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

by Mathew Klickstein

  DENIS HANNIGAN: The toy piano on Rugrats was bought at a local mall. There were lots of unique sounds on the show that helped give the series its identity.

  DAN VITCO: Yes, I came up with the guitar theme for when Sam comes through the window. I watched him come through the window and went, “Let’s see how it fits in.” It sounded cool and it seemed to work. The guitar I used was a Fender Stratocaster. And there’s something called a tremelo arm—some call it a whammy bar—and when you play a chord, as you let the chord ring out—in this case, it’s a D9 chord—you push the whammy bar up and down a little bit, and the pitch is going to waver a little bit. Almost like surf music. It’s a little bit of a flowy, dreamy, cool sound. And that’s what I used in that particular scene, every time Sam would enter through the window.

  SEAN O’NEAL: I believe Viacom has a copyright on the riff that brought me into the room.

  JEFF ZAHN: I’ve done a bunch of shows along with Are You Afraid of the Dark?, and what you’ve got to do is find a unique sound that identifies and separates it from everything else.

  MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: I was lucky: If you were looking for a more traditional score, you found the guys who went to Berklee and were well versed in the world of John Williams. If you were looking for something a little bit different . . . I would get the call.

  CRAIG BARTLETT: I’m a huge Devo fan. That was one of the reasons I came to LA: That’s where Mark Mothersbaugh was working. As soon as we got the episodes back and it was time to spot them and work on the score, I’d go to Mark’s studio. Going to Mark and giving him the lyrics to the Reptar theme and having him come up with the song? I was over the moon.

  MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: I scored every episode myself, with my brother and a couple guys that worked with me. I scored the live shows, the TV commercials, and the feature films. I wrote songs for it throughout the history of the show.

  CHUCK SWENSON: Mark’s a creative guy. You just let him do his thing. But then there was a guy named Denis Hannigan. He was the guy who did the work.

  DENIS HANNIGAN: Around 1990, I was working with Mark Mothersbaugh writing music on a Disney Channel show called Adventures in Wonderland when Gabor Csupo and Paul Germain brought over the Rugrats pilot. Mark wrote the theme and the music for the pilot. Halfway through the first season, Mark asked me to write the music on the remaining seven episodes. I was not credited as composer but as “music assistant.” Before season two, Mark asked me to be the composer on Rugrats and we would share the up-front credit. I came on officially at this point. There was a premiere party and Gabor told me he liked my music.

  PAUL GERMAIN: At first, I didn’t even know Denis Hannigan. Over a period of time, I began to realize that people other than Mark were doing the music. Now, at what point did that start and how much of it was done by other people? I really couldn’t tell you. But I began to realize Hannigan was doing most of the music.

  DENIS HANNIGAN: I wrote all the show music on the last fifty-two episodes of the first run and am credited 100 percent as writer on the music cue sheets.

  PAUL GERMAIN: What Mark certainly did do was determine the musical sound of what Rugrats was going to be.

  JEFF FISHER: I didn’t write the theme to Are You Afraid of the Dark? That was done by a guy named Jeff Zahn, who wrote the melody. I went into the studio with that and orchestrated it and arranged it, basically.

  JEFF ZAHN: As with every series that we do in kids’ music for Nickelodeon—and I also work a lot for PBS and Disney—the initial grunt work is at the beginning of the series, where it is most crucial to set up the tone and structure of the music. I was more involved in that and was the one who basically suggested Ray Fabi and Jeff Fisher to come on after.

  JEFF FISHER: I was doing a lot of work for Cinar, and the president came up to me one day and said they were thinking about doing this children’s thing . . . little bunch of scary tales. In fact, they wanted to call it Scary Tales, but the name was taken. D.J. MacHale was in LA and I was in LA, so I scored the pilot. I was basically in the right place at the right time.

  JEFF ZAHN: I believe I wrote the theme song to Are You Afraid of the Dark? in an airport, waiting for a plane in Montreal. It then changed from me humming to writing it on a piece of paper, a music score sheet. I had the theme and went home and developed it. It became kind of iconic. The composers were told to try to integrate and weave some of that in, which they did.

  STEVE SLAVKIN: We were going to have wall-to-wall music on Salute Your Shorts. We were going to score it like a feature. Big orchestral pieces, source music. Sometimes Ed Alton brought in live pieces, but a lot of it came from his massive library of samples. We used a lot of classical music, which was somewhat unique at the time, to try to give it a “big” feel. Take a baseball game and elevate it to this massive life-or-death experience. Give the sweeping grandeur to a capture the flag game.

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: The theme song for Clarissa was written and sung by Rachel Sweet, with whom I had worked when I directed her show back on the Comedy Channel. She went off with producer Anthony Battaglia, and when she came back, it was perfect. It was a gift. I don’t think I had to change a thing.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: They had the Ren & Stimpy pilot, and John wanted to do this thing where they had a party in the dog pound. I was in a band playing upright bass at the time with Jim Smith, who also worked on the show and helped to develop it originally. We were a pretty jammy type of band, heavily into the Grateful Dead, a lot of funk music, classic jazz, blues . . . We had our little thing going and John had no money. He had a clear idea what he wanted, and we were talented enough that once he told us what he wanted, we could ace the style.

  CHRISTINE DANZO: We were very restricted with the music. It had to be free for the most part, “needle-drop” or self-performed by Spumco staff to avoid future residual payments.

  SARAH CONDON: Mitchell reached out to Rachel Sweet, who we both knew from the Comedy Channel, and said, “Look, we have a certain amount of money, and can you take a whack at this?” It was just a small job; in a way, a favor. And she really hit it out of the ballpark the first try.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: John was really into this Polynesian musician called Chaino—this wild native guy who played bongos with sticks. John threw on this forty-five record, and it was this crazy music that had R & B roots in it, basic jump/swing beats with upright bass, but with these crazy bongos. “Do something like that! Do something like that!” The whole thing was raw, gritty stuff—like the art for the show. It wasn’t your typical timid, homogenized, crappy stuff that most people were trying to write for children’s television. What we made for him ended up getting used as a title theme, because when the show went to series, it got to be the time where Nick wanted a song. Various songs were submitted, but John said, “This works best. It has no lyrics. It’s just cool.” He convinced them to take it.

  RACHEL SWEET: Mitchell’s girlfriend at the time, Lola, had a studio in the Chelsea district and we just kind of banged it out. It was a lot of fun, actually. Probably three hours and we were done. It became kinda bigger than we ever thought it would be.

  BENNY HESTER: We got a great band together. Marty Walsh was with Supertramp, Jack Kelly had toured with Donna Summer, James Raymond was David Crosby’s son.

  JULENE RENEE-PRECIADO: James Raymond was adopted, like me. I had found my biological parents and he wanted to find his. During Roundhouse, he discovered that his birth father was David Crosby. That explains his incredible music gift. It was a whole pool of super-talented people.

  ED ALTON: There was a mixture of kids who definitely could sing and some who were a little more self-conscious. Those were some of the funnier segments in the intro sequence.

  HEIDI LUCAS: Poor Venus. I don’t think that woman could carry a tune. She did not want to sing. She probably petitioned them for hours—“I don’t want to sing this. Please don’t make me sing this. Can I do something else? Can I rap it? Any
thing but sing it?” She was pissed that she had to sing.

  VENUS DEMILO: Michael Bower hit me in the head. He had done it by accident the first time, but then with every take, he’d do it again.

  MICHAEL BOWER: It wasn’t an accident.

  VENUS DEMILO: He’d keep doing it and I’d give him a look and he thought that was hilarious.

  MICHAEL BOWER: I did it on purpose every time. I was pissed at her that day. I think I was in her room because I was trying to get away from Tim Eyster and I was touching something she had and she started hitting me. She may have been hitting me playfully, but any time I get hit, anger comes out. When we had to film the intro in that big wide shot, they stood me next to her and they said, “We want you to raise your hands at the end for Camp Anawanna!” I was thinking of the best way to get back at Venus, and the first time we filmed the intro, I half-punched her. Bam! We did it again. And I did it again. And she was mad. She said, “Stop it.” And then they filmed it a third time, and I did it again!

  VENUS DEMILO: We were really immature at the time. If you were there, you would have heard me complaining about him putting his armpit in my face every time.

  MICHAEL BOWER: You can see it in her face at the beginning of every episode. She looks right at me when I hit her in the face. It was great.

  COURTNEY CONTE: Oh, it was all improv. Steve directed it. It was hysterical. We just kept going for it.

  TREVOR EYSTER: I put my elbow on Danny’s shoulder and he takes his finger and pushes my elbow off his shoulder. That’s improv . . . but would have happened off screen, too. The plan was, the mold was going to shift by virtue of the energy of the actors. Erik MacArthur really did have that “fuck it” attitude.

  ERIK MACARTHUR: All I cared about was girls and surfing. Maybe try to steal a beer from somewhere. I wasn’t hanging out with these kids, calling them “Sponge” and “Donkeylips.” It wasn’t my scene. If I was working on some film or something like that, maybe there would’ve been a more serious environment.

  MICHAEL BOWER: When it came to me with “I hope we never part” in a close-up, I was holding a fishing pole and I don’t even know how to fish. So I started messing with it: “What the hell is this?” And it started to break while I was singing. When it came to that part where I’m supposed to say, “I hope we never part,” I replaced it with, “This thing came apart,” because . . . it came apart. And it rhymed.

  CONNIE SHULMAN: There was one day when Patti had to sing a song on Doug. I’m not a great singer and we did it several times over and over. This was one time that I could tell Jim was getting slightly frustrated. Patti didn’t have to have a great voice, though; it just had to be melodic enough to sound pleasant!

  BILLY WEST: I love that Doug would get his banjo and start singing about Patti Mayonnaise; it was very, very sweet. There was a number called “Bangin’ on a Trashcan,” and that’s the number that kids used to make their own little videos out of. I didn’t think in terms of making it worse. I thought in terms of what would be his limits as a kid who wasn’t necessarily a singer. That’s what makes people feel for him: It sounded, you know, naturally amateurish. Therein is the emotional resonance.

  MELANIE CHARTOFF: Playing Reptar’s girlfriend in the musical version of “Reptar on Ice,” singing those arias and love songs to a lizard, just cracked me up. Had to do a lot of retakes that day. The songs were a riot, sappy and written in an operatic style in which John Shuck—who voiced Reptar—and I’d both trained.

  DOUG PREIS: I did do a couple of the Beets and my point of reference from Jim was the Beatles, like Ringo and John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were maybe more of an amalgamation.

  DAN SAWYER: Obviously, it’s a play on the Beatles. But they’re not the Beatles. They’re a British band who are teen idols for Doug and his friends. They’re a typical band like Spinal Tap, having ridiculous arguments amongst each other.

  ALAN SILBERBERG: I wrote one of the first Beets episodes and put in “Killer Tofu.” When I wrote the lyrics to that, I felt like it sort of became its own thing. It went back to this thing Mike Klinghoffer had told me on Double Dare about how we could do whatever stunts we wanted with tofu because nobody eats tofu and so it wouldn’t be too wasteful. I sort of loved the idea of seeing a big killer tofu. I never considered myself a songwriter, but by putting these goofy lyrics in a script, I created a pop culture canon. I just got a check from ASCAP two days ago. The little, tiny amounts keep rolling in.

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: When I was cutting the first spots, I got this idea—because I’m a fan of Jean-Luc Godard’s movies—that I’d introduce stock music in a very kind of ironic way where I’d use the music and then cut it abruptly. I wouldn’t fade it. It was very shocking to everybody: You can’t use music that way in a cable show! And I was like, “Sure, why not? Why can’t you?”

  ALISON FANELLI: Picking music and sound effects was kind of Will and Chris and Katherine’s baby. They spent hours and hours going through the stock music and using stuff that no one else had used. Katherine would search for hours just to get ten seconds on the show!

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: Then it kinda got on my nerves because SpongeBob and all these shows completely stole that idea and went to the same exact cues, in fact! “Oh yeah. I know those cues . . . because I found them for Pete & Pete!” They were all in the stock library, but nobody was using the stock library that way.

  SYD STRAW: They told me I was going to be in a band with Danny on one episode. So we needed somebody to be in the band with us. I called Joey Ramone, but he said he was leaving for Europe the next day on tour. That would’ve been a very different version of the Blowholes.

  MELANIE GRISANTI: The show opening of Doug is one of my favorite things. I love it! The simplicity of what happens with the line and the music and stuff . . .

  TONY EASTMAN: When we were timing out the doo-doo-doo do-do-do dooo-do-do-do-do, I showed Fred what we were gonna do and he figured out how the sound could go with that ahead of time. Usually, these things are post-scored, and this one was done ahead of time rather than the music being added in later.

  FRED NEWMAN: I had to graph it up. “This is where Skeeter swings and hits the screens. This is where the dog barks happen on the upbeat.” That was the most complicated piece we ever did, because we were finding our way, and finding the sound.

  TONY EASTMAN: What Fred was doing with his mouth could be considered “scat singing.” It’s like on Seinfeld, where they had the bass guitar playing with the cutaway of the outside of the restaurant. That became a little transitional segue type of thing.

  DIZ MCNALLY: I call it the “Diz Call,” but it is a shriek. My whole family does it. Even my grandmother and my grandfather used to do it. Just the call in the neighborhood, when you’d be riding bikes. After you finished supper, you’d go out and stand on the porch and go, Eee-ooo-eee! Eee-ooo-eee! Now I’ve got everybody in Hollywood doing it, even the UPS drivers and the post office guys when they go by at the newsstand where I work! It doesn’t hurt my throat because I can even do it with my mouth closed. It just automatically happens. I’ve never lost my voice.

  FRED NEWMAN: I had learned from these old storytellers in Georgia. Most of these old stories they would tell started in Africa and came over, translated. I heard them toned and with all these sounds of dogs and bears and rabbits they all did. And they would do voices, too; they would become old people and babies. I wanted to do that. The first sound I ever really learned was the sort any second-rate kid in the South learned: the water drip.

  ALISON FANELLI: They would record everything that was going on in the neighborhood during Pete & Pete. All that stuff, that non-produced, non-glossy, non-conveyor-belt type of stuff, was what made it so great.

  FRED KELLER: By not having a laugh track on Hey Dude, even though we were shooting in a sitcom style, we preserved the location, the reality of the ranch, that Spin and Marty feel. They wanted to keep it m
ore of a location type of show rather than impose on the audience a feeling that they were sitting in the bleachers watching a typical sitcom.

  BRENDA MASON: I had to spend many days adding the laugh track to You Can’t Do That on Television, and yes, it was annoying. There was one particular laugh track that we referred to as the “girl machine gun.” The sweetener, Dan McLellan, got very good at it. We would start at the beginning and he would sweeten on the fly. We’d stop and edit when necessary, but usually it was a fairly quick process.

  MARK SCHULTZ: I would go through hours of audience sounds, identifying a whole spray of laughs—applauses, remarks, individual people laughing . . . I filled up a sampler full of all my laugh recordings, and I had them hooked up with touch-sensitivity, so if I hit the keys harder, the laugh would be louder. And if I held the keys, the laughs would sustain. And I could overlay things. I could drop in a giggle or a single person. Sometimes jokes are aimed for guys and they’ll get it faster than a girl will. And sometimes girls will get a joke first. I matched the ambience; the audience recordings were from the same place we taped the shows, so they didn’t sound like they came out of a dead studio. I got to the point where I could make laugh tracks that didn’t sound like canned laughter at all, and I was very proud of it.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: I did not want a laugh track on Clarissa. It seemed so fantastic without one. But I lost.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: It was a sitcom, and I believe in laugh tracks. They’re cues. You can test shows with and without and they’ll do better with. Why didn’t we do it on Salute Your Shorts and Hey Dude? Because it’s unreal. It’s outside. Then it feels wrong. Whereas Clarissa was clearly a studio show. It could’ve been shot in front of a live audience.

  MARK SCHULTZ: I hate the laugh track on Clarissa. It’s one of the worst laugh tracks ever.