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

by Mathew Klickstein

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: It was “too good,” and Sony Wonder determined it would be impossible to market the thing as a kids’ album. So they slashed up the original Straitjackets album, made it much shorter, and added in a bunch of silly audio noises and quotes. I took my name off the project.

  BOB MITTENTHAL: We got lucky the first time out of the box with Double Dare. It gave them a lot of misplaced confidence that we would always be so lucky.

  HARVEY: They did a lot of other game shows to try to re-create lightning in a bottle, which everybody does: Once something happens, you try to duplicate it. And quadruple it, and quintuple it . . .

  ABBY HAGYARD: There are a number of people I have met over the years who say, “We’re going to do a show kind of like You Can’t Do That on Television!” Every time I hear that, I say, “Good luck!” You really have to put a lot of ingredients together to make something look that effortless.

  MARC SUMMERS: They did a show called Finders Keepers. Major disaster. Wrong host, wrong concept. GUTS might have come close, and Legends of the Hidden Temple to a certain extent . . .

  ROBIN RUSSO: Marc and I went on to do another show called What Would You Do? Which I called Why Are We Doing This?

  BOB MITTENTHAL: Super Sloppy Double Dare was the same show, just marketed differently. Double Dare 2000 was when they brought it back after it went away for a while. They made a lot of money on that idea for a good number of years—none of which went to the creators.

  THOMAS MINTON: Like Cartoon Network, Nick seems to have been adrift for some time now. The last bona fide hit they’ve had—for over a decade—is SpongeBob SquarePants, and it was sort of done under the radar, going against everything Nick then considered an animated series to be. Once it hit, however, every studio in town wanted “our SpongeBob” in the manner they wanted “our Ren & Stimpy” a few years earlier. Imitation breeds garbage!

  GEORGE EVELYN: SpongeBob is a success because everybody likes it. Whether that happened because of some Nicktoons process or not, who can say? Although . . . it did happen at Nickelodeon.

  WILL MCROBB: When John got a chance to do everything he wanted to do on the Spike version of Ren & Stimpy, it failed because people don’t want to see something that just goes way beyond the boundaries. They want something that has some dimension or humanity to it.

  BILL WRAY: He didn’t have to go straight to fucking homosexuals and buggering each other. Save it up! Imply it! Work with it! That vile, ugly thing is totally self-destructive. A way to say “fuck it” forever. When Microsoft gave him a big pile of money for a cartoon, he called it “Weekend Pussy Hunt.” Are you kidding me? Artistic freedom is one thing, but they’re not going to want that. They want Ren & Stimpy.

  ALBIE HECHT: I fought to make Snow Day, which is essentially a Pete & Pete movie based on that whole idea of magic realism that Chris and Will do so well.

  WILL MCROBB: If you look at that movie, you can see a Pete & Pete template: Little girl, older brother having sibling issues about not wanting the other one to grow up, and they kind of come together . . .

  CHRIS VISCARDI: We’ve tried many times over the years to create something with a Pete & Pete sensibility, but ultimately it would not move forward. People don’t want anything that’s quirky anymore. Quirky means odd. Odd means weird. Weird means not for everybody. Not for everybody means lower ratings. Lower ratings means, We don’t make as much money. Uh . . . we can’t do that. And that’s just the way it is.

  WILL MCROBB: We had a lot more material that made Snow Day a lot more Pete & Pete, but eventually it got cut out. If it could’ve been more like the show, I would’ve been more proud of it.

  ALBIE HECHT: It was a really successful movie for us.

  D.J. MACHALE: I did write a Dark movie called The Tale of the Wicked Gift for Paramount. It was an original story of the Boogie Man who was conjured centuries before by an ancient tribe as a means to discipline children. But the spirit grew in power until his only purpose became terrifying children, capturing their souls, and banishing them to a frightening land that exists in an ancient silver box . . . that our characters find in Sardo’s Magic Mansion. The project never went anywhere because the folks who ran Paramount at the time didn’t get that you could make a movie like that, meaning “horror lite.” They felt that horror had to be either true horror or Scooby-Doo funny. It’s too bad; I went back and read that script recently and it’s really good!

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: The shows that came after are supposed to be aspirational, but the characters are really just aspiring to be show business stars, which is about the least functional, least useful thing in the world. American Idol and Hannah Montana are fine, but being a scientist or a journalist or a painter or being anything is more important. Clarissa was smart. She wasn’t trying to be a “star.” Being a star for Clarissa would have been a step down. She admired Madonna . . . but she also admired scientists. She was more cool than the characters from these other shows.

  ALAN GOODMAN: Fred and I were the first ones to leave under our own steam and to be available to the rest of the television industry. So we had development deals everywhere. When we were talking to CBS about a Saturday morning show, they had all kinds of rules about what kids could understand, about how kids’ minds work, about the kinds of things we could do in animation. We thought these guys were just idiots.

  DEBBY BEECE: In 1989, I left to launch a comedy channel called Ha!

  MIKE KLINGHOFFER: I left Nickelodeon in 1991, which is when Viacom was forming their comedy network called Ha!, which actually merged with the Comedy Channel and became Comedy Central, which I will take credit for naming. I truly stole it from Sears Brand Central.

  LINDA SIMENSKY: I left for Cartoon Network. When that started up, I thought it was really cool. I like to have as much freedom as possible. I enjoyed my time at Nick, but after nine years, I was ready for the next thing.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: I was working with Nick for ten years, which is a long time to be working in any phase of TV. I needed to break away from working with children. I felt if I didn’t show a range, I would quickly get labeled as a person who just does “kids.” And I thought I had more to offer than that. That took me to Viacom Interactive, and they dragged me back into kids by having me invent Noggin. Then I went to CBS to do CBS Eye on People, which was subsequently sold to Discovery. Then they bought Travel Channel and merged with them. And then I went to do women’s at Oxygen. I was at the Weather Channel and then Martha Stewart. From children’s to Martha Stewart. You have to take the intervening eighteen years of TV experience there.

  ELIZABETH HESS: As an actor, as much as we love steady gigs, there is something about the unknown that feeds the creative spirit, and I was really hungry to go back out into the unknown. I loved everyone that was a part of Clarissa. I stayed in touch somewhat with some, but it’s a peripatetic life that we actors lead. If I were to see anyone from that show, it would be as though no time at all had passed. But my life has moved on and so have other people’s.

  DANNY TAMBERELLI: I speak to everyone that I’ve worked with along the way for the most part. Kenan I give guitar lessons to, because he’s on SNL and we’re both in the city. I see him a coupla times a month.

  ALISON FANELLI: I cried hysterically when I left the last wrap party. I hugged Michael, and we were really crying. I knew I wouldn’t see him again; my life was going in a completely different direction. Danny and Michael are still very close, which is great.

  DANNY TAMBERELLI: Mike lives in Greenpoint, so he’s in Brooklyn. We hang out once in a while; we can’t really hang out in bars because he gets weird. It’s been known to happen a few times.

  FRED KELLER: Hey Dude matured as the kids matured, and the material got better as the writers got more adept at it. We thought we’d be stuck out in the desert, and at the end, we were sorry to go. But life goes on and careers move forward.

  COURTNEY CONTE: Salute You
r Shorts was great training for me, because we were scrappy—there were no rules, we made it up as we went along, and we just went for it.

  GRAHAM YOST: When Hey Dude wrapped, I was out of a job and recently married. I was miffed that Nick hadn’t offered me any kind of development deal. I ran the show for a year and wrote thirteen episodes! There was no phone call. I was having lunch with a friend and said I had this idea about a bomb on a bus. He said, “That’s a good idea. You should write that.”

  ROSS HULL: I’m a meteorologist now, so it wasn’t like I stopped after the show. Are You Afraid of the Dark? certainly provided a sort of launching pad for me.

  DAVE COULIER: Out of Control was like comedy college for me. Bob Hughes was extremely generous with letting me exercise comedic freedom. So I learned a lot about delivery, timing, and being funny on camera. By the time I got to Full House, I was well armed.

  FRED KELLER: This was my first experience doing episodic TV, and it was a wonderful training ground. After that, I went on to do two hundred episodes of network TV. Not bad for something I almost turned down.

  VENUS DEMILO: I played intramural football when I was in college, which I probably wouldn’t have done had it not been for that character. I didn’t go into professional sports, but it’s still part of my life. Being part of Salute Your Shorts did make me realize I love being on set. I studied film production in college so I could make my own projects.

  RICK GALLOWAY: By season four, I had already asked Bob Mittenthal to AD or at least a way I could find an understanding of production in which they put me through a battery of very fun jobs, kinda assisting people. I ended up after Welcome Freshmen working at Nickelodeon as a PA and being involved in production, which I am now. I’m a lighting director.

  DAVID LASCHER: I’m about to write and direct a film, and Hey Dude definitely put me on that path.

  CHRISTINE MCGLADE: What I took away was a very good understanding of how broadcasting works, behind the scenes. I had many opportunities to do that kind of work as the years went by and ended up doing some producing with Roger and Geoff. That was hugely helpful as my career continued down that path.

  ABBY HAGYARD: Some amazing things happened to the kids who went through that process. Some of them look back on it and roll their eyes, smile a funny smile. But they all came out of it with a very clear sense of who they were. I would be stunned if there was anybody who said they didn’t like it.

  JUSTIN CAMMY: My wife certainly didn’t recognize me later in life, but when she found out when we were dating that I was the Justin from the show, she admitted it was the only show she watched with her brother and sister. Even though they were separated by quite a bit in age, they could watch it together.

  ROBIN RUSSO: I married my husband after the Double Dare craze, and he wasn’t that into the arena of television—it was like, “Oh, okay. Some Double Dare thing that my wife did.” Then he realized how huge a thing it was and now is kind of proud of me.

  CHRISTINE TAYLOR: My husband, Ben Stiller, kept hearing people coming up to me saying, “I loved that show and grew up watching you! I loved Melody!” Paris Hilton came up to me at some place in LA and went crazy because she was such a big Hey Dude fan. This was before Paris Hilton was Paris Hilton, so I didn’t even know who she was. Someone had to tell me. And Ben would say, “I have to see this.” They hadn’t put the show on DVD yet, so when Ben was working on a movie at Paramount or something, as a gift he got somebody at Nickelodeon to burn the full series for me and made a case and everything. Our daughter didn’t even recognize me when she watched it. Ben has since pulled some scenes and clips to use against me. He does little home movies and he’ll sometimes throw some scenes from Hey Dude on. Just to make me laugh.

  ALISON FANELLI: My husband now, he never heard of the show before I told him about it. We were dating for months before he found out. Do you even know who you’re dating?

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: We never even really knew people watched it. Now it’s really fascinating to see how many people were influenced by it when they were kids.

  JAMES BETHEA: It’s fascinating because at the time, you’re managing this campaign, trying to keep the thing running as best you can, and you’re hoping that people like it, but you’re not really thinking about the long-term effects at all. To go online today and see people in their twenties now or older discussing the impact of what we did? That’s amazing. I’ve met people who told me they went into technology and production because of what they saw on Nick Arcade as a kid.

  MELISSA JOAN HART: People definitely started talking to me about it and how it changed their lives. I heard people say they became journalists because of Clarissa.

  TOM NIKOSEY: Mr. Wizard was the original. Even Bill Nye was at his funeral and paid homage to him. Bill said Don was “the one that influenced all of us.” When Don spoke at the National Science Teachers Association at the annual meeting in Anaheim ’06, the Myth Busters were there performing, and when they got up, they announced Don was in the audience. Six hundred people all stood up and gave him a five-minute applause. The Myth Busters admitted he influenced everyone. Who could dispute that? He was America’s favorite science teacher.

  ARON TAGER: My character came out of the script relentless. My favorite line was, I want your theater! And I’m going to have it! I used it in a demo for myself, and my agent got freaked out, so he stopped using it—’cause it was too scary. One of the assistant stage managers on a play I was doing in Toronto came up to me and said that when I was Dr. Vink, I scared the shit outta her as a little girl! “That’s wonderful!” I said. “You don’t seem to be any worse for the wear.”

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: My favorite thing is that to this day, everywhere I go to pitch a movie or a TV show or a book, there’s always someone twenty-four to thirty there. These are the people who are starting to run the world. As soon as they hear I created Clarissa, they go crazy and revert to being fourteen-year-olds. Even some of the guys.

  BOB MITTENTHAL: I was working on a film and these PAs came over and said, “We heard you worked on Double Dare!” They just fell on their knees: “Thank you! You made my childhood!” And that’s pretty gratifying. So I have no shame about it at all. Maybe I should . . .

  CHRIS VISCARDI: When the Internet started to really grow, we were shocked about how many people would talk about Pete & Pete with the passion of a rabid following, because it’s been so long since the show’s been off the air.

  WILL MCROBB: You make something, you go into the time machine, and you come out seventeen years later to see what happens. It’s pretty amazing to consider: We may have only gotten a 2.1 rating and they took us off the air, but seventeen years later, there’s all these twenty-six-year-olds who are saying Thank you so much.

  JASON ALISHARAN: Since it’s been about twenty years since I was on the show, I don’t get recognized in public.

  CHRISTINE MCGLADE: There’s a certain age group of people who still sometimes recognize me, and that’s an odd experience.

  ALISON FANELLI: It’s been such a long time. I’m really surprised when I’m recognized. The last time it happened, I was in medical school and I was at a Starbucks with pj’s and glasses on. My hair was short-short. And someone was like, “What are you doing here?” How did you even notice me? It might be harder with Michael and Danny. “Where’s the tattoo?”

  RICK GOMEZ: I was walking around a Kmart in Manhattan and a couple of kids were with their family chasing me around the aisle and laughing: “It’s Mike!” Wow, what is Maronna going through?

  DAVE RHODEN: Several years after the show, I was eighteen or nineteen and I was in Florida at a hotel pool with a bunch of friends. At this age in my life, I had grown out my hair—at least chin level all the way around—and had a big, fat, thick goatee and an earring in my ear, and I had put on a lot of muscle. This little girl who was probably up on the eighth floor of the hotel balcony screams, “IT’S MERV!” An
d all my friends just died laughing. They were like, “Yes, it is!” And I was like, “How did this little girl from, like, eight stories away recognize me with long hair, goatee, and an earring?” I didn’t even feel like I was the same person. Seriously, you remember that?

  ANDREA LIVELY: I was never seen on Nick Arcade, and that’s the way I wanted it to be. It was really cool that I could go out and people wouldn’t know who I was. I could have a life and do what I did on Nick Arcade.

  HOWARD BAKER: I was visiting New York City once and was walking down the street behind these four club kids who had homemade backpacks of the characters. They called each other “rugrats.” I told them I was the director on the show and they went berserk! I was a bit overwhelmed by the attention and thought they were going to kidnap me.

  CONNIE SHULMAN: It’s surprising how many times when I’ll say something at the grocery store or something and that twenty-year-old range will pick up on it real fast. To think, this little orange-faced blond girl was a role model for some girls that are now in their twenties.

  RACHEL SWEET: The show I’m working on right now, we have a bunch of interns in their mid-twenties, and the other day one of them said, “Oh my God! You wrote the theme song to Clarissa Explains It All?” And then she sang it for me.

  ARON TAGER: I still get phone calls every once in a while, fans of Dr. Vink. And they all give me the line, With a v-ah vah-vah. But it doesn’t happen that often, so it’s fine.

  RICHARD M. DUMONT: Of course I get the catchphrase from anyone who recognizes me. That was annoying for a little bit.

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: We didn’t have any sense of who we were reaching when we were making it. I’ve had students who saw Pete & Pete when they were kids, and it’s really interesting to me when they’re so passionate about it. It lets me see the effect of how it shaped people’s sensibilities. To see all that work and that it really had meaning for people is fantastic.

  MELISSA JOAN HART: There’s always, at least once a day, someone who comes up to me and basically says, “I remember you from Clarissa,” and they feel like they’re in this exclusive club. It was a cult hit, so when people say it to me, they have this little wink of their eye. It’s so funny to see the reactions of people who were really moved by that show and character.