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

by Mathew Klickstein

  RACHEL SWEET: I don’t care whether you’re male or female, young or old, white, black . . . doesn’t matter. If you can write something that people identify with, that’s what matters. Mitchell doing a show about a young girl never bothered me at all. I never felt he had to be it to write it.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: Gerry said that men can’t write for women. And I said, “That’s not fair; that’s not true,” and that Mitchell should write them. And she agreed that she was wrong.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: The first thing I said was if Mitchell was creating it, I wanted to make sure there was a woman writing or directing it, because I didn’t think he could get it without having a woman there in a top creative role. A few months later, they brought me the pilot and I said there was no woman writer and no woman director and that I was not going forward on this show. They were busted because they didn’t have the nuance right. Geoffrey Darby knew I was right, so they fixed it.

  SARAH CONDON: Mitchell hired female writers, obviously, and was very respectful of that. He would often say, “How would you feel?” or “How did you feel?” or “What would happen if this happened to you?” He was quite wonderful about that, and really talked to Melissa a lot, too.

  LISA LEDERER: I was really excited about being able to put something on TV that people might not have seen before, especially around a young girl. Clarissa didn’t behave the way young girls had been behaving on TV. For me as a visual person to try to describe that to a viewing audience through wardrobe, those are the kinds of problem-solving challenges a costume designer really loves.

  HERB SCANNELL: That’s what I set out to do as director of programming: make sitcoms and news shows for kids, put lead girl characters and race diversity in shows that hadn’t been done before. It was like having a palette of paint where they used only black and white and all of a sudden there were all these colors available to us. That was the beauty of working at Nick.

  RICHARD PURSEL: This is the most loaded question of the lot. An entire book could be written based on this one alone.

  BILL WRAY: We did a cartoon called “Man’s Best Friend.” Nickelodeon wanted twenty seconds cut from that. Maybe a little more. We were all stunned that John wouldn’t make the cuts, because Nick was giving him an ultimatum. “Nope, I’m not cutting one second from that cartoon. It’s genius.” Which it is, but this was when we were beginning to get a lot of success, and John was feeling it. “I am the most successful Nickelodeon thing. I’m giving my heart and soul to this thing. Don’t fuck with me!” And this was the highest-budgeted film we’d ever done. I heard rumors that we got close to spending $250,000 on it. A lot of money for a cartoon back then. Nick wanted their investment back, they couldn’t get it, and they had to shelve this expensive cartoon. I went to Jim Smith thinking he could reason with John, because I’d talked to Bob Camp and Bob wanted to cave, thinking Nick had a point. Jim was like, “Fuck Nick.” And that was the catalyst.

  BILLY WEST: Nickelodeon loved the fact that Ren & Stimpy was delivering Christmas to them. It was raining gifts and presents and revenues. They loved all that. But I think they kind of wished that it wasn’t the content that it was.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: I don’t think Ren & Stimpy was too offensive. We introduced farts and boogers to cartoons, but kids fart and pick their noses and laugh about it all the time. Things that offend me are ugliness, slasher movies, and reality shows.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: The first six episodes were not that scary. What happened afterward was scary. When the show was a success—and it was a giant success right off the bat—I had dinner with John and he said, “Now that it’s a big hit, you have no right to tell me how much it’s going to cost, when I’m going to deliver it, or what the content is.” And I said, “John, you know what? I really don’t care what it costs. And I don’t even care about the delivery. But the content is important. I can’t let you do that.”

  WILL MCROBB: John became fixated with George Liquor, who also ended up in “Man’s Best Friend.” Nobody at Nick wanted George Liquor. That created a lot of bad blood.

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: There were massive storyboards brought in about George Liquor, who was not a character we had bought. When we originally saw Ren & Stimpy, there were sixteen to twenty characters. And we chose just those two characters. Doug had tons of characters, and they had to hone it down, too. If there are too many characters, you don’t know who to focus on. You can’t depart from the show you’d been successful with.

  VANESSA COFFEY: John had tried this before. I had thrown one of his storyboards away: “Are you kidding me? You’re not doing that to Ren and Stimpy.” And then it was “Man’s Best Friend,” with a memo saying he couldn’t deliver it on time and on budget. Basically, “We’ll get it to you whenever we get it to you. F U.”

  CHERYL CHASE: Ren & Stimpy got a little too violent for me. I don’t like too much violence in cartoons. And creative people sometimes lose control and make bad decisions.

  BOB JAQUES: Vanessa Coffey asked me to animate new scenes for “Man’s Best Friend” to replace the objectionable content so it could be aired. Out of respect for John and his position, I declined to do so.

  VANESSA COFFEY: When we got it, we couldn’t air it. I walked down to Gerry’s office and said, “We can’t air this.” And we didn’t.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: I agreed it was scary, but “Man’s Best Friend” was something new, you know? It looked gorgeous. I felt like they could have aired it, but the show was getting a lot of attention and there was a lot of fear about what parents would think.

  THOMAS MINTON: Nick banned the episode, and John resorted to floating it as a bootleg VHS tape just to get it out there. This was all front-page news in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter in September of 1992. Around the same time, John was fired by Nick.

  VANESSA COFFEY: I was the last person who wanted John to leave the show, but he gave us no choice. You can’t be in production with a producer who’s out of control.

  THOMAS MINTON: It was front-page entertainment news because a creator had been canned from his own megahit creation. Hardly Nick’s finest hour. A great deal of subsequent animosity was exacerbated and perpetuated in print media interviews given by people on both sides of the issue.

  MIKE FONTANELLI: I had friends on both sides, and there was a lot of resentment. For some reason, there’s still resentment years later. The people we’re talking about have not moved on.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: Lots of people have their own opinions, as is their right. You can never get everyone to agree on anything. But not all opinions are equal.

  JIM BALLANTINE: The sad thing about the breakup is that it was painful for everybody. I don’t think the show ever really recovered from it. We were getting death threats. Nickelodeon was still a small handful of people at the time who had never had to deal with a tough situation like this.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: During the summer break between season one and two, Gerry Laybourne invited me and the main creative crew to New York to wine and dine us in congratulations for the success of the show . . .

  JIM BALLANTINE: There was a point where John flew out to New York to meet with the Nickelodeon executives, basically to say, “Just give us more money and more time because we’re brilliant and we’re making the best damn cartoon on TV.” While John was in New York City, Bob Camp went to John’s door and drew a huge pair of balls that was repainted by the time he returned.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: Gerry made a toast to us—telling me I had put Nickelodeon on the map—and once we started talking, I asked Vanessa and her if they personally liked the show. They assured me they loved it, so I took the opportunity to ask if they would trust my crazy story ideas more during the second season. They promised they would.

  WILL MCROBB: John truly believed that kids wanted things that were disgusting. Many conversations we had were about how grossness was good and grossness was art.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: John and I went to
Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles on Gower Street and you’d see the likes of George Foreman there. A lot of heavyweight people, African-American culture, entertainment business. Generally, we were the only white guys in there at the time. We’re at lunch and John came up with this idea for “Ren’s Toothache” where the gum holes get stinky and so disgusting. He’s describing this entire thing to me, and right in the middle of it, this giant black guy at the table next to us goes, “Hey! Hey, hey!” I turn around and look at him. “I’m trying to eat my food here! And you guys are talking about boogers and pus!” That ended up going in the show. That kind of stuff happened a lot.

  WILL MCROBB: That’s what Nick wanted, but there was a line. “John, you can’t do a blowjob joke on Ren & Stimpy.” “But no kid’s gonna get it; it’ll go right over their heads!” Every time I’d make a counterargument, his response was, “It’s not like I’m showing them fucking.”

  HOWARD BAKER: Spumco had issues with getting things done all the way sometimes, and some shots would be ripped out of an artist’s hand and just thrown in the box half-baked.

  JIM BALLANTINE: Compared to television animation that’s made today, these were very generous budgets, but John’s demand for perfection kept the productivity very low. John would not allow a storyboard or a layout to move on to the next stage of production unless it was perfect. And the interaction with Nickelodeon became more and more confrontational.

  VANESSA COFFEY: We had sheriffs trying to get our materials from John out of his studio.

  EDDIE FITZGERALD: If John was at fault for his so-called perfection, it reminds me of the Pope telling Michelangelo to hurry up with the painting of the Sistine Chapel. John was creating the future of the animation industry.

  FRED SEIBERT: Though John clearly has a large group of minions who believe that he does no wrong to this day, I thought he did a lot of things that were uncool. And I think that Nickelodeon did some things that were uncool.

  HOWARD BAKER: We all want to do good work, but I’m afraid John didn’t understand that by selling a show to a TV network, he also had a responsibility to get it done under some parameters. I was the last step to getting each episode done, and I had to have all my ducks in a row or things wouldn’t go forward. John behaved under the impression that the overseas studio would stop whatever they were doing to work on his show. They would not. The studio was a business and had other screaming clients, too.

  MARY HARRINGTON: The sixth episode of Ren & Stimpy took so long to come out, we had to premiere it as the “Lost Episode” of Ren & Stimpy. They had turned that bad situation into a very funny one. It was all about creative freedom in the past, but now it was, “How much money is MTV Networks willing to spend on Ren & Stimpy?”

  LINDA SIMENSKY: The airing schedule for Ren & Stimpy was episode one, then . . . episode one. Then episode two. Then back to episode one. Then episode three. Would that make you happy?

  EDDIE FITZGERALD: Somebody who was in the position to know said to John, “I have the statistics of how the show is viewed. And the repeats exceed the previous week’s airing.”

  VANESSA COFFEY: Yes, we got good ratings with Ren & Stimpy with few episodes . . . but the ratings for Doug and Rugrats were over 2.0, too. That whole block raised the ratings for Nick, not just Ren & Stimpy. And ultimately, we couldn’t syndicate it the way we could with Doug and Rugrats.

  JIM BALLANTINE: We were under an enormous amount of scrutiny, and the show was starting to receive a lot of publicity.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: It’s been impossible to get the straight story because there’s so much drama. I only know the facts: They were missing airdates; they were not delivering episodes.

  BOB CAMP: Is somebody saying otherwise? If so, they’re liars.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: We actually only missed one deadline. For the sixth episode of season one. “Stimpy’s Invention” was late because Nickelodeon had told us to stop production on it after they saw the storyboard. We were told we’d have to write a new story and draw a new storyboard from scratch. When I told them that would make the show late, they didn’t seem to understand why. They thought you could just snap your fingers and new cartoons could appear—for free—out of the air instantly. Vanessa had already signed off on the story outline, but Will McRobb had been against the story from the beginning. He kept telling me we shouldn’t make a cartoon about “mind control” for kids. I had no idea what he was talking about.

  BOB CAMP: We got away with great shit all the time, because Vanessa Coffey fought for the show all the time. She was John’s greatest supporter.

  VANESSA COFFEY: John wasn’t the only one who had battles at Nick. So did I.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: My relationship with Vanessa was great until the end. She liked the heartwarming scenes, and I pushed for the stuff I knew kids liked. So we would together concoct a bipartisan cartoon show.

  BOB CAMP: Vanessa was always supportive, and Will McRobb was a good writer and helped a lot. If we didn’t have notes, the shows would probably not have been so successful.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: I literally had to beg Vanessa to let me put “Stimpy’s Invention” into production. But by that time, we had lost a month through no fault of our own. “Stimpy’s Invention” and “Space Madness” were both rejected by Nickelodeon before I talked them into letting me do them. And they turned out to be our two most popular episodes.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: Of course John was difficult. He was also brilliant. But then he would get angry at the network and put something in because he’s crazy. He’d say, “Oh, I’ll get them for killing this! If I can’t do butt plugs, I’ll do this!” Okay . . .

  RICHARD PURSEL: John figured he’d teach the execs a lesson and have his worst artist do the changes they wanted. Of course I saw it as a chance to shine, though my drawings were pretty bad. Nick didn’t want Ren to pray for “girls and cars,” so my change was “huge pectoral muscles and a fridge with a padlock.” “Magic boogers” became . . . “magic nose goblins.”

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: When they ordered season two, they told me they wanted twenty new episodes . . . in the same time it took us to deliver six in the previous year! I told Vanessa that would be impossible. I tried to talk her into going down to at least thirteen—like a regular cartoon series—but no. Halfway through season two, Vanessa called me and told me they wanted to do a Ren & Stimpy movie. Normally this would be great news, but they were expanding too fast and it wasn’t realistic.

  JIM BALLANTINE: It was real tense. John would get really angry at the artists, and because they weren’t producing anything useful, he would want them fired. But he really didn’t like conflict, so he had me do it. That’s how I got the title Pink Axe. It was the first time I’d ever fired people. Many of the artists who were fired were relieved, because a lot of them would get blocked with their drawing. They couldn’t draw because they were so afraid John would criticize them. He had a problem when they would listen to music on headphones, because he thought it meant they were only using half their brain.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: I was so depressed and insecure all the time, afraid of failing, that I had trouble working. When I got my first storyboard done on time that was reasonably clear and well done, John added a lot of stuff and embellished it, but then he gave me an extra check in my envelope. It was a bonus for good work. He did have the ability to reward as well as to punish.

  CHERYL CHASE: Sometimes people buckled under the pressure because John needed things a certain way. He was a perfectionist, but he got what he wanted. Some could handle it, some couldn’t. I could handle it. I loved working for him. It was fun and creative. I dug it.

  CHRISTINE DANZO: Eventually, production fell behind and Nick’s—Mary’s and Vanessa’s—reaction was to impose stricter, more invasive controls on production. They were bypassing John and myself and going directly to Spumco personnel, asking questions and giving instructions, which caused major confusion and discord within the studio.r />
  EDDIE FITZGERALD: The second season started with John, right up to the middle of the season. Then in the middle—it was a horrible day—John was in Canada and I came to work. One of the PAs came over and said, “Hey everybody, you can put your pencils down, because we’re under orders to pack up and send the show to Nick.” It took me by complete surprise. A friend of mine, Mike Fontanelli, felt the same way. We were just there with our mouths open.

  MIKE FONTANELLI: Eddie found out Nick was trying to take the show away from John. What was happening wasn’t right. We called an infamous meeting in the basement of Spumco. It was informal. No one had to go and lots of people chose not to.

  EDDIE FITZGERALD: I said that because John was the brain behind the show and since it wasn’t drawn or produced like any other show out there, we should hold out. And I look around the room, and some people are looking at the ground. I didn’t understand why.

  THOMAS MINTON: Eddie was—and is—in love with the process of discovery and boundlessly optimistic, regardless of the circumstances in which he may find himself.

  EDDIE FITZGERALD: What I didn’t know is that half the studio knew about this for some time and had negotiated salaries with Nick. The people who knew about it were reluctant to talk at the meeting, and finally a girl stood up and said, “This sounds like McCarthyism to me. You’re saying we have to sign a loyalty oath to John or else we can’t work. And I’m against McCarthy.”

  MIKE FONTANELLI: Someone made a remark that I will remember until my dying day: “It sounds like you’re asking for a loyalty oath.” At that point, we lost control of the meeting. All of a sudden, Eddie and I were inquisitors at HUAC.

  JIM BALLANTINE: Nick pulled the plug. John called us all in a room and told us he had to shut down the show. Nick stopped paying Spumco.

  BILL WRAY: John burst into tears and had to run into the other room because he couldn’t compose himself. I’ve never seen him cry before or since. He said some pretty damning things to me after it happened, too. That he was relieved, it was killing him, hadn’t had a solid shit in two years. There was a lot of spin on his emotions to accept this devastating loss.