Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (9 page)

ALAN SILBERBERG:
In the beginning of
Double Dare
, I didn’t get how it was gonna work. How were people going to
want
to get into the physical challenges and go running through baked beans?

ROBIN RUSSO:
I felt the opposite of that. Once I saw the very first group that came in for the very first show of
Double Dare
, I turned to my stage manager and I said, “This is gonna be a huge hit.”

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
The first day that we shot, I’m sitting in the bleachers and the set is so spectacular. The kids have
never
seen anything like this. The doors open, the kids come in. It was electric. I have never heard so many little kids swear in my life. It was fantastic.

KENAN THOMPSON:
Along with
Danger Mouse
and
You Can’t Do That on Television
, I was a big
Double Dare
fan. On
Double Dare
, they were just having a good time, you know what I’m sayin’? Jumping around in whipped cream just for fun. On
You Can’t Do That on Television
, they were getting
slimed
. No other network was sliming people like that. The image of that green stuff coming down—every time I would turn it on, it would stay with me.

ANNETTE LESURE:
The type of stuff we did on
Wild & Crazy Kids
was fun for
any
kid. At the time, producer Richard Crystal—who is Billy Crystal’s brother and is a clone of him except for being lanky and narrow—did specifically ask me if I was into sports. And I said I didn’t play football or anything like that. But it was very exciting because it was new stuff every week. Stuff I’d never heard of before that they’d just randomly make up. One week we were on donkeys playing basketball, and another we’d be on trampolines or something else.

VENUS DEMILO:
The pie fight with Heidi and me was really great. We stayed up so late doing that. Throwing pies, resetting, throwing pies, resetting . . . The next morning, I had to take my entrance exam for high school, and I still had whipped cream in my hair!

HEIDI LUCAS:
There was an episode with a celebrity rock star coming to camp, and ZZ and I had to lay on the grass and use parts of our body covered in powder so he could see us from the plane flying overhead. Afterward, I was picking baking dough out of my hair and nails and every part of my body you could possibly imagine that could fit dough—which was disgusting—for days. That probably showed on my face. Could I have been a little high-maintenance? In times like that, yeah.

HARVEY:
As I was the “goofy sidekick,” when it was time to try out a new stunt or something, there was a lot of mess and I said it was okay, that I was low-maintenance. But here was my one hard-fast rule: “I’ll do anything, jump into any substance you want . . . as long as the cameras are rolling.” As long as I knew it wasn’t just for somebody making me jump in a big pile of green shit, as long as it was for the narrative thread of the show. Which is a pretty highfalutin phrase to associate with
Double Dare
.

ROBIN RUSSO:
Being the only female on
Double Dare
, I always got the brunt of the mess. I didn’t mind the mess itself, and I got messy
a lot
. The problem was when I’d get
really
messy. Especially on the road show. I would have to get on a plane twenty minutes later. It’s hard to fly when you’re smelling like eggs and gook.

DONNIE JEFFCOAT:
I was the one on
Wild & Crazy Kids
who got picked on, because I think Omar Gooding was protected by his mom half the time, so she would never let them do half the stuff they did to me to him. Any time there was a stunt or something crazy-messy, it was usually done to me. By the last season, I started complaining. “Really? At ten o’clock in the morning, you’re going to pour this vat of crap on me?”

JOANNA GARCIA:
At one point I had been slimed more than anybody for promotional things we had done. I would always blow the challenge or something and would end up getting slimed more than anybody. But I was okay with it.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
The problem with the messiness is it became an arms race at that point. How do we top ourselves every time? There was some frustration on that level.

ALAN SILBERBERG:
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. What was hard was trying to come up with different ways to make messes.
Double Dare
got bigger and bigger, and the stunts got bigger and more mechanical. It was a lot of pies in the pants; I mean, how many different ways can you do that?

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
We always used to say at
Double Dare
that one of the reasons that show was successful was your parents told you not to play with your food and we’re letting you play with your food. It’s as simple as that. You were going against authority. You were going against the convention.

BOB HUGHES:
We have no regrets about misleading children. We all grew up in the sixties and seventies, and we were all completely antiauthoritarian. It was just built into our DNA. We had suddenly been given this megaphone and we could turn on authority and say what
we
wanted to say. And that what
you’re
going to say isn’t always right.

ALAN GOODMAN:
It’s not that we ignored the rules and it’s not that we thumbed our noses at the rules. It’s that we didn’t
trust
the rules more than we trusted our own understanding of things. So we actually lived by a lot of rules. We just questioned them first. I still do that in my career today.

BOB HUGHES:
And a lot of times that helped us, because we did things that were unexpected or different. But other times . . . it hurt us because we were so naïve.

ELIZABETH HESS:
I grew up with such a strict upbringing. For me, it was so liberating to be a liberal, permissive, generous, nonauthoritarian figure. I think
Clarissa
in a lot of ways broke a lot of the sitcom-y rules. I feel there’s something very empowering in it for the kids watching it. So maybe the parents on the show are fallible and they trust their kids more than they should, but the message of that in
Clarissa
is that if kids mess up, it’s about parents giving you some space to figure it out instead of having all the answers and being overprotective. It’s a good thing I’m not a mom, huh?

CHUCK VINSON:
With
Clarissa Explains It All
, it took me back to when I was a young kid and there were things I wanted to say to adults . . . but couldn’t really say them. And I think that’s what the success of the show was: You may
think
it, but Clarissa
said
it.

ABBY HAGYARD:
If there were more of that kind of stuff, you’d have fewer, say, Columbine issues. When you feel, as a human being—age has nothing to do with it—that you don’t matter, that your opinion has no weight, that you have no value, that there’s no future for you, that no one cares . . . that’s the worst situation to be in.

CHRIS VISCARDI:
We loved the idea of having a really defiant character like Little Pete. A character that would do and say all the things that we probably never as kids ourselves would have been able to express for kids. That also came out of the sensibility of the network at the time.

WILL MCROBB:
Occasionally there was a word we couldn’t use. We could use “blowhole” and “fudgelicker,” but we couldn’t say “nipple.” It was pretty arbitrary.

HEATHER SHEFFIELD:
The way we arrived at “sucks hose water” as a catchphrase was Nick wouldn’t let us say something “sucks.” It had to “suck eggs” or something. And somebody said, “Can we say it ‘sucks hose water’?” Sometimes Standards and Practices could be odd at times. I did a bit that was a Pamprin takeoff that would give
other
people cramps. They didn’t want to touch the subject of menstruation, and when they did agree to do it, we had to be very overt about it. They were really weird.

D.J. MACHALE:
There was some concern from Nickelodeon up front that there was gonna be a big push-back against
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
So much so that they asked in the beginning if we could base our stories on literary antecedents so if we did get those complaints, we could say, “Hey, wait a minute! This is Edgar Allan Poe! This is Mary Shelley! This is classic stuff!”

STEVE SLAVKIN:
There was never any shortage of notes, that’s for sure. They were paying for it, and we wanted to make a show that they were happy with, so we had to accommodate some of their things. There was one scene where the kids had to sneak out of their bunk and go down to the lodge to get . . .
blank
. So I wrote that they were going down to get some candy, which is something I’d seen as a camp counselor. We got a note:
Can’t have candy.
Why? Childhood obesity. So what were we supposed to do? They should sneak out and get
fruit
. I’ve never seen a kid risking a severe punishment for a ripe tangelo. But if that’s what they wanted, that’s what they would get. So there’s an episode of
Salute Your Shorts
where the kids sneak out . . . for
fruit
.

MARY HARRINGTON:
Every once in a while, we’d have a chat with Standards about things when it came to
Rugrats
and the way the babies said some words incorrectly. If the characters were older, it certainly would have been a problem. But a nine-year-old watching
Rugrats
knows that what the babies are saying is wrong because they’re babies and therefore won’t really emulate it.

E. G. DAILY:
On
Rugrats
, we were just trying to stay true to the authenticity of what a child really does. Kids just naturally
can’t
say words correctly right away; they haven’t learned to.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Am I worried about Bugs Bunny’s cross-dressing causing two generations of cross-dressers? No. It’s a cartoon. We had a group of psychologists and all this stuff, and they’re the ones who actually said to us, “It’s a cartoon. At the age of two, they know the difference.”

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
There was a charity event I was asked to speak at as Didi from
Rugrats
to a group of parents and kids. Big mistake. After I did my little spiel, the officiator asked if there were any questions from the audience. One bewildered little boy raised his hand and said, “But how do you color yourself in?” It was beyond my ability to explain, so I deferred to one of the animators, who broke that child’s world in half. Kid was crying and everything. He’s probably still discussing it in therapy. Until they’re six or seven, children can’t tell what’s real or not real in their worlds. Santa seems logical; puppets and cartoons are just another kind of creature, like dogs.

CHRIS VISCARDI:
I don’t think we ever thought too much about if we were going too far. If we ever did go too far, the network would certainly tell us. At the time, Nickelodeon had a very pro-kid, comically anti-parent perspective. It was all about a lighthearted defiance Nickelodeon was trumpeting.
This is
our
network. Kids only.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
That was sort of a radical theory of ours called “Us vs. Them.” The kids against the grown-ups. It’s like the Revolutionary War . . . and we were starting the revolution. You could say “Us vs. Them” and it’s teenagers versus parents, or twenty-year-olds versus forty-year-olds.

ANDY BAMBERGER:
After Debby Beece moved up into the promo department, that’s when we had the development of “Us vs. Them.” That gave us a theme to go for how to position each show.

SCOTT WEBB:
We had a promo that ran that said, “If you catch your parents watching Nickelodeon, send them to their room!” Gerry Laybourne got called out because, “Look, Gerry doesn’t want kids and parents to be together.” So there came a multiyear discussion about essentially eliminating “Us vs. Them” out of our language. Under Herb Scannell’s reign, that shifted to, “Nickelodeon puts kids first.”

GEOFFREY DARBY:
You Can’t Do That on Television
made Nick “on the side of the child.” And that was all Roger Price. Absolutely. “Television on the side of the child.” It wasn’t anti-adult. It was pro-kid.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
Nick was just a quote-unquote “very free” place where we were experimenting and allowing ourselves to be kids again, to try to get in the minds of what our audience was thinking.

HOWARD BAKER:
When we won the Emmy on the first season of
Rugrats
, we had a small dinner with Gerry Laybourne. It was Nick’s and I think Viacom’s first Emmy, so she wanted to meet us. She played a joke on Norton Virgien where she told him the cream pie had heat coming off of it, and when he held his hand over it to feel the heat, she slapped it and his hand went into the cream. I thought, “This is the head of a children’s network, all right.”

STEVE VIKSTEN:
When Craig Bartlett and I created
Hey Arnold!
, we named Helga’s character after Gerry in homage: Helga Geraldine.

SCOTT WEBB:
Since the core idea we hit on as a team was that it’s tough to be a kid in a grown-up world, one of the first things we did was look at
ourselves
as kids. We were all misfits and misunderstood and all those things.

DEE LADUKE:
I was a misfit youth, believe me. I was a misfit of a misfit. And we were all kids at Nick! There wasn’t a one of us who had grown up yet. We still thought of ourselves as eight, nine, ten years old. A lot of us were extending our adolescence because maybe we weren’t too good at being kids the first time around, either because we were misfits like me or . . . I don’t know. But we were really going to make up for whatever we lost in childhood right there at Nick.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
I was Vice President of Production at Nickelodeon . . . and I didn’t have an office! That doesn’t happen today. I didn’t have an office, I didn’t have a phone. I sort of ran around and hung out in other people’s offices. And they would track me down. That was sort of the fun, the attitude we had.