MELANIE CHARTOFF: I loved the relationship between Minka and Boris, and their squabbling was so familiar to me from my own family. For Minka, I mustered all memories of the bubbies from the Fairfax district and my own long-gone grandmas into a Yiddish gibberish tirade. And this was Didi’s mother from the Old Country, so I kept that same strident falsetto pitch, then added an accent.
PAUL GERMAIN: Boris and Minka were based on my grandparents named Semen and Minka, but I didn’t want to use “Semen” for obvious reasons. We were all Jewish and we were doing the older generation. Michael Bell was doing it, Melanie Chartoff was doing it, and I was writing it. It was years later when some group was angry that Boris was a stereotype and I thought, “Maybe you think he’s a stereotype. I’m doing my grandpa.”
MICHAEL BELL: That was inane and a waste of everybody’s time. I’m Jewish! That’s what my grandfather looked like! They came from small communities; they were not beauties. My grandmother was a cute little potato! My grandfather was a potato!
MELANIE CHARTOFF: According to my mother, it resembled anti-Semitic caricatures promoted by the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew that she had seen as a young girl. She thought I was parodying her late mother, a pudgy, uneducated Austrian bubbie. I shared her fears with the staff—comprised of lots of reformed Jewish folk—who didn’t want to back down from what we felt were affectionate and distinct portrayals rather than hostile stereotypes.
MICHAEL BELL: We presented the Hanukkah show to an Orthodox synagogue and they loved it. They roared and cheered. A whole synagogue full of Jews and not one of them stood up to say they didn’t like how we represented Grandpa Boris. But they cut back on Grandpa Boris anyway, because they didn’t want further troubles with the Anti-Defamation League. What? You’re going to let them decide how the show should run?
DEE LADUKE: My consciousness was not high enough when I wrote the original pilot for Hey Dude, and the Mexican-American boy who was added later was something I had never thought of. I’m really happy that character got added.
FRED KELLER: Because we were dealing with the West, it was much better with the Native-American character getting involved and becoming the expert of flora/fauna. That was natural. It was one of the more important things Hey Dude did.
KELLY BROWN: I thought they brought the character of Danny on because there was such a positive Native-American feel out there and they wanted to bring that character to life. I never thought of him as a token Indian. And Joe Torres wasn’t Indian. I think he was Mexican.
LISA MELAMED: I’m fairly certain he was Mexican.
MICHAEL KOEGEL: They wanted me to find the character of Danny, who was American-Indian. They put me on an airplane and I called every school on every Indian reservation in the local Tucson area. I talked to school administrators, and they let me meet any kid who was interested in being an actor. It had to be a boy, of a certain age . . . I was walking around with my video camera and my tripod over my shoulder. It was a wild adventure. Finding an actor who was Native-American was really tough. Ultimately, we fudged it because Joe Torres was really Mexican-American. He had a little American-Indian blood in him, but once you get in that part of the country, there’s a fine line between what’s an American Indian and what’s a Mexican Indian. It’s a cultural divide.
FRED KELLER: The problem was finding an actor who could do it at the age group and do it at the budget that could be pitched for each episode. We weren’t doing these things in Hollywood or New York City. In Hollywood, we’d say, “I need a one-armed paper hanger with red hair who has a parrot on his shoulder.” And fifty of them would show up.
BOB MITTENTHAL: Orlando was a pretty shallow talent pool as well. I don’t think we had a lot of Asian kids on Welcome Freshmen.
MICHAEL KOEGEL: Bob had his hands tied, because they would not let us cast that show out of New York City. All those kids were from Orlando.
CHUCK VINSON: When you take a look at the story on Clarissa, it’s somewhat of a small cast, and it got to the point of bringing on whoever was best when it came to the task of being a day player. There was a little bit of, “Yeah, lemme try to get some Asian people here or some black people here.” When we did a high school play or restaurant scene, you do see more people of color, and I would make sure to open that door a little bit more. But it was very limited down in Florida.
RON OLIVER: There were issues with the cultural differences on the Are You Afraid of the Dark? set, because even though D.J. had assembled a really good, smart crew, they were primarily French. Most of them spoke English, and I studied some French in high school, but I’m not fluent. So it was a little bit tricky sometimes, and we’d have communication breakdowns here or there.
ELIZABETH HESS: Like a good Canadian, I went off to study in England. I came to New York with all my Canadian accent bashed out of me and had a standard British accent. And all the agents said, “You’ll never work unless you lose that thing.” And I thought, “Oh! I’ve spent all this time and money . . .” So I thought whatever happens, that’s my voice. When I was cast as the mom on Clarissa, there was actually some concern about my accent because it’s very transatlantic.
ABBY HAGYARD: Sometimes a joke on You Can’t Do That on Television would originate in Roger’s British and we would have to translate it to Canadian.
JUSTIN CAMMY: Then there was the Americanization of the show we didn’t understand. In the “College” episode, the script kept referring to colleges I’d never heard of—Vassar, Barnard. What the hell is that? And in Canada, we don’t call things “pop” or “soda.” We only say “soft drink.” I call my mom “mum,” obviously. We would say “aboot” . . .
CHRISTINE MCGLADE: Roger always said the reason he picked Canada was that we didn’t have accents. For American ears, obviously, we had an accent, but to us, we didn’t at all.
VANESSA LINDORES: We were told not to say “eh.” Other than that, we had no idea we had accents. I live in the U.S. now, so now I hear it. It’s funny.
CRAIG PRYCE: When you get the right elements visually, I don’t even think you can notice. There’s always this thing about “oots” and “aboots” and that kind of stuff. There was a real coproduction element on Are You Afraid of the Dark? with people involved both stateside and also sometimes Quebecois.
ROSS HULL: There were key words that I learned very quickly not to make the mistake about. In Montreal, it was different than Ontario English, so we kind of had to modify it a little bit. There was “roof” and a few other key words that we had to learn how to say. Or “sorry” instead of “sore-y.” That’s a big one. To this day, as a Canadian broadcaster, people will write to me and say, “You sound American.”
FRED NEWMAN: Jim had a Southern kid on Doug with Patti Mayonnaise, and that was kind of rare for a series at that time.
CONNIE SHULMAN: I’m from East Tennessee, and some people are better at losing their accents than others. I guess I didn’t do that. I’ve been up here a long time, and it’s the kind of thing where sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
BECCA LISH: Connie is unusual in that she actually sounds like that. I think she initially auditioned for Skeeter too, but who could now imagine Patti Mayonnaise sounding any other way?
WENDY LITWACK: To go with the Southern accent true-to-life was very bold. Most other kids’ networks would never have done that. They go for the very homogenized, pasteurized, all-American talent.
COURTNEY CONTE: Nickelodeon wanted us to look like the UN. They wanted a little bit of everything.
ABBY HAGYARD: We had Brody and at least three or four black kids. There were some Native Canadians, there were some Asians on the show. We had someone who was Inuit. We had people of different cultural backgrounds. We had French, we had people from different countries. We had a very diverse set of children on that show. I am Caucasian. Les was Caucasian. That was just happenstance. I like to say that I’ve remarkably kept my fig
ure, having had 260 children!
KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: There was also the fact that one girl who might be your girlfriend in one scene was your sister in another. That’s where there was some of the funniest off-camera dialogue.
ADAM REID: Les and Abby thought it was great that they had this multiethnic, very diverse family. That was part of the beauty of the show. When you’re in it, you don’t think it’s special. Of course there would be representations of all these ethnicities on the show. That’s what school is, that’s what communities are. Why wouldn’t this be reflected on television?
CHUCK VINSON: We were doing an episode of Clarissa during the time that the Rodney King trial led to a verdict in favor of the cops, which started a riot. LA was just on fire. We were doing an episode where Clarissa goes back in time, and I needed torches to show the chaos in this scene. So I used to make small, little statements within scenes when I could. You know, show what was going on at the time.
VENUS DEMILO: I didn’t think about it in terms of race at all. We were all so different. We came from all walks of life. We were so many different races, all together. On Salute Your Shorts, it was more about girls against boys than it was about race.
DAVID SIDONI: The girls on Roundhouse would say the guys tended to be immature and childish on set. I would say they were right. We didn’t care. We had fun! It was the guys against the girls. We’d be playing with remote-control cars and other games and video games. Just being boys.
JASON ZIMBLER: Being a guy on a young girl show? Bravo. Lucky to get a gig on a show that’s doing such unconventional work. It didn’t need to be about “guy power.” Although there was “Ferguson Explains It All,” when we kicked her out of the opening titles and my character rewrote it. We even redid the titles for that episode.
SEAN O’NEAL: Being on Clarissa? Geez, I was the “best friend.” I was “the guy that climbed through the window.” I had this idol status, even though I was a nobody. I still have that to go on. “I was that guy on Clarissa.”
CRAIG BARTLETT: I was the only boy in a family of four kids; my sisters provided me with that raw material. I’ve always thought in all my writing, the girl characters are a little smarter, they’re driving things, they’re kind of in charge. And the boys are clueless and goofy and can do the pratfall stuff. More pure ego lurching around, crashing into things, and the girls are more trying to drive things. All that stuff I think is true, and I like to write that stuff.
STEVE VIKSTEN: The women characters kind of ran things on Rugrats. It started with Stu. Jack Riley came in, and I thought he was miscast because he was always playing these downbeat, sarcastic characters. Melanie Chartoff then played her character so upbeat, like a yuppie. There was a character sketch of the twins’ mother, and she was always wearing workout clothes with this female symbol on her sweatshirt. Angelica’s mother, Charlotte—my favorite character—was always on the phone. The father bowed down to his wife as the alpha dog of the group. All the women were like that on Rugrats.
DENIS HANNIGAN: Some feminists were concerned that Angelica was being portrayed in a negative light, but I talked with Paul and he said to keep doing her music the same way. He wanted her strong. She was fun to write for.
PAUL GERMAIN: When I was a little kid, in fifth grade, there was this bully who was picking on me, and it turned out she was a girl. I was terrified of her. This became an emblematic thing in my life: a girl bully. I thought it would be cool to do a girl bully on Rugrats.
CRAIG BARTLETT: I heard about that. It’s funny that there was a girl who used to beat him up and that Paul identifies with Tommy. I kind of identified with Tommy, too. I tried to think about my earliest memories, and that would put me into Tommy’s head.
CHUCK SWENSON: Men are in something of a backseat these days. You see that in popular culture: movies about men being goofballs, guys who are incapable one way or another. They’re children, like the Adam Sandlers of the world. Or even George Clooney—the Sexiest Man in America—gets played in Up in the Air. It’s a real representation of the popular psyche.
HOWARD BAKER: Didi was just as dumb as Stu. Betty was so strong that it became her weakness. Later, when the Carmichaels came along, the mom was such an overachiever that she became a joke. They were all pretty inept.
VANESSA COFFEY: Stu was a new dad. And I thought Grandpa was a strong character. Obviously, Chuckie’s dad is goofy, but we wanted it to be funny. We felt safe with it.
CHRIS RECCARDI: Ren & Stimpy was a man-driven show. That comes more from the sensibilities of the thirties and forties, when cartoons were all male-driven. I don’t know that there was any sexism going on. Cheryl Chase was a professional voice actor. Lynne Naylor was working on it and also did some great voice work on it, too, because they couldn’t afford to pay anyone else.
CHRISTINE DANZO: As a woman, I was delighted to be working on the show. I laughed all the time. I was not the only female. In fact, it was almost a fifty-fifty mix on the first six episodes.
CHERYL CHASE: There were women in the office at Spumco, where they made Ren & Stimpy. There were a lot of artists hanging around. Lynne Naylor was an artist. I never felt it was a boys’ club.
EDDIE FITZGERALD: There were lots of conversations over lunch with a bunch of guys wondering how we could get more girls in there. John would say things like that: “I feel like I’m in a locker room or something!” At the time, not many girls had that sensibility; some did, thank God. We were always delighted when a new girl came to the studio, and I never ever saw any discrimination there.
JOHN KRICFALUSI: Cartoons in general are a kind of “boys’ club” and most cartoonists are guys, but there are some very talented girl cartoonists, too.
HEATHER SHEFFIELD: In the beginning, I was the only girl on the writing staff, so I did more girl-focused stuff. The first thing I pitched that made it on the air was a Reebok pump bra that inflates like a pump shoe: small, medium, and Dolly Parton. A League of Their Own was in theaters, and I pitched a parody of it for boys who threw like girls. Eventually, my dad put quite a few women on staff, but prior to that, I was the only girl.
LISA MELAMED: The girl characters on Hey Dude were as interesting and as complicated as the boy characters. My first episode was about Danny, and it was nice to be able to pull from my own relationships in my teenage years and write about that. One story I wrote—“Sewn at the Hip,” when Melody’s best friend came to visit—was so intensely about my relationship with my best friend that I sent her a check. I didn’t come in with a particular female agenda, but I always knew I wanted to write about the living drama of being a teenage girl.
RON OLIVER: I’d like to say Are You Afraid of the Dark? was a boys’ show, but I have a feeling it was split down the middle, because we would switch off every episode with there being a girl protagonist or a boy protagonist. They were quite conscious of that at Nickelodeon. We were one of the first shows that actually tried to straddle the middle line and succeeded at it.
KARIM MITEFF: Girls at the time tended to not be big video game players. So we had to figure out a way to make Nick Arcade appealing for girls. James and I did our own focus testing and found that girls definitely liked video games, but they liked the kinds of games where they could discover things or where there was some kind of magical device or something that gave them a hidden power. So we incorporated that into the endgame and that got the girls excited. Girls did seem to be less proficient in the endgame. Could have been hesitancy, to some degree. Not as quick to perform . . .
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: I believed that boys and girls had a lot more in common. Part of that was growing up with older sisters who could beat me up sometimes. I didn’t grow up with the same sort of stereotypes. So the distinction was never really an issue for me, and I thought that if we could create a cool girl who boys liked and girls wanted to watch, then we could prove it to America that we could make a show with a girl protagonist.
TOMMY LYNCH: The premise of Alex Mack was based on my father, who was a nuclear physicist and kept radioactive materials in our garage when we were kids. I always wondered what would happen if I ate them, and that was the basic idea of Alex Mack, which was originally written for a boy: Alex. Herb Scannell, who was president of the network at the time, called me up and said he loved the script and that he had only one note: The lead should be a girl instead.
LARISA OLEYNIK: Which I think, obviously, was a great choice!
TOMMY LYNCH: I did some very little changes, and Alexandra—a girl—was born.
ALISON FANELLI: I actually thought for a while that Ellen was kind of wimpy. I would get upset with how Will and Chris would write how Ellen would be pining for Pete, but Pete would have a new crush in every episode. I did love that they made her an A student and that she stood up for what she believed in and challenged authority and all that stuff. She gave Pete good, levelheaded advice. Katherine was absolutely key in giving Ellen a good role. She and I always had a very special relationship and still do. She always asked for my input on the script.
LARISA OLEYNIK: I never gave it much thought, but I liked that Alex was a tomboy. My clothes were comfortable, and I didn’t have to worry about getting them wrinkled. That’s all I cared about when I was twelve.
LISA LEDERER: Sometimes, as a woman, I find it offensive that men need to write things to teach me what strong women are all about. But when Mitchell would talk about this, it wasn’t like he was trying to show girls how to be strong girls or that he was trying to show women how to be their quirky, unique selves. It felt like an authentic voice coming from him. There was never anything weird or offensive or creepy about it all, for me.
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 15
