Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age

by Mathew Klickstein

  JUSTIN CAMMY: You Can’t Do That on Television was so low-budget that at one point they just gave me one hundred dollars to buy new clothes. There was no direction on what kind of clothes they wanted.

  KRISTEN NIKOSEY: Don kinda dressed similar to when he was on camera as he would at home. Kinda very generic in a lot of ways. Once in a while, he would put on a Hawaiian shirt because he was doing something, but not very often. He didn’t want to call attention to himself. And that’s how he was on Mr. Wizard’s World: It wasn’t about him. It was about giving excitement about science to the kids he was dealing with.

  PHIL MOORE: If there’s anything I answer with a kind of jokingly adamant response: No, I did not choose my own wardrobe! I didn’t know what the heck the deal was. I called it the Carlton Banks Collection. I did kinda look like a dufus.

  ANDREA LIVELY: I can confirm Phil Moore had nothing to do with his wardrobe. They laid it out and he wore it. It was indicative of the nineties. Another thing I didn’t have to worry about: I didn’t have to worry about my clothes because you never saw me.

  PHIL MOORE: It was a small concession, though. I went from working in a data center to being a nationwide TV personality. And they wanted me to wear a weird-looking peacock shirt? Okay!

  DAVE RHODEN: They brought me in with Jocelyn Steiner, who ended up getting the part of Alex. They had me read with her, but they had me read for the part of Merv instead of Walter, as I had in my first audition. Then they took away our scripts and asked us to kind of ad-lib it and see how it would go, and they seemed to like it, I guess, and they called us back and said we got the parts. From there they put us in some kind of introductory acting classes, some things to get loosened up. We probably went to those for a few weeks. We went to the first wardrobe fitting, and they brought us down to try on the clothes for our first show. And I put on the shirt and put on the slacks and came out, and they said, “How did everything fit?” I was like, “Well, the shirt’s fine, but the pants are a little short.” They put me in some high-waters, you know? They were, like, four inches short or something like that. And the lady in charge of wardrobe looked at me and said, “No, they’re perfect.” I was just like, “Holy crap. Everybody’s gonna see me in this?” That was the first time it dawned on me that I was playing a nerd.

  LISA LEDERER: Clarissa wasn’t really a tomboy and she wasn’t really the weird girl. She was always just herself. This is where I feel Clarissa touched a nerve with people, because she was very fluid in the way she dressed. She might have a lot of stuff to do that day, so she might feel like she had to wear combat boots because she could cover more ground that way. There might be a reason she had a ponytail. It felt like what we were doing was creating this girl in a more real way, to represent the way that girls—that people—normally dress.

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: Lisa Lederer was one of these New York folks who brought a Downtown scene sensibility, and when she first came on set, the people at Nickelodeon were freaking out because she had a nose ring.

  SARAH CONDON: Taking someone from the magazine world like Lisa Lederer, who didn’t have much of a TV background, was what really made people nervous. Not so much the way she looked but the fact that she didn’t have any TV experience per se.

  LISA LEDERER: I pierced my nose in my own apartment with a darning needle because there wasn’t any place in New York to have that done. I guess the corporate people at Nickelodeon felt it was way too dangerous for somebody who looked like that to get their hands on this beautiful young blond character. But I wasn’t trying to represent myself; I wasn’t trying to represent my social scene. I was trying to represent Clarissa, and I believe that at some point everybody realized that’s what was going on.

  MELISSA JOAN HART: I wish I had taken more of Clarissa’s style. That would have been fun, but I never really paid attention to how it was put together. I was already pretty tough and a nonconformist when it came to my personal life, because just being in a part of New York City where I was living, just sitting on the subway, you’re surrounded by so many different kinds of people, and it’s, “Whoever you are is okay.” Maybe that’s what I brought to Clarissa. Even though it was already sort of in the writing. I was able to really pull it off, though, because I understood it.

  TOBY HUSS: I found my Artie glasses at a thrift store. I think they were women’s glasses. The red pants and white tank top I used when I was first doing the character. I never really thought about it. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to create a character that pulls all of the zeitgeist together. Mine was random; Artie was a goof-off and was fun. That was it. When I took those glasses off, though, that was the end of it. I still have those glasses.

  ROSS HULL: I don’t actually wear glasses. I have twenty-twenty vision. That was certainly a prop. We started off with having lenses in my glasses, but the reflection of the fire was a problem, so by later seasons, they were lensless.

  MARC SUMMERS: If you look at some of the kids on Double Dare, they didn’t come across as the brightest kids in the world, they didn’t have much to say, but I think the kids at home related to them more than, Hi, my name is Sally and I’m a ballet dancer! We put real kids on and that helped a lot.

  MICHAEL KOEGEL: The thing about casting these shows: We had to find normal, real people.

  ALISON FANELLI: That’s what was great about Pete & Pete: It’s about kids that people had never made a show about before. It wasn’t that type of Hollywood studio thing. It’s so obvious when you watch Pete & Pete versus those shows how different it looked. I love how gritty it is. That natural aspect is why we have such a huge following.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: You can imagine Pete & Pete was not a show for everyone. Some people would sit there and say, “Yeah, uh . . . that was kind of wild.” Basically, What the fuck was that? And then there were other people who just automatically got it for what it was.

  JOHN INWOOD: With Pete & Pete, there was an effort to choreograph the show in a way that would give it a design from beginning to end and from scene to scene. That’s not the style right now, where we have the “documentary-ization” of shows like Parks and Recreation—which I just did a year of—that are embracing a looser, messier documentary style. Studio executives have embraced that because it’s led to shorter days, quicker shooting time periods, and the bottom line is . . . it’s cheaper.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: At one point, Geoffrey Darby was in seven cities in one week overseeing our productions. I thought, “We’re getting so big, we need our own studio.” But our company wouldn’t have gone for that, because they liked our continued profitability as the bottom line. We got together with the people who were building Universal Studios in 1988 and convinced them to build us two large soundstages at their theme park.

  BYRON TAYLOR: Aside from slapping a big Nickelodeon logo on them and picking some bright and contemporary colors for it, we weren’t allowed to make changes or improvements to the buildings. We were going to have a Styrofoam T-rex that was used in some Nickelodeon promo stuff and it was going to burst out of the bathroom structure . . . but it proved to be too expensive, so they didn’t do it. Really nothing changed except for the added bathrooms.

  HERB SCANNELL: Geoffrey and Debby were there for some early brainstorming meetings. Like everything else at Nick, it all came down to, “What’s kid about it?” There was an idea that there would be air jets shooting out of the floor and somebody’s dress might fly up. It would be subversive and unexpected. There were going to be garbage cans that talked to you. The original Nick Studios had Nick toilet paper with the blimp logo, and everybody stole it. So we quickly had to change the toilet paper because kids were taking them as souvenirs. A lot of kids were apparently not “doing their business” appropriately, if you know what I mean.

  BYRON TAYLOR: Universal had their own team, and I was the only person available to do conceptual work for Nickelodeon. The way it was presented to me, Nickelodeon was offered the opportunity to h
ave a home—a facility—that was two soundstages, plus office space, a control room, editing suites, and a shop where my guys could do our work. It was going to operate as a studio in the classic sense: staff, personnel, camera people, prop people, lighting people . . .

  BOB MITTENTHAL: It was like working in a fishbowl.

  BYRON TAYLOR: That was an interest on Universal’s part, because we could operate as an attraction: People could take tours, go behind the scenes, participate. There would be an event basically every hour.

  DEBBY BEECE: The studio opened and there was a huge celebration in Orlando. None of the rides worked. It was 110 degrees. People were walking around with silver trays in black velvet and with Champagne. Everybody standing in lines for rides that were half-open. But it was a wonderful time. Very glitzy-glamour.

  HARVEY: You couldn’t help but notice the culture change when we went to Universal. That was a big deal, seeing Steven Spielberg at the grand opening and announcing the dedication of the soundstage. There were a lot of suits that we saw. Now there was merchandising and live tours and ad sales . . . and a fountain at Universal Studios Florida that spewed out green slime.

  HERB SCANNELL: Success is relative in Hollywood. The people there spent more time ignoring cable than doing anything about it. Now, suddenly, people were saying, “Nick has a place in Florida? What’s up with that?”

  ANDY BAMBERGER: We finally had a home. We finally had a place where Nick was made.

  MARK MULCAHY: I’m pretty sure, like anything, people would be pretty disappointed about the truth. There’s a “Sandy.” I guess there is. I don’t know if that helps to understand it. No one knows but me, and that’s a rarity, so I’m hanging on to it. Even the other band members aren’t aware of it. I came close to telling somebody, but I didn’t. So I haven’t told anybody. Don’t feel left out.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: Will and I had been talking about who would do the theme song for the show, and Miracle Legion was a band we both really dug.

  MARK MULCAHY: Will and I had lunch together. He was shaky about asking me if Miracle Legion would do music for the show. At the time, we were having legal trouble, and nobody in the band wanted to do it. I had a partner in the band and we wrote most of the songs and he didn’t want to do it. So Miracle Legion couldn’t do the music. I had never written music on my own, but I volunteered to do it anyway. And then I presented him with the song “Hey Sandy,” and the rest is where we are now.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: Will, Mark, and I talked about all the things we wanted Mark to do in the song—“We want this and to have that in it”—and Mark, as he does, kind of nods: “Oh, yeah. Cool. Great.”

  MARK MULCAHY: I had waited over the weekend to see what their opinion of the song would be. I really wanted a job, because the legal part of my music career was messing me up and this would be great in terms of fortune. I had had a demo of that song, and it really was the only one. It wasn’t like five choices. It was, “Here’s the one that I have.” And it’s strange because it did work really well.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: Two weeks later, Mark sends something back and it was completely different than everything we wanted him to do. But it was absolutely perfect. And that’s the theme song that’s in there now.

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: Believe me, if Mark could concoct a mystery that people would talk about this many years later . . . But I know that he didn’t. He’s not that calculating.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: Over time, people started getting obsessed with what some of the lyrics were, particularly the second or third line. Mark has always been pretty cryptic about it, has always refused to tell us what it is. I think we’ll keep the mystery alive. I don’t even wanna know.

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: I love that people are still trying to figure out what he’s saying. It’s good to have a little enigma around something, especially when it lasts.

  MARK MULCAHY: Something Will and I agreed on was that neither of us wanted a theme song that was about the show. Not “Pete and Pete: two brothers . . . blah, blah, blah . . .” It was going to be its own song.

  MICHAEL SPILLER: They gave me a lot of freedom in directing Pete & Pete’s opening sequence. I had very little time and money. We did the whole thing in three or four hours. I didn’t give Mark or the rest of the band much direction. They just played the song a bunch of times. “Have fun! High energy!”

  MARK MULCAHY: He said, “Could you guys just jump around and up and down?” I said I didn’t want to jump up and down. I wanted to do something other than that. Then he said, “Could you please—just on this take—jump around?” That’s the one where I jump up on the bass drum. The stuff they used. The reason I was looking up: I was trying to think of other things to do there. I had never written a theme song to anything, so I certainly didn’t have any reason to think that it would be a “successful theme song.” But somehow it was.

  CRYSTAL LEWIS: We recorded the theme song for Roundhouse in our makeshift studio space at Universal. I had known the song for some time, having been involved with the show from the early stages. I remember the filming of the opening sequence more clearly than the recording of the song itself, for some reason. It was one of those days when work didn’t seem like work. We didn’t have a script, and we were able to just be ourselves and traipse about Universal like we owned the place! The recording of the song, as well as the filming of the opening sequence, in addition to the filming of all the SNICK promos with the infamous orange couch, really began to bring home the fact that we were doing this. It wasn’t just a hope or a dream anymore. It was reality.

  RACHEL SWEET: I wanted the theme song for Clarissa to be poppy. I wanted it to be fun and memorable . . . and I didn’t want to write lyrics. I didn’t want to do the typical sitcom theme song where it kind of tells a story or tries to convey what the song is about. I wanted it to just be something fun to listen to, like ear candy. I think that’s what we got. I had been recording for many years and was very into sixties pop and girl group stuff like the Shondells and the Ronettes.

  ALAN GOODMAN: One of the guys who I had worked with at CBS Records was this guy called Marty Pekar, and Marty was a huge fan of doo-wop and had gone back and found a lot of those early doo-wop bands and had started a label to produce for them. One of the groups he worked with was Jive Five with Eugene Pitt.

  MIKE KLINGHOFFER: One of the sounds that kids seem to always respond to—and they’ve researched it and whatnot—is the doo-wop sound. For whatever reason, it has—I don’t know what you want to call it—this “jungle instinct” for kids, like, two to five. They just like that, those sounds.

  ALAN GOODMAN: Fred and I called in Tom Pomposello, who unfortunately passed away too early. Tom was a couple of years older than we were and had owned a real hippie record store in the town where Fred had grown up. But he was also a wonderful blues musician. I was working on Nickelodeon and our business was growing, so we brought him in to create those graphics and the soundtracks and all of that stuff. I said, “I don’t know how much you know about doo-wop, but there’s a lot of that repeated-syllable stuff. Get-ga-get-get get-ga-get-get. There’s a lot of that in doo-wop.” So that stuff was running through my head, and I came in to Tom and said, “What if we just took the word ‘Nickelodeon’ and went Ni-ni-ni-ni, Na Nick nick nick?” And he went off and did Nickel-O-de-ONNNN! So the opening part of it was me saying Ni-ni-ni-ni, Na Nick nick nick, and Tom came up with the way to end it. And Eugene Pitt was the one who scored it out and figured out what all the vocal parts would be. You wouldn’t think it took three people, but it did!

  FRED NEWMAN: I’ve always thought sound is, in fact, music. Crickets are music. On Doug, it would be a homemade sound a lot of the time. The rhythm would be rice in a paper bag. It would be two sneakers I would tap together. I would use things that a kid would have had around the house for the actual tracks of music.

  DAN SAWYER: We were like kids ourselves doing the music for Doug. Because it’s so
sparse and hand-done, it stands out. We didn’t feel like we were constrained. Up to that point, most of the music heard in cartoons was derived from Carl Stalling, the guy who set the template for almost all animated cartoons. It’s orchestral and has a lot of chromatic runs and a lot of funny quotes from symphonies. I love that stuff. We were trying to do something different, though.

  JIM JINKINS: And of course, Fred had a virtually endless repertoire of mouth sounds: Chick-ah-ka-pahhhh! Meanwhile, Dan could play zillions of instruments, and what he couldn’t play, he’d either sample in his keyboard or bring in outside players and singers.

  DAN SAWYER: Traditionally, that was something you wanted to stay away from. I was even told, years ago, that there were four or five sounds not to use. The first was any human-made sound like singing, clapping, whistling . . . anything human-made. We weren’t supposed to use that as an underscore. Those kinds of things would compete too much with the dialogue and take your attention away. We broke a lot of rules on all the Nickelodeon shows in those years.

  EDD KALEHOFF: I always do music the classic way. I’m a guitarist and a keyboardist. I was lucky enough in my training in my early years to have a synthesizer as part of the whole mix. The Moog synthesizer. But those are mostly acoustic instruments—real drums and a real guitar and real horns—all mixed together to create a fabric of the “size” that I wanted.

  MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: The Fairlight I wrote the Rugrats theme on now seems like Iron Curtain technology or something. They had big seven-inch discs and a real low sampling rate—maybe eight-bit or less—but I liked it and I think Gabor Csupo liked that I was using acoustic instrument sounds on that synth. Cellos, guitars, upright basses, horns; they sound more like those instruments than analogue synths, but they still kind of sound like an acoustic guitar. Like what wood paneling—that kind of plastic-coated stuff you get at Home Depot—is to real wood. It was kind of like that. And I liked the sounds because of that sort of not-here-nor-there kind of sound to them.