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

by Mathew Klickstein

  ALAN GOODMAN: Slime, for Roger Price, was a way for kids to “act up” to adults. To punish them for the crime of being parents. But it evolved when it became the symbol of Nickelodeon. As a symbol of the demarcation between grown-ups and kids, getting slimed became a badge of honor. Sliming Tom Cruise at the Kids’ Choice Awards was a way of saying, “We accept you. You’re one of us.”

  ALBIE HECHT: In 1994, we moved the Kids’ Choice Awards to the Pantages Theatre, and the conceit was we would start it out as a very austere and serious event that gets busted up by slime and chaos. In my mind, there was only one person big enough to pull that off, and that was James Earl Jones. With his voice and the theater, you can see it. So I get on the phone with him—he’s like a hero to me—and he goes, “HELLO, ALBIE.” That voice comes on and I’m like, Oh my God, it’s James Earl Jones. I pitch him the idea of doing the show, being in a tuxedo and getting slimed; it’s gonna be great—kids all over the world . . . And there’s silence. At this point in my career, I know silence is not good. And he goes, “Albie, I don’t think so. Thank you for your time.” And he hangs up. I’m crushed. I don’t know what to do; it’s sort of been written for him . . . Two minutes later, the phone rings: “ALBIE? JAMES EARL JONES.” What did I do? I must have done something wrong! He says he just talked with his granddaughters and they said that he must do it because sliming is the biggest honor he could have.

  ALAN GOODMAN: When we started to build our tone, our look, our sound, our style, we went against the grain of what was normal because we didn’t see a lot of value with normal. We really didn’t have the money to do anything else. So we had to have our own point of view.

  MIKE KLINGHOFFER: One of the bugaboos that we were fighting was that cable shows had a look. That “public access look.” That nonprofessional, nonnetwork look. When we were trying to establish who we were, production value became very, very important for us. It couldn’t look cheap or like a “little kids’ version.”

  LARRY SULKIS: There was no money for gloss. Man, this was about as close to “I’ve got some costumes in the garage, let’s put on a show” as you could get. And it definitely looked that way. But that added to the fun of it!

  DAN SAWYER: It seemed low-budget. Or revolutionary.

  KATHERINE DIECKMANN: Improvisational, DIY, punk was very much our aesthetic. We’re just going to take these kids and go to some suburbs in Jersey and shoot it, man!

  BYRON TAYLOR: Everything at Nickelodeon turned out to have a major learning curve involved with it. Over the first five or six years, it developed quite a bit.

  SCOTT WEBB: There are two people who are gone who really should be counted along with Fred Seibert here. One is Tom Pomposello, who helped us come up with our sound identity with the doo-wop, which helped us communicate a lot of our attitude and was the foundation for a lot of our animation identity as well.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: That’s why Tom was important in those days—and this is because I married an audio engineer: Sound is really important on television, especially back then.

  SCOTT WEBB: The other person is Tom Corey, who designed the Nickelodeon logo. Tom Corey really understood these ideas about designing a logo that could be as expressive as kids were and as flexible a design that we could keep fresh. There are rules for the logo. But the logo is an ever-changing orange shape. It could really be anything, as long as it fit within some basic design rules.

  GEORGE EVELYN: Each Nick logo was something different. A graphic shape, no outlines, usually. A flat, bright orange bone or hat or whatever.

  SCOTT WEBB: Whenever we put it on air, we always wanted to make it like a big sticker and kind of in your face. Lime green and orange were the two colors that Tom Corey proposed, because they are both international distress colors. They’re attention-getting. Designers always want to change what they’re working with. Like, whatever the last guy did was a piece of shit.

  ALAN GOODMAN: The flat orange-colored logo was deliberate, and the idea was it literally slaps on, basically obliterating the end of the scene and saying it’s our brand. The original idea was it was just an orange thing, but it had to be something that wouldn’t be orange in real life. So it couldn’t be an orange, for instance.

  GEORGE EVELYN: We directors and designers would sit around, sifting through the logo branding spec sheets, and pick our favorites, sort of divvying up the pile. Nick’s mission was “have fun” and have the logo at the end. And “we like orange.” Other than that, it was pretty open.

  JOEY AHLBUM: When I got the audio track for what would become the first dinosaur ID, I was trying to come up with ideas and a good friend said “kids love dinosaurs.” I started drawing and came up with the sneaker-wearing doo-wop dinos. And then I gave them an irreverent Nickelodeon twist. They were wearing sneakers, they were mixed with modern technology—watching TV, listening to a Walkman, and even driving cars. They were also done in bright, poppy colors, all with that amazing doo-wop track. It added up to pure magic and pure Nickelodeon.

  MIKE KLINGHOFFER: Up to about 1985, Nickelodeon really had almost no original productions. So everything, every attitude we had, had to come across in basic thirty-second blasts through our on-air promotions.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: What was great about Nickelodeon at that time—particularly working in On-Air Promotions—was it didn’t have a lot of original programming. So pretty much all the money they had went into interstitial programming. Even though we were making promos—“Mister Ed will be right back after these messages”—we also got to do other interstitial programming that was animated or allowed us to do film shoots and all these post-production effects. It was like going to film school all over again.

  SCOTT WEBB: The promo department was a great incubator for Will McRobb to really find himself. He was unbearably shy when he showed up in the early days, and the environment in which we were working really allowed him to open up and share his work more to others.

  WILL MCROBB: As golden as that golden age might have been, I really don’t think Pete & Pete would have been made into a series except for the fact that it came out of the promo department. It all came out of Scott Webb’s department, and he had the autonomy to make the sixty-second spots that caught on the way The Simpsons caught on with its shorts.

  JOE STILLMAN: Scott was really the keeper of the flame and kind of embodied a grown-up kid at Nickelodeon. He really kind of emotionally and spiritually kept Nickelodeon on track.

  SCOTT WEBB: I was twenty-eight at the time, maybe twenty-nine. In the early days, my approach really resonated, and that’s one of the reasons I became the promo producer I did, then the creative director I did. People would say my blood was orange.

  WILL MCROBB: Scott really bled orange. He was the truest of the true believers. He could handle it all from a purely creative and from an advertising point of view. Sadly, Scott is legally blind. But that only added to his mystique. We had to sit really close to him. Scott had a guru persona.

  SCOTT WEBB: I had become a freelancer for Fred Seibert at the Movie Channel. And shortly after I got there, I began to have a problem with my eyesight. I thought I just needed glasses, but I went to a doctor and learned fairly quickly that it was not correctable. It was a problem with my optic nerve. When I got that news, I sort of felt like my life was over. I couldn’t imagine how I could ever be a functioning production assistant. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t drive. I didn’t know how I would ever produce television, and I felt like my life was over. The day I got that news, I went to Fred and did everything but say the words, “I quit.” I went and I told him that I had a problem and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to do anything. And so he said to me, “You have a lot of problems: You’re really lazy and you’re disorganized. You’re irresponsible. And I expect you to go back to your desk and get to work. And if you have trouble with your eyes, you should let me know.” Fred did some heroic things for me in those days in the way he stuck his
neck out. This was way, way, way before the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Fred made sure that I got some really wacky equipment to help me do what I needed to do. To have somebody step in to say that he believed in me at a time when I didn’t believe in myself was a huge turning point for me in my life. I really felt at that moment that I wanted to dedicate my work to kind of prove that Fred did the right thing. Losing my eyesight was a really dark period in my life, and it was a dark journey. But I figured out how to be a producer as a visually impaired person.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: Scott was a producer. He wasn’t running it all. Debby Beece was running it.

  JOE STILLMAN: In fairness, the essence of what Nickelodeon became was something that also came from Fred/Alan. They really focused on what makes Nickelodeon Nickelodeon. Why we weren’t Disney. That kind of stuff.

  FRED SEIBERT: We started as promotion consultants and eventually became programming consultants, then a full-service ad agency for Nick. From their standpoint, we were rock-and-roll guys. We were hired to solve a problem. Nick had no ratings; what could we do that people hadn’t done before us? We had a lot of theory, but we needed executional proof, and Scott Webb was the lead of executional proof.

  WILL MCROBB: All the years that I’d been in the promo department really felt like we were an underdog team of commandos trying to do something that was good, and everything that Pete & Pete became was really fueled by that same identity.

  CHRIS VISCARDI: I’m sure there was a little bit of jealousy about our getting a chance to do that. We eventually broke off from the On-Air Promos Department and kind of went freelance to make Pete & Pete.

  BYRON TAYLOR: The design of Double Dare was inspired by an Italian movement from the 1980s called “Memphis.” There was a design firm that did all these crazy pieces of furniture, and they eventually got into architecture design. It had kind of a post-punk feel to it, perhaps. Other things were Rube Goldberg and the game Mouse Trap.

  DAVID ELLIS: Byron had an interesting approach to color and line design that hadn’t really been used or exploited at all. He was a genius in his approach to what Nick was all about. It was imaginative and new.

  BYRON TAYLOR: If you look at weapons G.I. Joe toys have, they look like they are from World War II but are stripped of detail because of the scale. That “toy-ness” was something I always wanted to go after in designing obstacles as well as props for the stunts. That’s my aesthetic criteria.

  ALBIE HECHT: Oh, Byron’s amazing. He’s in the DNA of Nick.

  BYRON TAYLOR: Jim Fenhagen had already designed the Double Dare set—completely established the look. But they still had the obstacle courses that needed to be designed. All of that stuff, we had to determine what it would look like. And my work at Nickelodeon sort of snowballed from there.

  HARVEY: If you saw Byron outside, you might have thought he was, like, a pharmacist or maybe a librarian. Then he’d come up with these ingenious, almost perverted sort of torturous kinds of things: “We’ll make ’em reach up into this giant nose” or “We’ll send ’em down this slide and have them land in this mess.” There was always a fine line between its being real torture and just torturous fun.

  BYRON TAYLOR: Very few strictures were placed on us.

  DANA CALDERWOOD: I liked the Sundae Slide because that was always fun to shoot, with kids coming down headfirst or slipping and landing: We were guaranteed to get a big, wonderful shot and splash at the bottom of the slide.

  BYRON TAYLOR: I was probably the first person to go down into the Gumball Machine. It’s very exciting to be inside. There’s usually a frown on my face, and I wound up coming out with a smile.

  DANA CALDERWOOD: That’s the type of stuff I would do on my lunch hour: play on the hamster wheel. Just the idea of a one-ton human hamster wheel was so clever.

  HARVEY: Byron was such a bizarre, creative guy. It was like this sort of weird Santa’s Workshop—the giant hamster wheels and huge nose that blew snot out and all this stuff Byron created with his team.

  BOB MITTENTHAL: Double Dare was a pretty smart set design. It was really designed to look like a bathroom. The glass brick walls, the tile-esque floors . . .

  BYRON TAYLOR: Jim Fenhagen had designed a very beautiful set that the producers had imagined as a swimming pool. Bob Mittenthal describes it as a bathroom. Geoffrey Darby described it as a natatorium. That’s sort of his pretentious explanation, which is apt.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: They weren’t the boss, so they can use all the terms they want, but I gave the direction and I said I want it to be a natatorium, which is what caused those tiles. “Bathroom” never entered my mind. Why “natatorium”? Because I liked the word.

  ALAN SILBERBERG: There’s something about appealing to the kid audience that a stunt had to be both fun and not too dangerous but still challenging. We would sit around at dinner—because, you know, a lot of us were living in hotels and going out to dinner all the time—and throw ideas around that way. At one point, there was a Writers Guild strike, and since we were not a guild show, we hired some of David Letterman’s writers to see if they could come up with some stunts. And they did not work. Beyond the obvious, there were some things that came in from that group that were extremely conceptual and just . . . didn’t work.

  GERRY LAYBOURNE: During the very first taping, the kid gets to the first obstacle and it’s a flag in a bag of feathers . . . And the kid spends the entire sixty seconds trying to get the flag. It was the only obstacle they hadn’t tested. So they then had to spend an hour cleaning the feathers and goop. The second time around, the camera fell back into the French toast or whatever and we had to start again. We needed to do four shows a day to make this work, and we’re now into hour five of taping this one show. I go home. I’m just like, “Oh God, this is the worst thing. It’s never going to work. We’re dead.” I’m on the phone with Debby Beece, who says to me, “Don’t worry, Geoffrey will figure this out by Monday.”

  DONNIE JEFFCOAT: Double Dare was in a studio. GUTS was in a studio. Nick Arcade was in a studio. So it was a real challenge for our production company on Wild & Crazy Kids, which was on location, to keep it together. We had a lot of organizational issues, and I don’t mind saying that. The production company did a pretty good job, but there were some times when they really pushed our hours as young people. It was one of these things where I’d show up and they’d go, “This game is going to work just like this, and this will explode at this time,” and it would be a complete, major failure. We’d have to, a lot of times, have backup games planned, which always threw the day off. We shot two shows a week. It was a lot for everybody.

  FRED KELLER: To go and do a three-camera kids’ show in the Arizona desert on location was quite a challenge. We were doing a twenty-two-minute show in about two and a half days. Very tough show to do, Hey Dude.

  DAVID LASCHER: I loved the amenities. It was like the Ramada Inn or something. I turned seventeen, and it was my first bit of freedom. We became really close friends: Christine Taylor, Kelly Brown, Joe Torres, director Ross Bagwell . . . We were really tight.

  GRAHAM YOST: The production moved from the Ramada to the sumptuous Radisson. The thing about the Ramada was that the pool was right there. We had to walk a little further at the Radisson.

  FRED KELLER: The first thirteen episodes were very bare-bones. We were staying in the little Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Tucson, and we didn’t even have a dolly for the camera. By season two, we had the dolly, we were at the Marriott—everything bounced up as the show was more successful.

  CHRISTINE TAYLOR: I was not a person who had ever been to the Wild West. I’d never been on a horse. I had no idea what the environment was going to be. I had never even been to the West Coast before. I had no idea what the dry heat of the desert was going to be . . . until we got there!

  FRED KELLER: One time we put a thermometer on the sound guy’s hat; he’d been sitting above the set with his boom,
and it was, like, 125 degrees. When we were rehearsing with the kids at the Ramada area, there was a Coca-Cola machine and we kept hearing this rattling sound . . . Son of a gun if there wasn’t a huge rattlesnake that had gone to cool itself in the machine! We had to get a snake wrangler to take it out into the desert because Tanque Verde, where we were shooting, is protected land.

  KELLY BROWN: The last day after we wrapped the first season, we all got on the plane, but we had to get off because it was too hot to fly. They shut the airport down.

  CHRISTINE TAYLOR: The horseback riding was hard, too. That was another challenge for the suburban Pennsylvania girl that I was.

  DANA CALDERWOOD: At night, we would test all of the stunts on Double Dare. Needs to be bigger! Needs more water balloons! It’s good, but NOT MESSY ENOUGH! We had kids—production assistants, mostly—who would do the testing. Or sometimes we would do it ourselves.

  TIM BARTELL: Every time they had an idea for a game or something, they’d bring a kid in to test it. I’d call my friends, “Hey, can I borrow your teenage son?”

  LISA SHAFTEL: I was the smallest person in the shop where we worked at Showman Fabricators. I’m five-foot-two and at that time was probably 115 pounds. I would get pulled off of whatever I was working on, and they would use me as a guinea pig to go through the obstacles and the props to see if kids could reach, if things were too big or too small. One of the things we built was a very simplified, vertical ant farm that was basically a large plywood box with acrylic, Plexiglas panels on the front side. Inside was a very simplified maze that was a wooden structure covered in industrial carpeting. It was 95 percent finished, and they called me over to test it out. I climbed up inside . . . and the distance back up was too far. I couldn’t reach and I got stuck inside it. I had to sit there for a while as the carpenters unscrewed all the Plexiglas panels and got a ladder to get me out. It was kind of like, “You will never believe what happened to me at work today.”