
I felt very protective of Melissa and was making sure she had money for clothes and that her guardian was taking care of her all right. It was my highest priority. She was like my daughter for those years, and I think about it a lot because my daughter is that age now.

MELISSA JOAN HART:
Mitchell looked out for me. He was worried about things. All the pitfalls of being a child star: where my money was going, how I was behaving . . . that kind of thing. He would always come down to Orlando and visit and take me to my favorite restaurants. He would get me great birthday gifts, cared about me, and took care of me.

CHRISTINE TAYLOR:
Our director, Fred Keller, was the father figure trying to help us navigate through it all, because our parents weren’t there. They would come in and out, but Fred was the real father figure to me at the time. And his wife was there, too.

ROGER PRICE:
I often told them something along these lines: “I am not your parent. I do not have to love you. I am not your teacher. I do not have to educate you or improve you or give you a second chance. I am a producer, and I have a show to make. You get some free drama training from one of the best teachers there is. You get selected for the show by doing your best to do what Carole and I ask you to do. I select from those of you that I believe will be best for the show, and these are not necessarily the ones I like best, or even like at all. What you or your parents want has nothing to do with it. What I want has nothing to do with it. It is all down to what is best for the show. If chosen, you will give up your time, do what you are told, do your very best, never give us any hassles, and get well paid for it. That’s all there is to it.”

BOB BLACK:
Every once in a while, I’ll see Simon Cowell in action, and he kind of reminds me of Roger. That blunt, to-the-point, British producer type. Although Roger was never as mean.

CHUCK VINSON:
I think Melissa did a Jell-O commercial with Bill Cosby when she was really young. So that was an ongoing joke. She would say, “I bet they didn’t do this on the
Cosby
set!”

ELIZABETH HESS:
That added element of having a guy friend come in through the window? Wow, how revolutionary is
that
?

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
I wanted this boy who was in Clarissa’s life to be her friend, and I didn’t want him to have to go up the stairs or through the front door and talk to her parents every time. It was a way to get him in her bedroom and start interacting faster. And it was also a way to show that they had this real friendship that wasn’t about anything sexual. They were friends, and I wanted to keep it pre-sexual. Which worked . . . right up until she was sixteen.

CHUCK VINSON:
Initially, they were just young as hell. Then the voice starts getting deeper and Sam’s hair started to be stylized a little bit more . . . It became an ongoing joke, like, they’re getting a little bit old here for having this guy using a ladder and coming up to her room. People understand they’re close friends, but the reality is she’s gonna be changing clothes more often . . . and these characters have to grow with the show.

SEAN O’NEAL:
We were definitely going through life at that point, so they included that in the scripts.

DAVID ELLIS:
The show started with Clarissa at thirteen and ended with her at sixteen, almost seventeen. We had to update her room every season as the show evolved. She had a pet alligator in a little wading pool in the beginning, and we had to get rid of him after a while. That might have also been pressure from the ASPCA, though.

ELIZABETH HESS:
I asked Mitchell why he cast me. I’m not like, you know, a commercial mom. And he said, “You know, all little boys want to fall in love with their mothers, and they want a sexy mom. You’re a sexy mom.” Well, that’s enough to flatter
any
actress!

DEBBY BEECE:
There was a term we used—URST: UnResolved Sexual Tension—when we were trying to develop tension between characters in our shows.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Really, believe it or not, URST is all about the hair. I can’t say enough about the importance of hair.

SEAN O’NEAL:
I had been in New York before, but this was above and beyond. We arrived at the audition and I saw Melissa, who I believe was eating a bagel. I was there for a few minutes, possibly had read the scene, and then Mitchell asked me to leave the room. Before I stepped out, though, he told me to mess up my hair. I was a nutcase when I was in school and a little bit of a class clown, so I always used to rub my heavy-duty cowlicks, which made my hair stand on end. When I left the room and messed up my hair, I came back in and Mitchell said, “Yeah, you’ve got the job.”

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Since boys mature slower than girls, we were thinking more about young girls. This is in any of the psychology readings we were going through back then. URST, more than anything, was about affection and not so much about sexuality and that when young girls are getting older, they go from having affection for their girlfriends to boys in their classes or wherever they may be. So by having longer, more feminine hair for some of the boys—and you can see this every few years with teen idols or whatever—the girls can transfer their affection. And it’s unattainable, that’s very important, too; it’s gotta be unattainable affection, because they’re on a TV show—to the boys that they’re watching on the shows. And then as the girls continue to get older, they start reacting
against
the good-boy, more feminine look, and that’s when the boys’ hair is cut to make them look less feminine.

SEAN O’NEAL:
As Sam got older, he got a little bit less—like everybody, I guess—cutesy and more manly.

SARAH CONDON:
We did a fair amount of cutting his hair and dealing with his clothes to turn him into the character that we wanted him to be.

ROGER PRICE:
Teenage girls seem to like young and girlish boys for their sex fantasies, for that is the basis of pop star worship.

SCOTT WEBB:
Slime was also a big part of how we perceived URST. It’s, “When I go out and get messy, I’m doing something I know my parents don’t approve of. But
man
, it feels good.” And sex is like that. That was the other way we used slime.

DEBBY BEECE:
Green slime was
not
an example of URST. Everybody had their own takes on things. It could be a real free-for-all at Nickelodeon.

ALISON FANELLI:
We were all really close, and it was really hard for Michael Maronna and me when they started writing the romantic stuff on
Pete & Pete
. The kisses were absolutely horrific for us both. Both times, we avoided each other for the entire week. It was pretty difficult. As soon as they’d get their take, we’d be embarrassed for a couple of hours after. Michael asked Katherine to shoot the kiss scenes early in the week so we could get them over with. In the marching band episode, they did that
very last
, so we were tortured the entire week. We got over it fine.

SEAN O’NEAL:
Melissa and I were old enough and had a boyfriend and girlfriend when we did the date scene. I still remember the tie I wore and the fact that the set was that little Italian joint. We were comfortable with it.

MICHAEL BOWER:
There was the episode where I was the fat guy trying to get the girl. Dina. I don’t think Heidi wanted to be a part of it. A part of
me
in any way. Whether it was because of BO or whatever, she was not happy getting ready to dance with me. She did not want to rehearse. She shied away from me. I had to make this joke while eating pizza, and I kept doing it because she literally couldn’t stop laughing.

HEIDI LUCAS:
When Michael as Donkeylips was trying to tell me a funny joke and he had pizza in his mouth, he was just trying to be personable. But I thought I was going to lose it . . . and I did!

MICHAEL BOWER:
She was so nervous. It was embarrassing because it was sort of a love scene and she was a young girl. She was not ready to deal with that.

HEIDI LUCAS:
There’s one outtake of me just absolutely losing it. You can hear the director in the back: “Heidi! Get your stuff together!” “I’m sorry! He’s really funny!” “I know! He’s
supposed
to be funny. Pull it together!”

MICHAEL BOWER:
The director, Peter Baldwin, was like, “C’mon! We gotta do this! He’s making you laugh. Get your shit together!” She finally came through in the end, and the result was great.

MEGAN BERWICK:
With the episode where ZZ falls for Budnick, I think the writers just watched us, and I don’t think anybody missed the fact that I thought Danny Cooksey absolutely walked on water. He and I never dated. He was much, much older than me. He never took advantage of his big brother thing over me.

DANNY COOKSEY:
It was all professional.

HEIDI LUCAS:
I’m lucky to say I had a friendship with Danny Cooksey beyond just the cast member friendship.

MICHAEL BOWER:
Heidi Lucas—Dina—and bad boy Bobby Budnick started enjoying each other’s company toward the end of the last season. They may have hugged a couple of times, whatever the case is. They became pretty good friends. It didn’t go beyond that. Young romance.

FRED KELLER:
Christine Taylor and David Lascher had a little romance going on at one point. That was an awful lot of fun.