HERB SCANNELL: How was I going to fill Gerry’s high heels? People change. Some people who I thought would be with me left early and some people I never thought I’d get on with, I got on with. And we spent ten years doing some great things together. Before, we had just scratched the surface, and now we could build Nick into a really meaningful force in popular culture while continuing to make great stuff for kids. I didn’t see my job as walking away from what Gerry had put down as foundation. I saw it as taking what she had laid and continuing to grow it. And that’s what I did.
ALBIE HECHT: Herb really encouraged us to create this studio system where we became the fifth-largest in Hollywood.
CRAIG BARTLETT: Gerry mentored Herb into that spot. And Herb and I got along fine, too. But MTV Networks, Viacom, Nick—every year they got bigger and more corporate than the year before. While Herb was running things, it just grew more and more corporate, and less like you had that personal touch. It was probably just inevitable that that was the way it was going to go. It wasn’t Herb’s fault. Herb’s Nick was still a great place to be, but each year it got bigger and more out of control.
ALBIE HECHT: People forget that Herb Scannell put Nick at Nite on the map. They forget how unbelievably successful Nick at Nite was. Herb understood how to program to any demographic. And Herb had been extraordinarily successful as a programmer and launching Nicktoons and SNICK under Gerry.
GERRY LAYBOURNE: When I left Nick, we had 56 percent of all kids viewing. We grew from having nothing to having 56 percent.
HERB SCANNELL: Gerry was the best. So when she left, it was sad. It was almost like a wake.
ALBIE HECHT: Sure, there were people unhappy about Gerry leaving. There was sadness there. A lot of unrest and worry about what would happen without Gerry at the head. There was definitely a lot of trepidation about Herb taking over, but I think he quickly established both his vision and his ability to collaborate.
HARDY RAWLS: When Gerry left, they lost a great believer not just in Nick but the way the programming should run.
JERRY BECK: When she interviewed me, she asked me what a good Nick movie would look like. I told her it wouldn’t be like Disney; it would be like Yellow Submarine. The moment I said that, I got the job. She wanted us to go in a new direction. A year and a half into my being there, Gerry left the company and went to Disney for a few years. As soon as she left, the direction for Nick Movies completely changed. Out with the original stuff. “Oh, Rugrats is doing well on TV. Let’s do a movie.” I moved on because I wanted to do what Gerry had wanted to do: cool new stuff. Developing movies based on TV series wasn’t what I wanted to do. I ended up going to Disney myself after that.
HERB SCANNELL: I knew she had been in contract negotiations. I had just put my mother in a nursing home, and so it was a tough week of stuff. I’d had my first kid six months earlier, so there was a lot going on in my life. I walked into the nursing home and was saying to myself, “I really want this job. I love Nickelodeon. I gotta go for it.” I called Gerry and had dinner with her during Christmas break after she left. I told her I really wanted it, and she said she didn’t know that. Six weeks later, I got the job. I loved running Nick. We were the Little Engine That Could.
ALBIE HECHT: When you think what happened under Herb: Nick Movies, Nick Animation, Nick Records, the Big Help, licensing and business, the rise of Nick International, Nick Online, Nick magazine . . . It was all Herb’s ambition to take this brand and express it in so many different ways, to “be present”—as he put it—in kids’ lives and be able to touch them wherever they wanted to touch Nickelodeon.
TOMMY LYNCH: Things were getting bigger. Changes and new ways of doing things were happening every day. It was fun. Herb brought Albie Hecht in to be his head of production, and Albie is a passionate guy.
MICHAEL KOEGEL: I left there in ’95, and when things started to change was when they brought in Albie Hecht. He changed the complete tone of what was happening at that place. He ruled by intimidation. And that is not what that network was about up to that point. He’d walk into your office, pound his fist, and say, “What’s going on with your show?!” It was such a different vibe. It was difficult to be around a lot of that stuff.
TOMMY LYNCH: We did feel we had to have a hit every time we pitched a new show. The world was becoming more competitive. Disney Channel was getting some traction. Cartoon Network came into existence. The big three networks became creatively irrelevant, so it was on. It also became a fact that the kids’ cable business became big business, so every decision had to be vetted by various departments. It wasn’t bad. Just different.
DAVID STENSTROM: As with anything, if you do the same thing long enough, you become stilted and entrenched in one way of doing things. In order to grow, you have to change. And I think Nick has kept changing. The only thing that doesn’t like changing is a wet baby.
LISA LEDERER: Unfortunately, I feel like in the nineties it all started to clamp down again. Everything became very particular and subscribed, and the parameters all narrowed again. When you turn the television on, it doesn’t really matter what sitcom you’re looking at: Everybody is dressed pretty much the same way. Their hair’s the same and the look is the same.
LARRY SULKIS: The stuff I see on Nickelodeon today over my kids’ shoulders, I don’t know whether they’re watching Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, or Disney. Whatever Nickelodeon’s particular signature is right now, I’m not hip to it.
CHRIS VISCARDI: That’s only grown over the years. If you look at what Nickelodeon and Disney Channel air now—I’m not besmirching them at all; they’re successful in fantastic ways—they’re programming to a much larger audience. And their programming is straight down the middle. At times you see stuff that’s really different and quirky and edgy and odd. But for the most part, that kind of stuff is not there anymore.
WILL MCROBB: We had tried to be the anti-Disney, now they’re just trying to be Disney. To me, that’s the arc from where it was to where it is now.
ALAN GOODMAN: They got seduced by the success of Disney’s shows with older tweens and teens living fantasy lives. Wizards, a rock star in disguise, twins who live in a palace. But you can’t beat Disney doing “dreams come true.” They’ve been doing that since Pinocchio. And you end up blowing off the younger part of the demographic that identifies with the “regular kid” stories—bucking the establishment—that were always Nickelodeon’s forte.
BOB MITTENTHAL: I work for both of them, and I think there’s still some elements that make Nickelodeon more risk-tasking than Disney.
ADAM WEISSMAN: I just finished a show at Disney where the lead actors got a Kids’ Choice Award . . . on Nickelodeon. Kids don’t care. They’re going to watch what they’re going to watch. It’s healthy competition. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles made really good music. Nick just took this other tack.
DANNY TAMBERELLI: The age of children’s television is really going. I don’t think it feeds your brain in the way it used to. Shows like Pete & Pete and Clarissa and Salute Your Shorts had sort of a quirky, not-straight-ahead quality. And that’s not how it is now.
WILL MCROBB: Everything’s about wish fulfillment now: becoming famous or popular. What was great about Pete & Pete is we glorified being a kid. There aren’t too many shows that glorify what it’s like to hang out in your backyard with your friends trying to figure out what to do for the day.
ALAN GOODMAN: Things like “Nickelodeon Takes Over Your School” was terrific promotion for us back in those days. There was a toy run where we had the whole wish-fulfillment thing for a child. They got to run wild through a toy store for five minutes and grab anything that they could grab. All of those things were feeding this notion of, I’m a kid and the world is mine. That’s kind of what our orientation was.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: Very early on, we did Rated K, which ran for a bunch of seasons.
ANDY BAMBERGER: Which spun off f
rom You Can’t Do That on Television in a way, because we could have kids reviewing things with kid opinions. Kids would listen to kids, we found out.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: And on Rated K we did something called “Big Ballot,” which eventually gave birth to the Kids’ Choice Awards. Fred and Alan will say they created Kids’ Choice Awards—they created the name—but it all comes out of Rated K.
ALAN GOODMAN: Yes, my partners at the time—Albie Hecht, Fred Seibert—and I created the Kids’ Choice. We still get a credit on the show.
HERB SCANNELL: The Kids’ Choice was Albie Hecht and Fred/Alan.
ALBIE HECHT: It’s one of the most proud things I’ve ever done in my life, but it didn’t start well. Fred and Alan were friends of mine from college, and they invited me to start this company with them, Chauncey Street Productions, and go in to do my first big pitch with them. I thought I had something great and came up with a great model and sketch, and I go in to meet Gerry—who I had never met but is a legend—and Darby—who I admired from You Can’t Do That on Television and Double Dare . . . I go in there and pitch this big idea where we’re gonna do a live, two-hour broadcast in a place like Madison Square Garden with three rings to it—like a three-ring circus—with acts in each one, and we’re gonna have fifteen thousand kids screaming and yelling, and . . . there was brutal silence. At the time, I always thought silence was good—that I had stunned people—but subsequently learned it’s bad. The first words back that Gerry ever spoke to me were, “I think I’m gonna throw up.”
DEBBY BEECE: It started off awful. We struggled to get that thing going. It took many years to become good. Those first several years—cringe. It was such a big hurdle. We didn’t have access to talent, we didn’t have money. It was scary.
HERB SCANNELL: The first year there was a busload of people who wouldn’t clap. They were Eastern-European deaf people. I think ALF won best actor. Say no more, right?
MICHAEL KOEGEL: The first time I worked the Kids’ Choice Awards—and for years—it was like, “Best actor: Robin Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger . . .” Always the same people. And they would not return our phone calls. They were movie stars and Nick meant nothing to them. Now Will Smith hosts it, but at the first Kids’ Choice Awards, the only celebrity we got in the theater to accept an award was Charles Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit. And we had to confirm he’d win an award, because he wouldn’t come to lose.
DEBBY BEECE: It was a good idea. We just didn’t have any resources to really do it. But that never stopped us before . . .
ALBIE HECHT: I wanted the award itself to be something that would differentiate ourselves. Something people can actually use, that’s a toy. Scott Webb and his creative folks took that and came up with different ideas. One of them was a kaleidoscope, originally without the blimp. That was not substantial enough, so then we did the blimp with the kaleidoscope embedded in it. The blimp was one of the most popular of Nickelodeon’s logos, so that’s why we went with it. Those first couple of years, we had 250 to 300 people. Maybe 500, tops. The breakout year was when we got Whitney Houston, who was just at the apex of her career. I think it was 1995.
HERB SCANNELL: Jeffrey Katzenberg started DreamWorks Animation, and we both had a common enemy in Disney. He delivered Mel Gibson from Chicken Run via helicopter at the Kids’ Choice Awards in 2001. From that point on, it was a matter of, “Who do you want to get? Jim Carrey? Tom Cruise?”
ALBIE HECHT: Before the Internet, the polling for the Awards was done at a park or chain like McDonald’s. There was always a great deal of promotion, marketing, and sponsorship around it.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: Gerry had had a very conservative attitude as far as merchandising and licensing Nickelodeon products. It really was very important to her, to consider what she used to call “parent trust.” That we would not try to force kids to dress like Nickelodeon characters and eat sugar cereal.
DANA CALDERWOOD: They hadn’t been corporate before. They wouldn’t let advertising in. Casio asked us to put their name on the Double Dare clock. For a million dollars. And Nickelodeon didn’t do that. They said, “We’re not Disney.”
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: Yes, we turned down a million-dollar offer with Casio on the Double Dare clock.
SCOTT WEBB: I had more than one discussion with lots of business departments within Nickelodeon who were like, “Listen, I have a $100,000 deal on the line. Is it really important that the logo’s orange? It can’t be black-and-white for Pizza Hut?” Or, “Can we do it differently because we’re dealing with Kodak?” That’s what I was up against.
VANESSA COFFEY: We wanted to put out high-quality things that represented the shows. The concept behind the original Nicktoons block was we were making original programming and the kids would tell us when they wanted the toys—instead of the other way around. Rugrats was our first big licensing success. It didn’t happen until we started syndicating it during the week. Then the toy deals started coming along with the licensing. It was a slow process, but it was a big success.
LINDA SIMENSKY: Nick was always happy to license. There was You Can’t Do That on Television soap back in the early years.
GERRY LAYBOURNE: Just as the advertising world had been skeptical about the cable TV world, licensing was slow to come to Nick. We were difficult; we did not want to sell kids short or out. We didn’t like putting logos on things. We wanted to be doing something creative and new. We had many heart-wrenching conversations: Most of our shows didn’t have a shot at licensing, like Salute Your Shorts, because it was a short-lived series. Even if you look at what’s merchandised from Nick now, it’s only a few of their shows that are everywhere. It’s the nature of the merchandising world: being risk-averse.
MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: Growing up on Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan and things like that, to me it was endless pleasure. I love the idea of going into a drugstore and seeing Rugrats toothpaste or going into Burger King and seeing frozen chicken nuggets in the shape of Rugrats characters. And I think that, if anything, Rugrats had all sorts of early information for how to make an art form spread across different marketplaces, different presentations.
WENDY LITWACK: When you’re on Nickelodeon and it’s cable, the advertising dollars are not as intense. When you take something and now Wendy’s kids’ meals are sponsoring it, they get input and tell the network what to do and don’t do. Doug suffered when it changed to Disney because of network intervention.
JIM JINKINS: Disney bought ABC, created “One Saturday Morning,” and began to court my company, Jumbo Pictures. So, should I stay with Nickelodeon, who is through with me . . . or get bought by Disney, where we get to create sixty-five new half hours of Doug, a feature-length movie, Doug Live! for their theme park, toys, books, additional funding for development and production on many new series . . . ? To quote a famous movie line, They made an offer we couldn’t refuse.
CONNIE SHULMAN: Hands down, I prefer the old Doug! The new Doug just wasn’t the same. Hard to put into words. Perhaps not having Jim around as much and Tom McHugh—definitely awesome, but having to readjust to a new Doug—and I missed all the gang crammed in the studio, waiting for their turn for the big group scene. Someone just dimmed the magic a bit.
JIM JINKINS: I will confess that I took my eyes off Doug too much during those Disney days once I got overwhelmed with all my responsibilities. The Nicktoons Doug stories were the most autobiographical, and I was the most hands-on with their creation.
DAVID CAMPBELL: At Nick, we had been making handmade jalopies that were fun and broken-down and had to be fixed, but were interesting. Disney makes Lexuses. Once the quirky, little creative company gets put into the System, its edges get rounded out and things get smoothed over in all kinds of ways. If you like bumpy, beautiful vehicles that are harder to drive and they do things that surprise you, then you’re not gonna like the Lexuses—they’re too sleek and smooth. I think that’s why kids tend to like the Nickelodeon episo
des better, because they’re quirkier. But you get old and your joints get creaky; my friend runs a Lexus dealership, so I own a Lexus now. But I still remember my jeep fondly . . .
JIM JINKINS: I mostly agree with Doug fans who think the original 104 eleven-minute Doug stories made for Nick were the best. Except for “The Dark Quail Saga,” written by Joe Fallon for Disney’s Doug.
BILLY WEST: This was when Disney was going to mimic Nick. And if they couldn’t do it, they would buy it one piece at a time.
MELISSA JOAN HART: I had such a blast on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch at Disney. They were the best years of my life, but I wasn’t very proud of the character. She was sort of wishy-washy and whiny, and it wasn’t as much fun to play her. I wouldn’t be friends with Sabrina, but I would be friends with Clarissa.
JOE O’CONNOR: I liked Melissa much more on Clarissa than I did on Sabrina.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: I was really circumvented on the pilot for Clarissa Now. I wanted to make a prime-time show out of Clarissa, let her grow up, have boyfriends . . . but the network executives said to me, “Well, network audiences don’t like any of that ‘postmodern shit.’” They didn’t like the talking to the camera and the fantasies. As if network audiences were different than cable audiences.
CHUCK VINSON: For a network like CBS to realize, “Hey, Nickelodeon and Melissa . . . something’s happening here! Let’s try to do something!” you know that comes from years of bringing that show up to standards where people could talk about it like that.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: We also tried to do an album. The group was Clarissa and the Straitjackets, and it was called This Is What Na-Na Means.
RACHEL SWEET: The record company didn’t really know what they wanted to do with it, and honestly, it was just an afterthought after the show was almost done, so . . .
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 21
