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

by Mathew Klickstein

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: Of course I wasn’t glad to leave. I created these characters and a whole new studio system that allowed creative people to do their best work. It was a long struggle against all odds to make “creator-driven” cartoons happen. I had proven that my ideas and methods worked and expected to be rewarded for it. To clear up a misconception, the show was not taken away from only me, but from the whole studio.

  RICHARD PURSEL: I was sharing an office with Bob Camp when the whole split was engineered; I entered the office one day to see Bob and producer Jim Ballantine huddled around a speakerphone call with Vanessa and Mary Harrington, who were in New York. Bob went around the studio soon after, telling people, “You’ve got a job . . . if you want it.” Bob raved that things would be so much more fun without John telling us what to do, but when I told Bob I couldn’t in good conscience leave John for a job with him, he called me a traitor.

  BOB CAMP: John called me into his office and gave me his blessing to do the show and the feature they were talking about. I promised to make sure his unfinished shows were the best ones.

  MIKE FONTANELLI: Jim Ballantine tried to lure me to Nick’s Games studio with a pack of lies. I got a phone call from him promising me directorship and a 40 percent increase in salary just for starters. I told him I wouldn’t betray anyone, especially not a fellow cartoonist. So he told me John was on board. Ten seconds later, I was on the phone with John and it was news to him. I never saw Games. I never set foot in the place. My nose is clean.

  JIM BALLANTINE: I wanted to keep working and so did most of the people on the show. Anyone from Spumco who wanted to work on the show at Games was welcome to. I didn’t approach Mike Fontanelli or anyone else. Vanessa or other Nick folks may have.

  MARY HARRINGTON: We were a little removed from that. Jim Ballantine was on the day-to-day of the show, and he was more in tune with what was really going on. He weighed into the decisions.

  VANESSA COFFEY: Jim Ballantine and I would make lists, and he would talk to people because there were obvious loyalists. Mainly it was, “Here’s who’s coming, here’s who’s not.”

  GEOFFREY DARBY: It’s just business. And that’s not a negative. If I’m Bob Camp, I need to be able to do X-Y-ZED, and that’s a promise I’m making to the network. He needs to get people who are gonna help him do X-Y-ZED, not people who are going to throw themselves in Bob’s way.

  EDDIE FITZGERALD: In my opinion, it couldn’t have happened without the artists going over there, and I’ll include Billy West in that. I think Billy did a horrible, horrible thing. There’s another guy whose hand I wouldn’t shake. I’m disgusted by it.

  BILLY WEST: Everybody has been so misinformed for years and years and years. I just came to work. And there were a lot of people at work there. If I didn’t continue to go on, all those people might’ve been out of work.

  MARY HARRINGTON: When we took over the show and needed Billy to do Ren now, too, Vanessa and I were at a recording session with him and he was saying, “You should be ashamed of yourself! How can you do what you’ve done?!” He was pretending to be Ren doing John’s voice.

  BILLY WEST: That was not my war. That was between John and Nickelodeon. The only pressure I had was being able to scream and yell and perform the hell out of the characters. I came to know John, but it wasn’t like I hung out with him all the time. People tried to spin it like I was a bad guy who left behind some fallen comrade, and it wasn’t anything like that.

  BILL WRAY: John has always tried to spin it that if Bob Camp hadn’t been willing, they wouldn’t have done it. That somehow Bob stabbed him in the back. He had to blame somebody. No, they fired you because you would not bend!

  BOB CAMP: It’s easy to try to blame the network for things going wrong instead of accepting responsibility for what went down. I’m on good terms with everybody except John. And frankly, I couldn’t care less.

  EDDIE FITZGERALD: Bob Camp, who led people away from the studio, later came over and talked to me at lunchtime, saying something reconciliatory. He wanted to shake hands, but I wouldn’t. I still won’t to this day. Bob had talent and was an interesting person to talk to, but he had a deep moral flaw. It was an immoral act to take John’s show away from him, especially in view of all the things John had done for him. Dante reserved the lowest level of hell for the person who did evil to his benefactor.

  MARY HARRINGTON: I would say three-fourths of the crew stayed, and the rest didn’t because it was too difficult for them to continue.

  JOHN KRICFALUSI: Only a handful of shortsighted fools went with Nickelodeon to help them form their own studio. Then they all fought among themselves and wondered why no one was loyal to each other. One of them very angrily told me on the phone months later how Bob Camp was a real backstabber. Duh! Surprise!

  MIKE FONTANELLI: John was supposed to fade away and be forgotten, and they were all to move on from Ren & Stimpy to even bigger and greater things. It didn’t work out that way, because the new Games cartoons were mean-spirited and ugly and more expensive. And they were as late as ever, if not later.

  BOB CAMP: We did the series, got them done on time and on budget.

  CHRIS RECCARDI: Censorship wasn’t so bad when we were at Spumco. It was harder at Games. John was very good at negotiating with them on that level.

  WILL MCROBB: In a way, Bob Camp’s era was probably grosser than it had ever been. But what had gotten John in trouble was his “dad issues” were working their way through characters. Bob’s episodes were tame in comparison to the psychosis John brought to George Liquor and to the “Anthony” episode. The father in that episode was the most psychotic character John ever made. Everyone who saw it said, This is not what we want to show to kids.

  RAYMOND ZIBACH: We always wondered what the hell Nickelodeon was thinking. Why did they want Ren & Stimpy and then censor it all to hell? We all hoped that Viacom would leave it on MTV; that pairing made the most sense and was hugely successful when they did that for a few weeks.

  VANESSA COFFEY: It was working on our network. Just because Viacom owns all the networks doesn’t mean we don’t still compete with each other. We were getting good ad sales off the shows. And kids loved Ren & Stimpy.

  LINDA SIMENSKY: It was ours! We liked it! We were a little territorial. We enjoyed the notoriety. It put Nick Animation on the map.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: If Nickelodeon had been one year further in its development and stronger, I would’ve done the right thing. Which would have been to give it to my struggling little sister, MTV.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: We said yes so many times to John and there was a point where enough is enough. It was like being a battered wife—and I don’t understand battered wives, how they can do it. So we finally had to tell John, NO.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: I really took it seriously. I read psychology books about what happens with these kids that have had a really troubled childhood, which he had had. How do you manage them? It was painful. And we had to fire him.

  WILL MCROBB: There’s a Ren & Stimpy DVD that came out that was from the season after John had been fired. He’s on the commentary track with all the “traitors” who took the show over. What sick person thought of putting John’s commentary on those shows?

  HERB SCANNELL: The issues that were there were about delivery and consistency. Unfortunately, it happened the way it happened. It was really tough for all of us. John made some great episodes. The best of the whole batch.

  JACK SPILLUM: You’d have to be naïve to think this kind of thing doesn’t happen all the time. Everybody should get their shot, but where do you draw the line? On Doug, we met every schedule and I don’t think we ever went over budget. But the creativity was there. And Jim Jinkins got to do what he wanted to do. That balance, that dichotomy, was what cartoon-making should be all about.

  KEN SCARBOROUGH: I was sad when Doug went on after we were at Nickelodeon and they didn’t keep Billy West. That was a bi
g mistake.

  WENDY LITWACK: Billy decided he wanted more than everyone else in the cast. When you do a show like this, there’s a thing called “Favored Nation.” It’s very important that nobody makes more than anybody else. They’re all putting in the same amount of time.

  BILLY WEST: I don’t spend much time mourning the end of a cartoon. For me, it’s time for another door to open. But what did bother me was that they were gonna go to Disney and they were sending me these deal memos that I was ripping up and throwing away. They were outrageous demands. They wanted me to do upward of twelve characters for less money than I made on Nickelodeon. They also said that I would have to fly from California to New York, because I was getting ready to move to California. I would have had to go back from California to New York just to do Doug. I said this is a little much, and they kept sending these memos. And finally I said, “Look—all of you—I wish you nothing but the best, but leave me alone!”

  BOB POMANN: Doing the sound effects for Doug was almost like doing a movie: It was very time-consuming for me. I had to work every night, including weekends. I gave up time with my kids. Doug became my girlfriend. I felt like it was worth it.

  DAVID CAMPBELL: We were there from nine in the morning—sometimes earlier—until midnight or later. Sometimes we’d stay until three or four in the morning writing premises, because Mister Kriegman or Master Coffey would say, “This sucks. Come up with something better.” It was pretty intense, but it was fun.

  VANESSA COFFEY: I didn’t use story editors at all in the first seasons when Mary and I were doing it together. Then we were doing three series and six pilots and developing Rocko’s Modern Life. I needed help, so I brought Mitchell and Will in.

  WILL MCROBB: Mitchell had a huge hit show. He was a scientist of comedy. But people running their own shows he story-edited admired him less. If he had been more beloved, I wouldn’t have gotten those jobs. I think he had a more pedantic style—preaching his theories—and I was just a wide-eyed enthusiast. And I think that was easier to digest.

  DAVID CAMPBELL: It might have been a Waterloo moment when there was a script meeting at Nickelodeon and Mitchell said something along the lines of, “Doug would never do that.”

  MARY HARRINGTON: When I was working with Mitchell, who was our story editor on Doug at the time, helping us give notes to Jim and his team, there was an episode when Mitchell said, “What if Doug did this instead of that?” And Jim was like, “But that’s not how it happened!” I felt like we were giving story notes about this guy’s life!

  ALAN SILBERBERG: I never felt rewritten by Jim Jinkins. But I know that Jim and Dave Campbell were very involved in the scripts, going line by line through them. I always felt that the shows got better.

  DAVID CAMPBELL: There was an episode of Doug finding some money and he goes and returns it to the police. Our writers were up in arms against it. They were like, “What kid is gonna find money and return it to the police station?” So Jim and I had to take the weekend off and go to the country and write this episode. Every now and then, you’re inevitably gonna have a clash.

  JOE ANSOLABEHERE: Mitchell offended me so many times. The last time he offended me, he said he wanted me to do something some way and I didn’t want to. Then he told me just to try it. So I tried it and we were having a conference and I had to call Mitchell and I said, “We tried it. Paul doesn’t like it, Arlene doesn’t like it, no one likes it. I have a roomful of writers here who agree it doesn’t work this way.” And Mitchell said—and this was the end of me and Mitchell—“I don’t fucking care if the whole Writers Guild West disagrees with me. I want it this way.” We went to Paul and said, “We’re quitting if Mitchell doesn’t leave.”

  PAUL GERMAIN: Little by little, it grew worse until it became clear to me we couldn’t go on like this. I had writers telling me, “Either he goes or I go.” Honestly, I like Mitchell, but I wish I would have taken a stronger stance with him from the beginning.

  JOE ANSOLABEHERE: He went and fired Mitchell, but at that point I had already quit, and was too proud to come back. When Paul fired Mitchell, he found out that everybody else—including the Doug guys, who are the nicest people on the planet—had already fired Mitchell. “Goddamn it! Why am I the last guy to fire Mitchell?”

  MARY HARRINGTON: I’m sorry things didn’t work out with him. Mitchell was a significant part of getting Nicktoons up and running. Especially in the writing areas.

  CRAIG BARTLETT: The hard thing about Mitchell was that we’d have an outline for a story, but we couldn’t go to script until Mitchell approved it and he was down in Florida shooting Clarissa. Paul would be going crazy because we wouldn’t hear from Mitchell all day and we had to get the script in. It was insane that they had Mitchell as the gatekeeper on our show while he was shooting Clarissa. I blame Nick for that.

  JOE ANSOLABEHERE: To give Mitchell credit where credit was due, in the second or third season, we were doing all of these crazy things, and Mitchell noticed this, saying we didn’t need to lose the silly comedy but that we should write in different genres. So every five episodes we’d write a “WH”—“Wreak Havoc”—episode. Then we’d do a Tommy episode. Then a Chuckie episode. Then one about the kids being afraid. We would do an “experimental” episode every tenth, I think. They were all genres we created so we could keep the series fresh with something new. And that was thanks to Mitchell.

  KEN SCARBOROUGH: Will was great, but Doug wasn’t his show. He was at times in a hard place, because what he was doing—like all of us—was making sure everybody was happy. There were some weird screaming fights about whether or not the show was too mean. Jim was a professional and would calmly reiterate his idea of what the show was. He’s an expert at keeping it in. I had a story editor I brought in—a guy who I’d work with in the past who was very abrasive—and we sometimes were all shocked at how this guy would fly in Jim’s face while Jim just sucked it up.

  DAVID CAMPBELL: The thing that sticks out the most for me as far as what made Jim Doug and Doug Jim—and this was really intrinsic to all the stories—was this crazy emotional extreme where he imagines the worst thing that could possibly happen to him . . . and almost at the same time imagines the best thing that can happen. He actually manages it pretty well, like a straight, even, calm, sweet, kind, gentle person. Which he is. But his inner emotional life has much more turmoil.

  VANESSA COFFEY: We never had an argument. The only thing Jim ever said to me was, “Ren & Stimpy is getting so much attention because of John. I feel like the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” And I said, “Jim, you have no idea how thankful I am that I have you. You don’t need the oil.”

  WILL MCROBB: Jim was the anti–John K. He was a genius too, but in a self-effacing, low-key way.

  KEN SCARBOROUGH: Jim was always wanting Doug to be a safe place for kids who were like him, without blood or scary things like that. Nickelodeon was at the time trying to push the edges of what cartoons did, so in some ways they didn’t know what they’d gotten with Doug. I think it was a much gentler show than they’d wanted it to be.

  DEE LADUKE: Hey Dude was about a very secure place where the scariest thing was a snake in the road. We knew we would never have a Degrassi thread. We wanted to present growing up to be something that’s liberating, exciting, and not something that would consume you in a bad way. It was age-appropriate and parents trusted us at Nick to be aware of our targeting a very narrow demographic.

  WILL MCROBB: What’s the point of being safe? Let’s be raw. We weren’t educational TV, for sure. We hoped our irreverence and the voice we were speaking in would inspire kids. I don’t know if kids still read MAD magazine anymore, but all of us were sparked by MAD and National Lampoon in a formative time in our lives. We just wanted to bring that spirit to kids and wanted them to question authority while being clever. And to not take anything too seriously.

  HARVEY: When we were in Philly with Double Dare, the stage c
rew were just as eccentric as . . . I mean, you would never let your children near them if you had any. They looked like what would be hanging out at a bus station and sleeping under a tree or bench. But they were rock-and-roll stage crew guys who also did television. You know what roadies are like.

  KENAN THOMPSON: The crew members were our favorite people. They were always laughing, always seemed a little edgier. Be cool with the tatted-up guys, the guys walking around with drills and hammers. And you learn your professionalism from everyone else.

  BYRON TAYLOR: On Double Dare, we didn’t use the same green slime that Geoffrey Darby used on You Can’t Do That on Television, because if it sat on stage under the hot lights, an oatmeal-based slime would bake like a rock. And if we didn’t get that off the set, we’d have chunks of greenish plaster. We used applesauce. That was my favorite, with a little bit of food coloring, little milk powder. Something to make it opaque.

  DANA CALDERWOOD: GAK was just sort of a general term they came up with.

  BYRON TAYLOR: One of the crew in Philly started calling it GAK and everyone followed. I can’t remember his name, but his nickname was Skunkhead because he had a punkish strip dyed down the middle of his head.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: There was no genius of Will McRobb or someone in New York coming up with “GAK.” All I will say is it came from the stage crew. They called it GAK. And we picked it up. That’s the story. Now, where the stage crew got the name from, I’m not telling. Sorry.

  MARC SUMMERS: In 1986 to 1990, we had, shall we say, a “colorful” crew. I love them dearly, and found them to be some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with throughout my career. But without mentioning names, there was a certain amount of recreational drug activities going on, and “gak” is the street name for heroin. And that’s where it came from. Klinghoffer and me laughed our asses off, because Nickelodeon apparently didn’t do their research and didn’t know. And when we told them, they about shit themselves. “Should we pull this stuff off the market, or what the hell do we do?” So they were hoping that it never got out, and apparently it never did.