Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (8 page)

JUSTIN CAMMY:
I don’t think that was ever really communicated in a way that would have helped people. You should probably be told that—especially as a child—at the very beginning: “We like you, you’re important. But this is a one- or two-year gig and then we’re going to be done with you.” It’s never good to reach your peak in high school. That’s not a healthy way to exist.

ROGER PRICE:
It was my nightmare. It gave me about the same degree of personal agony as the moment when you give the vet the nod to go ahead with the lethal needle for an old and much-loved dog. If one thing finally drove me from working with children, it was having to do this over and over. Whichever way you slice it, I was interfering hugely and irreversibly in their childhood experience.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
I feel like
Pete & Pete
definitely influenced my life in a lot of ways. I’m a musician. That’s what I do. I was into it right when we were getting into the show. And that “Hard Day’s Pete” episode with me finding the song, I personally related to that. I got my first bass during the shooting of that. And haven’t stopped playing bass since.

ALISON FANELLI:
Like my character on the show, I started becoming interested in science and medicine—which is what I’m doing now—and in a way, Katherine thought that life was imitating art or the other way around. Ellen was very much in the science world and always asking questions. I don’t think there’s anything bad about a character like that influencing a kid.

MEGAN BERWICK:
My natural personality is actually quite close to ZZ. Twenty-something years later, I’m working in Haiti doing economic development and financial inclusion. I basically am the woman ZZ would have become. In fact, before I moved to Haiti, I saw Steve Slavkin and he said, “I’m very proud of you, ZZ. I wrote you, created you, and look how far you’ve gone!” Totally joking, but very sweet.

STEVE SLAVKIN:
I don’t think it’s strange that Megan would become ZZ. She was a really special kid, and it’s great to see that she’s utilizing her skills to make the world a better place.

JASON ZIMBLER:
They wrote for me, they pushed me, they accounted for me. That’s the effect of me on Ferguson. The effect of Ferguson on me? Well, he was cerebral, and I liked that they gave me this strong mind, this strong intellectual figure to be a model. He was articulate and well-spoken and his mind fired all over the place and he was ambitious. I wasn’t watching Buckley and I wasn’t as politically aware, but I was beginning to be. I don’t think I chased a lot of teenagers into hardcore Republicanism. I’m more mainstream. I would consider myself independent. Socially liberal, fiscally conservative.

MICHAEL MARONNA:
We all still look like ourselves. My image has been close to a similar thing for a long time. But that wouldn’t be the worst thing to go down. There are other roles I’ve done that are more recent and more fresh in people’s minds. They would be just as funny to have as my epitaph. I’m kinda grateful to have this character.

KENAN THOMPSON:
I got lucky because I was named after myself for my entire Nickelodeon career. It’s very clearly me and not necessarily a super-stretch outside of my character. I’ve been lucky that I’ve never really had to fight that. The only thing I’m still attached to when people see me is a “Kenan and Kel” thing. But that’s not a bad thing, because I’m still myself.

MICHAEL BOWER:
A few years later, you meet fans and they constantly call you that name and they have no respect for you at all after you introduce yourself as a human being. That’s when it gets a little annoying. Being typecast is an industry standard. I don’t like it, but now that I’m producing, that’s how they do it!

JOE O’CONNOR:
I know a show like
Clarissa
would never go on now. People on the show wouldn’t be pretty enough. I have seven-year-old twins, and when we turn on some Disney and Nickelodeon shows, the girls are gorgeous, the boys are really handsome, and the shows are far more wink-and-nod. Times have changed. Selling habits have changed. Everybody’s upped the ante a little.

ADAM WEISSMAN:
There’s more responsibility on a show like
Hannah Montana
.
Hannah
, in particular, was much more than a show. It was a
brand
. You had a very lucrative concert component to it, she represented a lot of things to a lot of girls, and so there was a responsibility to maintain this multibillion-dollar brand . . . which is something you wouldn’t have on a show like
Welcome Freshmen
, basically done under the radar.

ROGER PRICE:
I did not let Alanis Morissette sing on
You Can’t Do That on Television
. If I did have the kids sing, there was a real danger one or more of them would become a pop star—à la Justin Bieber—as had happened with some British kids in my stable. And that creates all manner of problems, not least of which is security and crowd control . . . and record companies and concerts and managers. And it all takes away their time and attention from the TV series. Probably the best thing I did for Alanis was not to have her sing on the show.

JOANNA GARCIA:
I’ve always said that it’s kind of our duty as young people in a position where we are exposed on a larger scale to a lot of other young people to be a great role model. But now it’s almost frightening how much pressure is put on them. I was a working actor in television but was still able to make my mistakes in private and do stupid things without being under the scrutiny of paparazzi constantly following me. It’s just a different world now.

LARISA OLEYNIK:
I wasn’t responsible for selling backpacks. I didn’t have a side career as a pop star. These kids now are doing so much. And I mean, more power to them. I was just not that ambitious. That’s the difference I see, because there’s so much more responsibility now. And so much more
publicity
. But that’s just the world now. It’s funny to be thirty now, isn’t it? It’s funny that we can actually witness these changes; that we can recognize that we are of an older generation that has passed. That’s something I don’t think I would have been prepared for as a twelve-year-old. Really, hats off to these kids who are doing
so much
right now. I just showed up to work and that was it.

VANESSA LINDORES:
Don’t know. Never really cared much.

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
Depending on who worked the props, the recipe varied. I think it was mainly gelatin, food coloring, oatmeal, and eventually some shampoo.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
Green slime is made out of Cream of Wheat, green food coloring, and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. And water. It was fun to be there on set the days they were making it, because they had to get the consistency exactly right. Sometimes it was too watery; sometimes it was a little too thick. They had to get the right blend.

JOSH MORRIS:
The first mixture was loose oatmeal with green dye. By the end, they just shoved green dye into a big bucket of cottage cheese. The original green slime was much nicer. In later seasons, it didn’t look nearly as good.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
There were numerous incarnations. Ours was oatmeal, liquid dish soap, a lot of water to thicken it. Sometimes green Jell-O.

BRENDA MASON:
The Jell-O version was short-lived. Too chunky. I don’t know when the liquid latex started being added.

SCOTT WEBB:
In our tenure of using it, it was basically oatmeal, shampoo, and green food coloring. It was the “No More Tears” shampoo, so you could eat it if you wanted to, but you wouldn’t want to.

ROGER PRICE:
To make cleanup easier, slime did contain baby shampoo. But too much and it could sting the eyes, which had to remain open for the humor to work. Imagine that! The courage it takes . . .

KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE:
The slime did sometimes burn my eyes.

BOB BLACK:
There was a number of different formulas for green slime. When I was there, it was Cream of Wheat and cold water with green food coloring. We would have to blow-dry the kids’ hair, then brush it out. And even then, several days later, the kids would be walking around with green bits in their hair.

ROGER PRICE:
We always sent the kids home a lot cleaner than they came. Even if they weren’t getting slimed, they would likely have their hair washed and trimmed.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
I had to pick the slime out of my hair. It’d stay in there for a couple of days.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
It was pretty innocuous, actually. Slime wasn’t very gross. But the idea came from something that was pretty noxious.

SCOTT WEBB:
In the earliest days, it was actually a bucket of shit, according to Geoffrey.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
The slime was an accident. Honestly. We had this joke on the dungeon set: “Don’t any of you kids pull this chain!” We ended up going to the cafeteria, gave the prop guy a bucket, and said, “We want you to take all the stuff that was left on the plates the whole day. We’ll add water to it and dump it on the kid.” The kid’s name was Tim Douglas. When he pulled the chain, we wanted it to look like sewage was coming out. That was the idea. We didn’t get around to shooting the scene, because we couldn’t go overtime with children. It’s against the law. We put the set up again the following week to shoot that one scene, and the prop man came to me—this is a true story—and said, “We have a problem.” The problem was that he didn’t get a new bucket of slop. He just kept the old one. He had kept it backstage, and there were eight inches of green crud growing over the top of the bucket. It was really evil. God, did it smell! We had to get the scene
.
We couldn’t get more slop . . . So we said, “Dump it on the kid anyway.”

ROGER PRICE:
Down came
not
the simulated contents of a toilet, but
green slime
. Evil-smelling green slime, which had everyone in the studio gagging. It was probably luminous. Green slime was not invented by anybody. It fermented itself into life. And it
was
alive!

BRENDA MASON:
We could see the shock on the kid’s face when the stuff hit him. We thought he was going to be sick, just from the smell alone. Roger was furious. It was to
look
disgusting, not
be
disgusting.

ROGER PRICE:
If I had known at the time, I would not have done it. I was a professional producer! I was horrified when I found out and maybe a bit angry. We all felt sorry when we buried the kid afterward. Especially later on when we realized he was not actually dead.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Tim was fine afterward. He just took a shower. It got such a positive response from the audience that we wrote an entire show about slime.

ROGER PRICE:
It was a gift, and the potential was immediately evident. There was no doubt we would do that again.

BRENDA MASON:
We had nowhere to go but up with the recipe from there.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
In terms of the recipe, there was some mystique about it. People wanted to know what was in it. If we told them, they wouldn’t want to know anymore. Somebody figured out, “Hey, let’s pretend it’s a secret!”

MARJORIE SILCOFF:
I’m sorry, I was sworn to secrecy at age eleven and have never divulged it. I think Geoffrey Darby was the one who swore me to secrecy.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
We made it out of Cream of Wheat and baby shampoo and green food coloring and a little bit of vegetable oil. That’s basically all slime was.

ABBY HAGYARD:
There’s something innately delicious about something that disgusting and messy. I don’t think they expected it to be that hugely popular. Roger came up with the slime and the water because he was frustrated by the kids at home always saying, “I don’t know . . .” He said there should be a punishment for the “I don’t know,” and he found one! And it was a
hit
!

JUSTIN CAMMY:
I was only slimed once and I fucked it up. It was the “Marketing” episode, and you can see the fuck-up on screen.

ALBIE HECHT:
If you really want to get into it, you talk as you feel the slime, which slowly comes down on your head. Then your eyes look up as if—
what the hell’s happening?
—and then you
really look up right into it. And that’s when they dump the big slime on you. Then you face forward because that’s when we see it all over you.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
They told me, “It’s easy. When you say, ‘I don’t know,’ look up a little bit so the slime hits your face. You want it over your face.” So I said the trigger phrase, “I don’t know,” and looked up. But I closed my eyes before the slime hit, and you can see I was anticipating it. Why they didn’t reshoot it . . . I don’t know!

VANESSA LINDORES:
My first one was the legendary multicolored slime scene in my first episode. I wasn’t actually supposed to get slimed in that scene. It was meant for Christine. Often they would take the other actors off the set and do a single shot of the kid getting slimed, but because of the dialogue in that scene, they did a two-shot, so I stayed beside Christine the whole time. Since it wasn’t me getting slimed, no one thought to give me the slime directions; hence, out of instinct I did everything you aren’t supposed to do when getting slimed. I flinched and cowered. Even so, I still nailed my line: “Boy, must be tough being a TV star!” Geoff Darby came out of the control room after that, laughing his head off and telling me I earned the slime bonus for that one. At nine, you don’t know enough to realize how weird your life has just become.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
As an actor or host or performer, it was a nice challenge because we had to get it right. It was at the end of the day, and there was a big setup involved, whether it was slime or water. They’d have to get everyone off set, lay down plastic, shoot it so you wouldn’t see the ladder and the plastic, and all with the five people standing around us. It was gross, but it was kind of a fun thing to do.

BOB BLACK:
By the time I got there, Christine had veto power over getting slimed. Which was most of the time. She
hated
getting slimed. In the “Movies” episode,
everybody
was going to get slimed, because that was Roger’s response to Nickelodeon saying, “We want more sliming!” The sketch was originally written where Christine was going to get slimed twice, but she changed it to where she got slimed once and then watered on top of that.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
When I think of getting slimed, I think of the end of the day—it’d usually be on weekends, lots of people around. Lots of crew. That sense of generally a really friendly bunch of people working together to make this show.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
They all hated it. The parents didn’t really care one way or another, but one of the kids described it as standing under the rear of a cow when it lifts its tail.

BOB BLACK:
Getting slimed they liked. They liked the extra money. They liked that the cameras were focused on them. But on the other hand, the slime was nasty stuff.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
I have been “pied” by Ruth Buzzi. When I left the control room, they had arranged that and recorded it. But of course, I knew better than to get slimed.

ROGER PRICE:
Are you kidding? Have you ever been slimed? It is horrible.

JOSH MORRIS:
I did it as a casual thing to see what it felt like. It’s like taking a bath in mud. If you forget it’s not mud, it’s actually very nice. In a hot studio, though, the cottage cheese became foul if it wasn’t cleaned up efficiently.

JUSTIN CAMMY:
It tasted like nothing. Like Cream of Wheat without sugar.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
The water was early on. If you said the word, “Water,” you got dumped on.

MARJORIE SILCOFF:
The water was initially warm and then cold under the hot lights.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
Sometimes it was kind of cold. Roger and Geoff might have done a little bit of that on purpose just to get a reaction of shock or surprise. For the most part, it was quite pleasant and we got paid extra.

BRENDA MASON:
The bonus payments were introduced to ease the complaints about being slimed and watered. Once the kids knew there was an extra twenty-five or fifty dollars—a lot of money in eighties’ dollars—the complaining miraculously stopped!

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Using slime is really a leveler. It was a very simple way to bring them out of the rarified air of being a “TV star.”

SCOTT WEBB:
Roger understood that and took it a step further. It was a bonding moment between the kids on the television and the kids at home. “I got shit on at school today when I failed my math test. And look!
They’re
getting dumped on the same way!”

GEOFFREY DARBY:
How slime turned into the Nick thing was the same reason it resonated with the audience of
You Can’t Do That on Television
. “You think your life is bad? You didn’t have to write six hundred pages out of the dictionary for detention!” We took it to an absurd level to make kids feel that their lives weren’t really that bad. Slime may be vile, but it’s not violent. It’s safe.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
We did get negative reports from George Gerbner’s “violence on television” studies. He would give us a violence rating for slime that would count the same as a decapitation.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
We wanted to be as disgusting as possible. “Let’s see how far we can push that out in the world before we have to scale back!”

MITCHELL KRIEGMAN:
When
Ren & Stimpy
first started, we were looking at jokes about fart bubbles in the bathtub. That optimized the Nick slime ethic and themes of what we were trying to do.

ROBIN RUSSO:
Nothing ever grossed me out.

ANDY BAMBERGER:
With early
Double Dare
, the studio would start stinking by Thursday with all the rotten food on the floor and everything.

HARVEY:
We had this Plexiglas tank, and early in the run, we filled it with these postdated baked beans. It took
forever
to open that many cans; it was a big tank. At the end of the four days under hot lights, those beans were some pretty rancid stuff. How were we gonna get them out of there? We called this honey wagon guy. This is a guy who sucks out septic tanks for a living. After he was done sucking it out with a hose hooked up to his truck, he says to us, “You know what I do for a living, right? And I have never seen anything so disgusting in my entire life!”

MARC SUMMERS:
When I walked in the first day in Philadelphia and saw all those obstacles and they were putting whipped cream and food coloring on, the first thing I said to Geoffrey Darby was, “What the hell is
that
?” And he said, “That’s our obstacle course.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, because when I had done the audition, I had just been asking questions and we had been doing these lame-ass physical challenges. I said, “Do you really think kids would want to do that?” That was my first thing:
Do kids want to jump in that crap?