BYRON TAYLOR: Basically, we would be guessing when we would draw up the designs. It would be complicated by the factors of the mess being put on it and the kids going through it. After putting them in the studio, we would have to rework pieces occasionally.
JAMES BETHEA: What was amazing about our set on Nick Arcade was the thing people didn’t get to see: the scale. Ten thousand square feet, and half of our soundstage was dedicated to blue-screen sets, full-scale, for the interactive Video Zone at the end of each episode. At one time, we had the largest blue-screen set that had ever been built.
ANDREA LIVELY: Being on that immense set and walking around, seeing what the kids would see on the monitors, then looking at the end result—it was one of those experiences where I went, “Wow, cool!” But I didn’t realize how cool it was until I could really look back on it now and see how groundbreaking it was.
KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: The Link Set on You Can’t Do That on Television was just supposed to look like monkey bars with a blue sky background where kids might play or hang out.
ROGER PRICE: At the instigation of our designer, John Galt, we lit the Link Set—that strange structure from which the shows were hosted—entirely with fluorescent lighting. That had never been done before, for the simple reason that it was not technically possible. And now we are getting into areas that I barely understand. Apparently, the light from fluorescent tubes strobe at a different speed from the camera shutters, so that while everyone in TV realized that fluorescent lighting would eliminate many other problems, it was not possible to use because there would appear to be a slow pulsing of the picture exposure. John Galt had found a way to synchronize the fluorescents with the cameras’ thirty-frames-per-second shutter speeds, and thus eliminate the slow pulsing of light. The soft and all-over light from the fluorescents allowed the actors more freedom of movement without being rooted to marks or walking along only carefully plotted lines. It also cut out the problems of shadows from boom microphones, which had always been an issue. So a lot of the anarchic freedom we displayed was entirely due to a technical innovation developed and perfected for the show by a man who was one of the many undiscovered geniuses in Ottawa. On our pilot, I believe we were also the first in the world to use high-definition video cameras on location or, I think, anywhere. And that was another Galt innovation. He didn’t invent them, but he did know about them.
BYRON TAYLOR: How to integrate kids into the Video Zone on Nick Arcade was a lot of fun, because they were shot like a video game, like with side-scroller and overhead angles.
CURT TOUMANIAN: Some of the games were a lot more interactive than others, like the one where kids would throw a Styrofoam ball at the characters. What we would do is hook the camera up to the Amiga Computer, and when the kids would stand in front of the blue screen, their image would appear and they could interact with certain layers of the computer graphics. We had objects that would fly across the screen. If the kid didn’t duck, the computer would detect that as a collision. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything like that on TV prior to that. And I don’t think there’s been anything quite like it since, either.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: When we first came to the set for Clarissa’s room, it was done in all pink and was very frilly. Like most girls’ bedrooms at the time on those kinds of shows. But I had the set designers literally take black car paint and make checkered walls on top of the pink wallpaper. One of the camera guys on the set said, “She’s possessed by the Devil!”
DAVID ELLIS: If I had painted checkers on my wall at that age, I would have gotten my rear end tanned inside and out. But it was necessary to show that edge of Clarissa’s personality and also the liberalness of her parents by having her expressing herself that way.
BYRON TAYLOR: What I pitched was painting purple squares. I thought that would look kind of cool, that black would be too stark. But Mitchell informed me he hated purple, so there wasn’t going to be any purple on that set.
JOE O’CONNOR: Mitchell hated the color purple.
LISA LEDERER: That was absolutely a rule: We couldn’t use purple. At the very end of the first meeting, Mitchell said there’s only one criterion when you go to shop the show: No purple. I looked at him and went, “You’re kidding, right?” I mean, seriously, I can’t dress a teenage girl in purple? It was a very big deal. There could be no purple in his office; there could be no purple on the show. He didn’t even like it when people wore purple.
GEOFFREY DARBY: I don’t remember Mitchell’s anti-purple mandate, but I had an anti-green mandate. We couldn’t have green walls or people wearing green. One: Green slime doesn’t show up very well on green. Two: In the NTSC television system, when you’re wearing green, it changes the color of your skin tone. It’s math. I had to explain all this stuff!
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: The anti-purple origin is completely arbitrary and methodical. Clarissa is the first big show that I ever ran. And I had this advice from an old pro in the business who said, “The first thing you do when you go down there, come up with something arbitrary that everybody’s gotta do and stick to it and never explain it.” Stick to it and never explain it and that way you’ll prove that you’ve got the balls to run the show and they’ll all have to just mentally give in to you. He goes unnamed. So I go down there and it was in the back of my mind, but I knew I had to assert myself. And we’re in wardrobe and I actually had an idea about wardrobe, which is that, because I wanted the show to appeal so fervently to girls and boys—which was a big breakthrough—I wanted her to wear pink and blue, and that was the balance of her wardrobe. And in the set, I wanted it to be pink and blue. So I decided that purple would ruin that, so I just said, “No purple in the clothes,” and then Lisa Lederer would say, “Why?” And I said, “It doesn’t matter. No purple.” And in the set design I would say, “No purple.” And so then it grew, right? Inside I was laughing a little bit; it was a weird little thing. And by the way, Lisa snuck in a bunch of purple plenty of times.
BYRON TAYLOR: Of all the people I’d ever worked with up to that point, I’d never had anybody say something as crazy as that. Ultimately, there was an art director who came in to direct the rest of the series; I had very little contact with it after that.
GEOFFREY DARBY: Mitchell taught Byron how to create a sitcom set. Where the staircases go and that kind of thing. Mitchell dragged, kicking and screaming, a lot of the people in Florida into how to make a sitcom.
MARK SCHULTZ: The engineering department had a lot of trouble with Mitchell because they’d break their backs to make something work and he was very critical. He didn’t have any technical knowledge, and yet he treated those people very poorly.
DAVID ELLIS: One alteration I made was that with Sam coming through the window later in the first season, I realized we had to do something more elaborate with the outside of that window. Before, it just looked like the house was sitting on top of a cliff. So we did some model homes outside with some branches and things to give it a little more respectability.
BUDDY SHEFFIELD: Because we had a small budget on Roundhouse, we decided to use that to our advantage. The idea was to strip it down to what’s essential. We didn’t depend on things like scenery or makeup or that kind of thing, because we felt that didn’t add a whole lot to the comedy.
BYRON TAYLOR: For whatever reason, they wanted a turntable that would have scenery on it, like a Broadway set that would revolve. It seemed like an interesting conceit, but technically difficult and tremendously expensive. That also ran counter to what they were trying to do. Roundhouse was basically going to be like In Living Color for the Nickelodeon crowd. It seemed more fun for me to approach it in a scaled-down way, where the sets would be more “schematic.” You were always aware of the environment, wherever you were: You were always in the roundhouse, basically. Then there was the aesthetic of dumpster-diving, because those would be laying around in a roundhouse. Not that the set would be made out of junk . . . but that’s what i
t wound up looking like.
BUDDY SHEFFIELD: The original idea was that the set was an abandoned roundhouse that these kids had come to in order to take it over and do a show. I don’t know if that ever came across. In the initial opening, we played that out, but later on it wasn’t as important.
TIM BARTELL: I pretty much took Byron’s design and engineered it and drew it up for the Aggro Crag on GUTS. I would say it probably took about twenty people and about one month to build it. One of the challenges was we had to build it in such a way that it could be taken apart, stored, and rebuilt later. So we ended up building a substructure out of speed rail and foam and latex—a lot of foam—and created little areas with that structure here or there that would plop on the mountain. It was the extra “skin” of it. That allowed us to crawl up inside of it and work on the electronics and gags.
MARK SCHULTZ: We had elaborate harnesses of cable on the underside of the GUTS mountain that ran all these actuator infrared beams through activators, much like when you walk into a grocery store and the door opens for you. This would all be run to the MIDI sampler. So if a kid interrupted a laser beam and it triggered a bunch of Styrofoam boulders, I would have an earthquake sound effect that the kid would trigger, and the MIDI sampler would play the effect live on the air.
ALBIE HECHT: Then we did the pilot and we said we’re going to have a place that becomes a character in the show. That became the Extreme Arena, which Byron created beautifully. For the endgame, we came up with the biggest challenge we could. Magda Liolis was an athlete, and she hooked up this idea for “crag” and mountain climbing. She came up with that term: Aggro Crag. Kids still e-mail Mike O’Malley and me looking for a piece of it!
JAMES BETHEA: The Video Zone answered the question of “couch potato” problems involving kids playing video games on Nick Arcade. It was very physical. Watching executives and other adults who would come to try it out was hilarious.
ANDY BAMBERGER: It’s very disorienting. If you went left, on the camera you’d be going right. What you’re viewing is the opposite of what you’re doing.
KARIM MITEFF: We had to give kids time to adjust, because it was such a new thing. About one in eight kids didn’t get it. They had difficulty with the physicality of it.
ANDREA LIVELY: You had to be really coordinated. We were allowed to do it, but a lot of us felt like such fools because it was tricky and hard.
JAMES BETHEA: Nobody was funnier than Karim, because he would kind of lose himself, grunting and talking to himself and to the objects and the screen. He would take it so seriously, like we had dropped him in a war zone.
HARVEY: On Double Dare, the place would be going ape-shit with so many moving parts and a lot of kinetic energy at work, and Dana Calderwood was always so calm. I never saw him flustered. There was something almost like a Zen Yoda character to him.
DANA CALDERWOOD: Double Dare was live-to-tape. In other words, it never went into an edit room to piece it together after we shot it. It literally came to thirty minutes exactly. We wouldn’t stop for commercial breaks. We would actually lay down two-minutes-and-two-second holes on the videotape, which later became a commercial. When we delivered the show, it was completely done and edited. Occasionally, we would “pick up” or redo a shot, but there wasn’t anything that happened that you didn’t see on the show.
BRUCE GOWERS: Because Roundhouse was live-to-tape, that’s where the speed came in. Obviously, if something went wrong, we’d stop; but it very rarely would. The viewer could watch as the kids were even involved in the scenery changes to make it run faster and more smoothly. Roundhouse was totally continuous. There weren’t any stopped tapes like there were on so many other comedy shows.
ALAN GOODMAN: Clarissa broke a lot of rules in terms of typical sitcom presentations. It wasn’t the first series where the actor comes out of the show and talks to the camera, but it was the first one for kids that did that.
SARAH CONDON: Part of what Mitchell was trying to do, honestly, was having some fun with the graphics and the way we shot her. A really “cable” version of a girl show. Like being a little more creative in terms of breaking the fourth wall.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: I don’t really think about it as “breaking the fourth wall” when characters do it on TV. In my mind, TV doesn’t have one at all. When you’re watching the news and they’re talking to the camera, they’re not really breaking the fourth wall. And I loved Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. So that was definitely an influence. I had specific rules on how she would talk to you like you were in the room with her.
CHUCK VINSON: I spent hours talking to Mitchell about how Clarissa would break the fourth wall. There was a whole big formula. And it was quite wonderful: Once we got into that formula, we never really stepped over those boundaries.
LISA LEDERER: I was very immersed in the Downtown scene in New York. That whole rock-and-roll punk scene was about redefining the way we looked at what we found attractive and interesting. The people I was hanging out with, we were going out to art shows for Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, and in some ways that informed what I personally did on Clarissa in a positive way, because it drew from experiences that other people might not have had. I used to ride the subways, and they were always this great mash-up of kids from different boroughs and different backgrounds, different ethnicities, bringing that whole beautiful panoply of visuals to bear on a train. I paid really close attention to what the kids were wearing. It was visually interesting and somehow familiar . . . yet it didn’t look like everything else on TV.
KATHERINE DIECKMANN: From the beginning, Pete & Pete was all about this melancholy and emotionality of childhood as much as it was absurdist. We sort of took that approach to talking about childhood, which was not sentimental and not corny and not obvious. It was more about the strange things that happen in childhood and how truthful those are. Put that into our Downtown New York shared sensibility, and that’s really what Pete & Pete was.
WILL MCROBB: We really got off on putting together ideas that were on the surreal side of things. The ringing phone episode—that Nickelodeon wasn’t too crazy about—was “let’s do a story about a phone that nobody ever picked up.” Or the summer vacation where nobody knows the identity of the guy who brings them ice cream every year: an emotionally traumatized story about a guy who can’t handle intimacy . . .
JOE STILLMAN: Or the idea of finding the same inspector inspecting your clothes throughout your life. We would try to find subject matter that would do two things: be relevant to a kid . . . but with a twist. It wasn’t like, “Yeah, you lost your first tooth.” It was something you couldn’t find anywhere else.
WILL MCROBB: But we never wanted to be weird for weird-sakes. We were always hopeful we could make it organic. And I think coming from a kids’ perspective made it easy.
ADAM REID: You Can’t Do That on Television was a world where the adults were being outsmarted by the kids. The dad was a drunken politician. The mom was a blithering idiot who never took off her dish gloves. The adults were definitely not equal to the kids.
JUSTIN CAMMY: Not only was the dad a drunk, but he was a politician! Senator Prevert, which is a takedown on politicians. And Barth’s Burger was a critique on the fast-food industry at a time when the organic food and vegetarian movement was spreading. You could go on and on!
JOSH MORRIS: Fart jokes are one thing, but Barth’s Burgers is something you wouldn’t be able to get away with today. They had jokes about cutting human meat into burgers. That’s dark! That’s Sweeney Todd!
RON OLIVER: There’s a really powerful element, the idea of abandonment by one’s parents, that we had in “The Tale of the Super Specs.” We already had the idea of the “faceless,” with those people in black hoods coming toward you, but then we had Sardo being the nice comic foil . . . until he feels like he’s out of control. He’s the only adult, it seems, and even he’s lost control by the end.
ABBY HAGYARD: Barth, the Principal, Mom and Dad, the Librarian—all the adults were just weird. The house was just weird. The school, the world they inhabited was weird. That’s what that show was all about. Kids are fine; it’s the rest of the world that’s messed up.
JOSH MORRIS: It was very fresh—you’d never had a fart joke on kids’ TV before. Ever. Dark parents. Dark themes. That’s what Roger brought with him from England. And Geoffrey brought it to America, and it was very fresh. What kind of dark parents and dark kids were ever reflected anywhere except for maybe Mark Twain before that? Nothing, but in Britain, it’s their fodder for humor.
ROGER PRICE: I assume the Monty Pythons were imprisoned in similar establishments as I when they were younger. You need a quirky sense of humor to survive being British.
CHRISTINE MCGLADE: We got a big kick out of really showing things from a quirky kid’s-eye view of the world.
GABOR CSUPO: Nickelodeon wanted something different, something unique. And we were a studio that was known for doing these kinds of things, like when we were doing The Simpsons with all the colors in little different ways you hadn’t seen before.
VANESSA COFFEY: I had said to Gabor, “I don’t want realistic-looking characters. But I don’t want them to look like nonhumans either.” We went back and forth on design. Arlene Klasky’s a graphic designer, but I don’t believe she had anything to do with that.
CRAIG BARTLETT: Sure, the design for Angelica’s doll Cynthia is kind of scary. But that whole series is kind of scary if you really look at it. Everyone was weird. The designs are extreme. Especially when you consider it arrived on the cartoon landscape. The edge we had was when you turned on those shows, they didn’t look like anything else that was on TV.
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 10