ALAN GOODMAN: It’s not that we ignored the rules and it’s not that we thumbed our noses at the rules. It’s that we didn’t trust the rules more than we trusted our own understanding of things. So we actually lived by a lot of rules. We just questioned them first. I still do that in my career today.
BOB HUGHES: And a lot of times that helped us, because we did things that were unexpected or different. But other times . . . it hurt us because we were so naïve.
ELIZABETH HESS: I grew up with such a strict upbringing. For me, it was so liberating to be a liberal, permissive, generous, nonauthoritarian figure. I think Clarissa in a lot of ways broke a lot of the sitcom-y rules. I feel there’s something very empowering in it for the kids watching it. So maybe the parents on the show are fallible and they trust their kids more than they should, but the message of that in Clarissa is that if kids mess up, it’s about parents giving you some space to figure it out instead of having all the answers and being overprotective. It’s a good thing I’m not a mom, huh?
CHUCK VINSON: With Clarissa Explains It All, it took me back to when I was a young kid and there were things I wanted to say to adults . . . but couldn’t really say them. And I think that’s what the success of the show was: You may think it, but Clarissa said it.
ABBY HAGYARD: If there were more of that kind of stuff, you’d have fewer, say, Columbine issues. When you feel, as a human being—age has nothing to do with it—that you don’t matter, that your opinion has no weight, that you have no value, that there’s no future for you, that no one cares . . . that’s the worst situation to be in.
CHRIS VISCARDI: We loved the idea of having a really defiant character like Little Pete. A character that would do and say all the things that we probably never as kids ourselves would have been able to express for kids. That also came out of the sensibility of the network at the time.
WILL MCROBB: Occasionally there was a word we couldn’t use. We could use “blowhole” and “fudgelicker,” but we couldn’t say “nipple.” It was pretty arbitrary.
HEATHER SHEFFIELD: The way we arrived at “sucks hose water” as a catchphrase was Nick wouldn’t let us say something “sucks.” It had to “suck eggs” or something. And somebody said, “Can we say it ‘sucks hose water’?” Sometimes Standards and Practices could be odd at times. I did a bit that was a Pamprin takeoff that would give other people cramps. They didn’t want to touch the subject of menstruation, and when they did agree to do it, we had to be very overt about it. They were really weird.
D.J. MACHALE: There was some concern from Nickelodeon up front that there was gonna be a big push-back against Are You Afraid of the Dark? So much so that they asked in the beginning if we could base our stories on literary antecedents so if we did get those complaints, we could say, “Hey, wait a minute! This is Edgar Allan Poe! This is Mary Shelley! This is classic stuff!”
STEVE SLAVKIN: There was never any shortage of notes, that’s for sure. They were paying for it, and we wanted to make a show that they were happy with, so we had to accommodate some of their things. There was one scene where the kids had to sneak out of their bunk and go down to the lodge to get . . . blank. So I wrote that they were going down to get some candy, which is something I’d seen as a camp counselor. We got a note: Can’t have candy. Why? Childhood obesity. So what were we supposed to do? They should sneak out and get fruit. I’ve never seen a kid risking a severe punishment for a ripe tangelo. But if that’s what they wanted, that’s what they would get. So there’s an episode of Salute Your Shorts where the kids sneak out . . . for fruit.
MARY HARRINGTON: Every once in a while, we’d have a chat with Standards about things when it came to Rugrats and the way the babies said some words incorrectly. If the characters were older, it certainly would have been a problem. But a nine-year-old watching Rugrats knows that what the babies are saying is wrong because they’re babies and therefore won’t really emulate it.
E. G. DAILY: On Rugrats, we were just trying to stay true to the authenticity of what a child really does. Kids just naturally can’t say words correctly right away; they haven’t learned to.
GEOFFREY DARBY: Am I worried about Bugs Bunny’s cross-dressing causing two generations of cross-dressers? No. It’s a cartoon. We had a group of psychologists and all this stuff, and they’re the ones who actually said to us, “It’s a cartoon. At the age of two, they know the difference.”
MELANIE CHARTOFF: There was a charity event I was asked to speak at as Didi from Rugrats to a group of parents and kids. Big mistake. After I did my little spiel, the officiator asked if there were any questions from the audience. One bewildered little boy raised his hand and said, “But how do you color yourself in?” It was beyond my ability to explain, so I deferred to one of the animators, who broke that child’s world in half. Kid was crying and everything. He’s probably still discussing it in therapy. Until they’re six or seven, children can’t tell what’s real or not real in their worlds. Santa seems logical; puppets and cartoons are just another kind of creature, like dogs.
CHRIS VISCARDI: I don’t think we ever thought too much about if we were going too far. If we ever did go too far, the network would certainly tell us. At the time, Nickelodeon had a very pro-kid, comically anti-parent perspective. It was all about a lighthearted defiance Nickelodeon was trumpeting. This is our network. Kids only.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: That was sort of a radical theory of ours called “Us vs. Them.” The kids against the grown-ups. It’s like the Revolutionary War . . . and we were starting the revolution. You could say “Us vs. Them” and it’s teenagers versus parents, or twenty-year-olds versus forty-year-olds.
ANDY BAMBERGER: After Debby Beece moved up into the promo department, that’s when we had the development of “Us vs. Them.” That gave us a theme to go for how to position each show.
SCOTT WEBB: We had a promo that ran that said, “If you catch your parents watching Nickelodeon, send them to their room!” Gerry Laybourne got called out because, “Look, Gerry doesn’t want kids and parents to be together.” So there came a multiyear discussion about essentially eliminating “Us vs. Them” out of our language. Under Herb Scannell’s reign, that shifted to, “Nickelodeon puts kids first.”
GEOFFREY DARBY: You Can’t Do That on Television made Nick “on the side of the child.” And that was all Roger Price. Absolutely. “Television on the side of the child.” It wasn’t anti-adult. It was pro-kid.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: Nick was just a quote-unquote “very free” place where we were experimenting and allowing ourselves to be kids again, to try to get in the minds of what our audience was thinking.
HOWARD BAKER: When we won the Emmy on the first season of Rugrats, we had a small dinner with Gerry Laybourne. It was Nick’s and I think Viacom’s first Emmy, so she wanted to meet us. She played a joke on Norton Virgien where she told him the cream pie had heat coming off of it, and when he held his hand over it to feel the heat, she slapped it and his hand went into the cream. I thought, “This is the head of a children’s network, all right.”
STEVE VIKSTEN: When Craig Bartlett and I created Hey Arnold!, we named Helga’s character after Gerry in homage: Helga Geraldine.
SCOTT WEBB: Since the core idea we hit on as a team was that it’s tough to be a kid in a grown-up world, one of the first things we did was look at ourselves as kids. We were all misfits and misunderstood and all those things.
DEE LADUKE: I was a misfit youth, believe me. I was a misfit of a misfit. And we were all kids at Nick! There wasn’t a one of us who had grown up yet. We still thought of ourselves as eight, nine, ten years old. A lot of us were extending our adolescence because maybe we weren’t too good at being kids the first time around, either because we were misfits like me or . . . I don’t know. But we were really going to make up for whatever we lost in childhood right there at Nick.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: I was Vice President of Production at Nickelodeon . . .
and I didn’t have an office! That doesn’t happen today. I didn’t have an office, I didn’t have a phone. I sort of ran around and hung out in other people’s offices. And they would track me down. That was sort of the fun, the attitude we had.
DANA CALDERWOOD: You’d be sitting in a serious meeting, but you’re wearing a goofy pith helmet with a dinosaur glued to the top of it. Or you were sitting on a goofy prop like a huge Chinese restaurant to-go box. And that was part of the fun. Someone would come in wearing a stupid thing, and you would just assume they were testing something.
FRED SEIBERT: In my first meeting with Gerry, I told her that even though Alan and I didn’t know what we were doing, what we could guarantee her was that by the time we were done, everybody at the network would be having a good time. “And those two really uptight assistants that are sitting out there at their desks in their little jackets and ties”—mainly women, by the way—“are going to be dancing with their dresses over their heads! And the men are going to be shooting spitballs at each other! Does that translate into ratings? We sure hope so!”
GEOFFREY DARBY: It was not inmates running the asylum with the asylum not caring about the rest of the world. We took it very, very seriously. That’s why we got all the PhD types to help us. “Is this okay? Are we screwing people’s kids up? Are we screwing up people’s lives?” We took that trust very seriously.
ALAN GOODMAN: I can’t tell you whether people were crazy, but I can tell you there were a lot of really spirited young people who had never worked in TV before.
VANESSA COFFEY: I don’t think I went crazy. I know I didn’t go crazy. No matter what anybody else thinks. But the bottom line is that the entire Nicktoons block and the success of the block was on my shoulders. Nick had money riding on it, but I was responsible for it working or not. That’s pretty stressful. And I had Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo getting a divorce and fighting and John Kricfalusi freaking out and dealing with Bob Camp and his people. Jim Jinkins was great, but he was feeling left out a little . . . and getting Rocko’s Modern Life going—Joe Murphy’s wife committed suicide during the pilot phase. I didn’t take a vacation for five years. One reason I left Nick was that it practically killed me. It was so hard. There was a lot at stake, and we were trying to be totally different. We wanted to win. It’s not easy winning on that level.
LINDA SIMENSKY: We all were in the trenches together trying to make this new and amazing thing work out. If we did it right, it would be really great and affect people’s lives. And that was a lot of pressure. We felt the future of TV animation was in our hands. That’s more than a little stress.
EDDIE FITZGERALD: Our era’s too sensitive. These were good people who were incredibly stressed because they were doing something that had never been done before. And there were lots of obstacles. And they had high standards for themselves. To them, it was a daily battle to meet those high standards.
FRED SEIBERT: No one knew how to deal with the lunatics. And don’t go thinking the lunatics now are any less lunaticky.
KELLY BROWN: To be rolling around in the mud with Geoffrey Darby—the VP of Nick—while we were doing Hey Dude was just such a fun experience. Speedway was the name of the road we lived on.
FRED KELLER: There wasn’t a lot of money in doing Hey Dude, but the ride to the desert studio was worth it—this wonderful road at five in the morning, and we’d literally see bobcats crossing the road, herds of deer . . .
GEOFFREY DARBY: We never crashed the car. We didn’t go off the road. We never went off the road! That’s a myth! No, no, no, no, no! Those humps in the road, you could hit a speed where you could get all four wheels off the ground. That’s all. And then when you land, it lands! Right? You’re going eighty miles per hour and you’re in a Buick or something stupid—an Oldsmobile or something—and it lands. Crash! We never went off the road. But every time it lands, it might as well be a crash.
GRAHAM YOST: Geoff wasn’t the only one who did this. Dave Brisbin and I found that when you’re driving along the speedway and the road dips down into the wash and comes back up, if you hit those at sixty miles per hour, your wheels would leave the ground. I’d never done that in a car before, and it’s a very strange sensation to be in the air—a half-second of float—and when the wheels hit the pavement, there’s a screech. As soon as they leave the pavement, the drive wheels start spinning really fast because they don’t have the friction of the ground. It’s like an airplane landing, in a way. It was pretty cool, but Geoff hit it too fast. They survived but got banged around.
CHRISTINE TAYLOR: I knew about that, but I wasn’t involved. It was just hilarious and high drama at the time.
GEOFFREY DARBY: There was one vehicle that was a hatchback and—they’re all making myths here; they really love this myth-making thing because it makes it sound much more exciting—there was someone who was in the hatch when we landed. We did break a mirror. It was scary and fun. Like roller coasters. It is very exciting to get all four wheels off the ground. Try it sometime. That road is probably still there. It was a rental car.
HEATHER SHEFFIELD: We were a rowdy crew at Roundhouse in that sense. By the time we were in LA, we were on the same stage where Gilligan’s Island had been shot, so there was a lagoon out back—a two-foot pond—and all the boys had pellet guns. We’d burn things, jump over things with our bikes, just make messes. I brought my puppy to swim in the lagoon. I’m sure Seinfeld was not happy to be located right next to these twenty-year-olds blowing things up.
ALAN GOODMAN: There was one scene on Clarissa where Ferguson was a baby, and we cut to Jason’s head in a baby carriage with a doll’s body under his head and he’s got a bonnet and he’s wailing or whatever. The head from that baby wound up in the writer’s room where I had one of those Japanese flying saucer toys where we could flip the switch and it would move around the room. I was able to get the baby doll head onto the top of that flying saucer, and from then on, we called that Baby Head for when we wanted to freak people out. There was one time our producer, Chris Gifford, came in and we didn’t want him in the room because we were the writers and he wasn’t. And he had some question and we pretended not to care and I said, “I don’t know the answer. Let’s ask Baby Head.” So I went over and switched on the Baby Head toy and it moved around the room for a little while and Suzanne Collins and Doug Petrie and I all stared at it like we were waiting for it to deliver an answer and Chris just kind of backed out of the room a little frightened.
FRED NEWMAN: Doug Preis on Doug would bring in a rubbery plastic little bladder that would go pbbbhhttthhbbth like a fart machine. He would know it was really stupid, but he would bring it out sometimes and it would break a moment. It was so childish and inappropriate, but he would persist in such a way that it would become so hilarious.
STEVE VIKSTEN: Arlene Klasky came to this one Rugrats table reading on April Fools’ Day, and we decided we were going to write two fake pages just to fool her. It had to do with Tommy hearing a squeaking noise. He crawled up the stairs, and the squeaky noise got louder and quicker . . . and Tommy pushes open the door and he sees his parents fucking. Stu says, “No, Tommy—it’s nothing. Go back!” And Arlene blushed and got really angry. We all burst out laughing. She didn’t laugh. But it was fun to pull that on her.
HARVEY: We were in New York, and Marc was really tired after we had shot a lot of shows. There was this old wind-up boatman, and he ended up in every obstacle. Marc was laughing like a schoolgirl; he has this really silly, high laugh.
DANA CALDERWOOD: It was this toy boat that we could wind up and he would row his little boat. Marc just looked at the thing and cracked up.
MARC SUMMERS: We were shooting, at that time, six episodes a day. Sometimes three up-front shows and then three obstacle courses, go to lunch, and then three more up-fronts and three more obstacle courses in a row. By Thursday, I didn’t know if I’d given the rules yet or what the hell was going on. I got a bit punchy. Th
ere’s this little character in a boat and they kept moving it to every obstacle. And I just couldn’t stop laughing.
DANA CALDERWOOD: We couldn’t stop laughing either, and Mike Klinghoffer—the devil in him—kept running ahead of Marc so that every time he got to the next stop on the obstacle course, there was that stupid little guy in the stupid little boat. I don’t think any of us had ever laughed any harder, and Marc could barely get through it.
ALISON FANELLI: Michael Maronna’s favorite thing in the world was to get me to laugh during close-ups. We would shoot the scene with the two of us close together, and we’d laugh a lot, and they’d get mad at us. When I was behind the camera delivering lines to Michael during his close-ups, I behaved. When they’d flip it, he would do anything to get me to mess up. He’d be making faces, rushing lines . . . he was always a pain in the butt. In a good way. He was notorious for that kind of stuff.
BRUCE GOWERS: The art director on Roundhouse had a thing about Barbie and would hide a Barbie on the set every week. It would be in the shot, in the background. They were all costumed: Underwater Barbie, Drunk Barbie, Drag Queen Barbie . . . I had no idea this was going on. Who in their right minds would hide Barbies on set?
KELLY BROWN: Whenever we did any dining scene in Hey Dude, there’d be a thing of lard on the middle of the table. Just for giggles. That was definitely Graham.
GRAHAM YOST: One time, when Alan was due to visit, Brisbin and I created a “gift basket” that would be waiting for him in his motel room. We even conned some Ramada stickers out of the front desk staff, to make it look like it came from them. The basket was filled with old, near-rotten fruit that was about to be tossed. And lard. Lots of lard. From there, the lard ended up everywhere.
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 7