LINDA SIMENSKY: Kids are more open-minded than adults are when it comes to that kind of thing. The joy of the pilot was its unique look that was very Eastern European–looking with a little anime mixed in, and putting that in front of kids.
PETER CHUNG: I was into Japanese animators at the time—Osamu Dezaki, Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri—and they had made a big impression on me. What I admired about them was they treated animation as filmmaking, not as cartoons. I did apply some of that to the Rugrats pilot in the sense that I tried to give the world of the babies a little bit of ominousness. They’re very small and everything is intimidating.
NORTON VIRGIEN: Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson—two of Disney’s greatest animators and mentors to many in my generation—came around to see the pilot with a few of us. When the lights came up, they both seemed in shock. Trying hard to be polite, they nonetheless tried to talk some sense into us: “Do you really think that audiences will be able to connect to characters that don’t have . . . appeal?”
MELANIE CHARTOFF: It was rather thrilling hearing my character's voice emanating from this wild-looking creature when I was invited to see the pilot at Klasky-Csupo a year after we’d recorded it. What a trip!
PETER CHUNG: They’ve become popular, so people have learned to accept it. But before that time, there were no characters that looked like that.
VANESSA COFFEY: Peter Chung directed the pilot and set the tone for our show and how it was going to work. I wish we could have had Peter do our whole series, but he gets bored. He wanted to do something else.
PETER CHUNG: They asked me to stay on and direct more episodes, but by that time, I knew I was going to do Aeon Flux, so I couldn’t commit to Rugrats. I think I was working on Aeon Flux while I was working on the title sequence for Rugrats.
CHUCK SWENSON: Everybody really liked what Peter did—he’s a consummate draftsman, and if you follow animation, you can see his style with the really wide-angle shots that are really distorted—but it was difficult to maintain that quality. The pilot Peter did was pretty much all action. There were just a few short lines of dialogue at the end, a little bit of setup dialogue. The show became much more verbal, which helped in terms of production because it was just talking heads. Easy to animate, easy to cut . . .
HOWARD BAKER: That was a shame, because I thought the show did lose its special point of view and just became about talking babies.
CRAIG BARTLETT: Really, what we had was the legacy of Peter’s design. It guaranteed the show was going to be weird-looking for its entire run. Peter Chung was kind of extreme. He wasn’t that interested in stories. He was interested in visuals . . . and, essentially, the strangeness of childhood. If it had been more Peter’s show, it would have been a stranger and more alienating show than it really was.
PETER CHUNG: I always felt growing up as a baby that I was an alien in a world that didn’t understand me.
JOE ANSOLABEHERE: Peter is a fascinating guy who I’ve grown fonder of in other circumstances. But at the time, I was like, “Who the hell is this guy?” Here was this weird Asian guy sitting there and all this shit’s happening—all the writers are coming in, people are coming to pitch new stories and stuff—and he’s sitting there just staring and drawing and not very polite. You’d say, “Hi, Peter.” Nothing. He wouldn’t even say hello to you. At one point, we were all sharing this new phone and I’d get back to my office and there’d be a Post-It from Peter, and it would say, You got a phone call—Peter. And I’d go out and he’s drawing and I’d say, “Peter, who was it?” “I don’t know.” Are you doing this to torment me? Do you hate me? Or are you just so focused? And I don’t really know the answer, by the way.
PAUL GERMAIN: Peter Chung doesn’t talk a lot. I used to find him sleeping under his animation desk because he was so dedicated. He’s a nutty and brilliant guy, and his animation is some of the most beautiful stuff I’ve ever seen.
PETER CHUNG: I don’t know how to work any other way. Because I’m not efficient, I end up spending more time on something than somebody else would. I’m constantly trying to challenge myself and do stuff I don’t know how to do. That’s how you learn. It just required a lot of trial and error. One of the problems I had was working with a bunch of animators I’d never worked with before. Scenes would come back from animators who were freelancing—most of them—and I’d have to redo them myself. It seemed like a waste of time to give them back to the animators, because they were just going to come back wrong again.
PAUL GERMAIN: Peter does things with perspectives I’ve only seen done with computers.
PETER CHUNG: A lot of animators tend to focus on character performance. I was always more conscious of how to use the camera. I’d been making animated films since I was sixteen in high school, and one of the first things I taught myself to do was animating the moving camera. Part of that was because, at the time, I didn’t have any camera equipment. So I didn’t have the ability to pan or zoom or anything. I would actually animate the camera moves right into the drawings. I felt very comfortable about doing that, and it’s always appealed to me. I consider the camera a character in a sense.
MARY HARRINGTON: One of the great things about Rugrats was that it looked at the world through a baby’s eyes. You’d open up on something and say, “What’s that?” and you wouldn’t quite know what it was until it came into context.
PETER CHUNG: Rugrats was going to be seen from a baby’s point of view. They really wanted to have a different and distinctive style of camera that went with that. You weren’t just looking at babies. You were becoming a baby yourself, seeing the world through the eyes of a baby.
PAUL GERMAIN: The show went a long way from Peter Chung’s direction on the pilot, but in that he had been doing these shots from inside the character’s mouth looking out. You can see their little half-teeth moving around. Peter invented that shot—a point of view from inside someone’s mouth.
PETER CHUNG: The shot of the mouth came from the design of the characters showing these huge mouths and these tiny little teeth. That was one of the distinguishing features about these babies. Phil is making fun of Lil, and at first I drew Lil very small in the frame, then Phil very large. It’s like we’re looking at Lil through a wide-angle lens. The next stage, Phil is so big that he fills the entire screen. We’re in his mouth, literally. And Lil is just a little head off in the distance. Inside his mouth. It wasn’t gratuitous; the idea was to convey a sense of domineering.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: You can’t shoot from the inside of somebody’s mouth. Theoretically, it didn’t make any sense. But Nicktoons was willing not to make sense. They took that leap.
LINDA SIMENSKY: Nick liked that rebel quality, and they were drawn to the fact that John Kricfalusi was rebelling against the industry. Ren & Stimpy was far enough from the mainstream that they’d be able to work with him.
JOHN KRICFALUSI: I am completely mainstream and was just following in the footsteps of classic cartoons, movies, and television sitcoms. Still am. Almost all of my influences are very mainstream popular culture. I was not a fan of hippie cartooning, although I share some influences with some underground cartoonists.
THOMAS MINTON: John’s approach might be termed “early 1950s . . . with balls.”
JOHN KRICFALUSI: It took me a long time to instill a regard for more inventive color choices in my background artists. I kept showing them old magazine and book illustrations and Technicolor movies to prove that there were more than six colors in the world. We also used Golden Books from the fifties and sixties as a painting reference.
BILL WRAY: We were looking at everything that we grew up with. Hanna-Barbera, Disney . . . all these childhood things. In particular, John was like, “I want to do this like a Golden Book.”
RAYMOND ZIBACH: John and Bill were very precise about what they were trying to do. There was actually a time when the reference John wanted us to emulate was a marble wall in a Pen
thouse spread. I knew I was working on something special when I took that home to do a painting.
CHRIS RECCARDI: I met John when he was transitioning from the 1950s Hanna-Barbera style, which was very uniquely combined with Bob Clampett animation from the 1930s and 1940s. He had been taking this classical, well-constructed stuff and really pushed it. He was still at the time very into mid-century modern art and design. Then when I saw Ren & Stimpy, it was completely different. It was like somebody had slipped him a tab of acid or something.
JIM GOMEZ: People were saying, “Oh man, were you guys on acid?” I mean, we took acid, but we weren’t working on acid. A lot of the creation for this content was done over beers, sitting around with John and a few people in college and down here in LA. But in terms of production, it’s very hard to write or draw when you’re stoned.
JOHN KRICFALUSI: One of my story guys liked to come into work stoned on pot. He thought it made him funnier, but it just made him stupid. I’m not into drugs. Tried ’em in high school, but never was much of a hippie. Beer is better for you.
CHRIS RECCARDI: I had no idea what they were doing at first. I saw the pilot and thought, “Man! That’s whacked out!” It was really fun to watch stoned.
EDDIE FITZGERALD: At the time, just John’s drawing style was seen as a slap in the face of traditional animation.
FRED NEWMAN: With the little squiggly lines on Doug, they’re very thin. They have that sort of naïveté about them. And I just understood that. Some of it was Southern: a kinder, gentler feeling that we had even in the midst of New York City.
TONY EASTMAN: Blechman at the Ink Tank where Jim Jinkins and I worked before Doug was famous for his squiggles. Jim liked Blechman’s style, so he was doing this nervous outline thing with the original drawings of Doug. We decided to change, because depending on who’s doing it, it’s gonna be, like, all over the map; it’s never gonna be consistent. So we made it solid lines.
YVETTE KAPLAN: Jim Jinkins is an illustrator and not an animator, so his initial drawings were a little bit more of a wiggly line. They needed to be smoothed out a little, unfortunately, and look like something that could be produced by many hands.
BRYAN SPICER: They wanted young, hip directors that were bringing a style, a vision to Salute Your Shorts. It was nice. A lot of shows don’t want that. They want you to stick to their format. This show didn’t have a format. They just wanted the filmmakers to create something new.
COURTNEY CONTE: We approached Bryan because we saw a tape of his where on Parker Lewis Can’t Lose he did this wonderful camera shot of a guitar going down a wire from the school. Something like that. It was a really unique camera shot.
KATHERINE DIECKMANN: The reason I got the job on Pete & Pete was because of my storyboard drawing of Mom’s face when a wooden spoon covered in chocolate hit the floor. They loved that. They thought that was the total “Pete” approach to storytelling.
MICHAEL SPILLER: There were dolly shots, specialty shots, we’d rig things . . . We tried to do little crane shots, and I had a little jib arm so we could add a little movement. From the perspective of an adult, everything’s a blip that’ll be forgotten tomorrow. But to a kid, everything is so big, and we wanted to fill these stories with big energy.
JOHN INWOOD: When Michael Spiller was moving on, he showed me the beauty of the mini-jib arm, which he’d use a lot when we needed a dolly move. We could skip laying down track and use the mini-jib arm instead to get the push-in we needed. Low to high, high to low, a quick pullout. That, in conjunction with the wide-angle lens, gave us some visual flare.
MICHAEL SPILLER: In “Range Boy,” directed by Chris Koch, we had a lot of great shots because the camera was so small and light. It was mine and I could be rough with it. One time, I was strapped on the front of a golf cart and we’d built chicken wire up to protect me and the camera, and these guys were firing off live drives. One ball bounced under the net and ricocheted inside the cage. Somehow it didn’t hit my head or the camera. Or there was the time I was strapped to the hood of the car on “King of the Road.” It was a little hairy.
FRED KELLER: The production company, Cinetel, wanted to give an authentic look to the dude ranch on Hey Dude. Ross Bagwell Sr. told me, “Don’t forget, we want the big sky look.” Part of this was Ross had been involved with some of the early Roy Rogers movies. He had a real sense of efficiency of production and getting that western look. He wanted to do the thing in Arizona at the Tanque Verde Dude Ranch, which is one of the biggest and most successful dude ranches in the West. It was a beautiful place in Tucson, supposedly not too far from a corral that Geronimo’s mother owned back in the Wild West days. It was all very authentic.
GEOFFREY DARBY: I wanted to not do this in a studio. I wanted to do it out somewhere, because it’s a lot cheaper! Again, I was very famous for saying I wanted to do it inexpensively and put the value on the screen.
CHARLES S. DUTTON: Without a doubt, Are You Afraid of the Dark? was very, very, very well produced. It wasn’t like anything you would see on Saturday morning: those rather inexpensive kinds of halfhearted children’s programs. I never looked at it as a kids’ show. I didn’t leave there thinking we had done anything amateurish. I looked at it as if we were doing a small movie.
COURTNEY CONTE: We were doing a half-hour film every week on Salute Your Shorts, for all intents and purposes. Steve Slavkin had the directors push it in terms of directorial style.
BRYAN SPICER: Most sitcoms back then were three cameras and very stage-looking. They wanted Salute Your Shorts to be a one-camera film show, where you can make the shows more dynamic.
STEVE SLAVKIN: We wanted to bring film techniques to kids’ television. It was a single-camera show that was shot on video and put through the film-look process to give kids mini-movies about summer camp that were scored from beginning to end. We gave them a whole new look they’d never had before.
VENUS DEMILO: We shot at the boys’ camp of Camp Hollywood. And I had actually gone to their girls’ camp. So I totally identified with that. That drew me to the project more than other people, maybe. The cool thing was we’d go to the bat caves—where they shot the original Batman—and I had already been there. That feeling of familiarity with the location—it was like camping when we were doing the show.
COURTNEY CONTE: We were lucky no one else was filming there. We got the whole place for $500 a day or something, which is nothing. We were doing a very high production value for very little money. We were doing the show for $180,000 an episode, which is absolutely no money for a five-day shoot. That’s what I used to spend on craft service for Roseanne.
ALISON FANELLI: In the beginning, when they were instructing us on wardrobe—Pete & Pete was a really low-budget show—we had to wear a lot of our own clothes. You couldn’t wear anything too trendy—a lot of denim and white shirts and things that were really run-of-the-mill. And we couldn’t identify the state or town we were in. It was meant to be Anywhereville in the country. Even Pete wearing the flannel—it wasn’t that Little Pete was “Grunge”-y. He was just a kid who had to cover up his tattoo.
JANIE BRYANT: In designing Pete & Pete, I always loved using vintage pieces, because I felt it was a great way to express these characters who were so quirky. The show is about this special world, this special neighborhood. And using those accents of vintage pieces combined with contemporary clothing made the show look incredibly special. It almost has a Wes Anderson aesthetic to it. Maybe Wes Anderson was influenced by Pete & Pete . . .
DAVE MARTEL: There’s definitely something to be said about Pete & Pete creating hipsters.
RICK GOMEZ: I wore patent leather shoes and pencil pants and track jackets. It was like some thrift store from New York City exploded on the set of Pete & Pete.
JANIE BRYANT: I love Rick Gomez. I always put him in white loafers.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: I guess maybe the only hipstery thing would be the flann
el, but people have been wearing flannel shirts for forever. Then a musician puts it on and people think it needs a title. I just thought it was really fun. Janie Bryant was responsible for a lot of the costumes then. Now she’s the costume designer for Mad Men.
WILL MCROBB: We were trying to create a timeless universe that was anybody’s childhood. That hat was really more about Holden Caulfield than Grunge. You could definitely make the case it was the hipster precursor, but we never intended it to be that. And once Grunge took hold, I never for a second thought there was any connection. It’s a little like the myth that Hunter S. Thompson was on an episode of Pete & Pete. Little Pete wore plaid shirts, that’s for sure. Outside of that, I don’t think there’s anything you could point to that said “cultural marker.”
JANIE BRYANT: Pete and Pete were these kids who were dressing like adults. I always felt like they both had a mature sensibility. That’s the beginning of the inspiration. I live in Silver Lake and it’s true: All hipsters look like characters from Pete & Pete!
JOHN CRANE: I just wanted to not look too fat. The dancers—Ivan, David, Mark—they were more conscious of what they were wearing. I did care somewhat, but they generally weren’t putting me in crazy stuff. My background was middle-class—I’m not a dancer; I was a comedian, married—and was a little less wild. My character was that way, too. A dancer’s world is a little more trendy than mine. I look back at the episodes and some of the things the girls were wearing—good lord!
DIZ MCNALLY: I loved all the clothes and the fashion and the makeup. Purple cheeks, blue eye shadow . . . it was fabulous! All the clothes you see me wearing on Out of Control are my own clothes. I did my own makeup, which was a lot. The only thing they had to rent was a nun’s outfit. I still wear the little purple shirt. The 1980s checkered shirt, one of my favorite outfits to this day!
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 11