GEOFFREY DARBY: I wasn’t there on Hey Dude for the “tequila story.” There’s a different story for why I stopped drinking . . .
GRAHAM YOST: We had one night when it got really stupid and we decided to play indoor mini-golf. From Dave Brisbin’s room to Alan Goodman’s room at the Ramada. Whoever sank a putt had to drink a shot of tequila. We got absurdly drunk and then had a script read-through at ten the next morning. The three of us were so hungover and were looking at each other saying, “We are the stupidest people in the world.”
ERIK MACARTHUR: I thought Salute Your Shorts was cool, and we had a good time. But the people running it were a little bit crazy and it was a little bit nuts. This was a time when there was a lot of coke going around. It tells you what that time was in the nineties. People walking around with big block cell phones, playing it up Hollywood-style and stuff. But we had a blast.
MICHAEL BOWER: There was drug use on the set. Not from the cast—just some of the older people. I don’t really appreciate that. I have an alcoholic brother—he’s changed his life for the better now—but it was something that crept its way into the show. It was sad to see, but you can’t control everybody.
TREVOR EYSTER: I didn’t even know about it until I got filled in a little later on. None of it was of such use that it put anyone at risk. I have nothing but amazing things to say about the crew.
COURTNEY CONTE: I don’t remember any of that. Not that I recall. I’m sure they had beer and stuff, but I don’t remember drugs.
KIRK BAILY: I never once saw that on set. It might have been kept from me, but I never saw it. We made one or two trips to Vegas—the crew—when we needed a break from this inane and hilarious show, but it wasn’t outrageous partying. It was just hanging out together.
KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: There was a time when Roger Price called an impromptu meeting of the crew, and being the protective—and maybe a little crazy—guy he was, he brought a gun to the meeting, announcing that if anyone tried to give or sell drugs to any of the kids on the show, he would kill them. There was, of course, less laughter in the studio that day.
BLAKE SENNETT: I don’t want to say Salute Your Shorts felt less professional, because that sounds negative and that’s not how I feel. But it felt like summer camp. It was laid-back. I got into that vibe, and I was showing up half an hour late every single day. Eventually, Courtney Conte called me into his office and basically said, “You can’t be late anymore.” I was taken aback. I thought the vibe was so chill! “We’re just riding the wind, man!”
DAVE RHODEN: You got to remember, here we are—these kids in ninth grade with a driver who’s assigned to us to take us out for meals and/or our own catering service, and an entire theme park that was our backyard to play in.
KENAN THOMPSON: All these free clothes and these access badges where we could sneak into Universal Studios. It was an “access granted” situation. That was some serious shit, you know what I’m sayin’?
DAVE RHODEN: Eventually you’re making more money than your schoolteacher. Teenagers are probably hard enough to raise, and then you throw in some extra benefits they’re not used to handling. We could all get a little cocky and arrogant.
ADAM WEISSMAN: Imagine you’re a substitute teacher in seventh or eighth grade. You have a classroom full of kids and you not only have to instantly become the leader of the group in a way that makes them engaged, but you also have to get them to do their jobs, and you have technical considerations, and limited hours because they’re minors and can only work a certain number of hours a day. It’s very challenging.
DAVE RHODEN: Something we didn’t catch right away was that every single thing we said was picked up by the boom mic, which means every director, producer, soundman, anybody listening, heard it. I think it was season two when Chris Lobban—who was always kind of a hothead—was kind of pissed off about the directing or something like that and was bitching about it behind the set one day between cuts. Somebody brought him aside and told him, “Hey, you gotta chill out, because everyone is listening to what you’re saying.”
MARK SCHULTZ: The adolescent ego can’t handle being corrected in front of their friends, certainly not in front of a live audience.
JASON ZIMBLER: Our show was hot. We led off Saturday Night Nick and were prime time. We were the top-rated show on the network. A lot of teenagers let me know that when I was out of the house and walking around the city. Those were fun times. We were swept up in that.
ERIK MACARTHUR: I definitely got a lot of girls because of Salute Your Shorts. It wasn’t a popular show, but it was later on when it paid off. Fans who were twenty-two. I was better-looking at fourteen.
SEAN O’NEAL: When I finished the show, I was sixteen and had friends that had been involved in “extracurricular activities,” let’s call them. I jumped into what I wanted to do instead of what I should have been doing, because I wasn’t on a schedule at that point. Most of my friends did use it to pick up girls, rather than me. I never even had to worry about it. My friends would always bring the girls around, because they were always talking about me. It was hilarious. I was grateful that Clarissa came along.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: The level of facility at which Melissa had to perform, her endurance, was amazing. She was never cranky. I had to be sensitive to whether she’d be tired. And my heart always went out to her for her good nature.
JOE O’CONNOR: I got a little concerned sometimes that they were working her a little too hard. One time they brought her in even though she had a really bad cold. I said, “What are you doing here?” And she goes, “I told them I wanted to come to work.” Well, I went upstairs and just yelled at those guys. I was so pissed off. I lost my temper and shouldn’t have, but she’s a little girl and she’s sick, and should have been home.
ALISON FANELLI: I got the flu on “Yellow Fever,” and we were right in the middle of shooting. I just went down. Quick, raging fever. So on that episode, there’s a lot of shots where Ellen would have been sitting on the bus and they just had to position other characters or extras around the seat so you don’t notice Ellen’s not there. There was a scene where we were getting on the bus and I know I’m sick when I see it, because when I turn to look at Pete, I had that stiff neck.
TIM LAGASSE: The tough thing about working in children’s television is what you’re not allowed to do. In Allegra’s Window, I played a baker called Mr. Cook . . . and we couldn’t show a stove. They didn’t want children getting used to being near a stove. My set was a kitchen. But we couldn’t have a stove in it.
D.J. MACHALE: We did ninety-one episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark? and there were ninety-one campfires. And you never saw anyone actually strike a match to light that fire, because they didn’t want to teach kids how to strike matches. They were afraid someone would burn their house down or something like that. So the campfire was already lit when they showed up.
JASON ALISHARAN: That’s definitely true, especially because by the end of season one, the trees on the set were dying and they’d have to spray-paint them.
JOANNA GARCIA: I was kind of intrigued by the way the fairy dust we threw into the fire to make it flame was a combination of Carnation instant milk and glitter or something like that. I was also kind of grossed out because it got really sticky. I think it was a combination of all of our grimy paws in the little bag. And the heat.
D.J. MACHALE: It was Cremora, the nondairy creamer. It was petroleum-based, and actually burns. Then we also added some pyrotechnics to the fire itself.
JOANNA GARCIA: I trusted our prop guys. I felt we were in pretty good hands.
JASON ALISHARAN: Not that our production company, Cinar, would want me to remind them of this—what do they care, they’re bankrupt—but I think one season we were shooting in a warehouse with walls lined with asbestos. Probably not the best way to maintain a forest.
BYRON TAYLOR: Once MTV Networks saw Double Dare and knew what i
t was, there was a risk management guy who reviewed all the obstacles. I’m sure he was just aghast at what we were trying to do: Everybody should be in a helmet, and we needed padding on this and that . . . There was only so much of that we could do.
MARY HARRINGTON: The big Standards thing was imitable material. That was a tough one.
PAUL GERMAIN: Tommy was walking out onto a cleaning thing outside an office in a big tower, and Nick said, “You can’t do that.” Eric Clapton’s kid had just been killed, so people were really sensitive to that kind of danger. Interestingly, Nick almost never had notes for us. But Arlene Klasky did, and we’d have conflicts. She was always saying kids shouldn’t do this or kids should do that. And I was always arguing with her about it.
JOE ANSOLABEHERE: One time Arlene came back to me with a note saying I used the “s word.” “I did?” Turns out she meant “stupid.”
CRAIG BARTLETT: Nick wasn’t bothered by the fact that the parents on Rugrats kept leaving the kids alone so that we could start them talking. That could be seen as pretty reprehensible behavior on the parents’ part.
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: There was never a doubt the parents loved them. And twenty years ago, we were less paranoid than we are now about children being left alone. But the conceit of the show was that the “rugrats” lived in their own world. The parents might be sitting inside, and the kids are out in the backyard “on the moon.”
MARY HARRINGTON: They weren’t abandoning the babies. They were just always leaving them with Grandpa, who would always fall asleep. They were well intentioned. No babies got harmed in the making of Rugrats.
MELANIE CHARTOFF: It was comedy, folks. With a really clear statement of intentions for audiences hip enough to get it.
BYRON TAYLOR: I’m sure enough kids tried jumping off their roof with a cape because they watched Superman in the fifties. We did a thing on Double Dare where we had a stuffed cat that we swung by its tail and tried to get through a window, or some crazy stunt. But that never reappeared. There was a thing about feeding a baby—a realistic kind of doll that was splattered with food—and not only was it hard for Marc out there by himself judging these kinds of things, but it was also just a bad idea: kids throwing food at their younger siblings if they tried to re-create it at home with a real baby.
MARC SUMMERS: I used to have parents stop me and yell at me about, My kids ruined my living room! Or, They built an obstacle course and put coffee grounds on my carpet! My response to them was, “Be a parent. My job is to host TV shows. If you can’t rule your kids, that’s not my problem.”
ABBY HAGYARD: I guess I could say “self-righteous” people would come up and say, “I don’t approve of your show, you know.” Well, here’s a thought: Don’t watch it!
ARON TAGER: My son-in-law had a neighbor who was visiting with his kid, and the kid was really freaked out by me. He was too young. He shouldn’t have been watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? That was one thing I said later about that kind of thing: I blame the parents. You have to check in on those things once in a while. The kid was quite young. That was distressing.
BYRON TAYLOR: The big hope on Double Dare was that things wouldn’t break. That was always in the back of our minds. There were times when things did fail and we didn’t really expect it. The first time I saw something like that, we had a dad who did an old stunt, which was breaking eggs on his forehead. He was going so fast, he smashed the shell right into his forehead. He had a piece of shell embedded, and there was blood coming down.
BOB MITTENTHAL: Early on, one of the bleachers collapsed. I don’t think anyone was badly hurt.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: I don’t think the bleacher collapsed. I believe one of the arms came off the side of the bleacher and someone fell off. I don’t remember there being a lawsuit that came from it. I don’t remember giving testimony; that’s why I say that.
BOB MITTENTHAL: It just stands out as an accident you wouldn’t want to happen on your show. I understand the man had cut his penis. I’m sure he was fine. Probably got a nice gift out of it.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: I think in the five hundred episodes we did, only one kid ever broke his arm on the obstacle course. He lied on his form: He had broken that arm before.
MARC SUMMERS: The show never aired it. The kid lied on his application where it asked if they’d ever had any broken bones. The kid has glass bones. He had broken his arm, like, seven times. He slipped on the floor and his bone went right through his arm. I ran out of the studio.
DANA CALDERWOOD: Here’s this kid who knows he’s fragile but wants to be on Double Dare so much that he’s going to do it come hell or high water. We all admired him for doing it.
MARC SUMMERS: His father was a lawyer, and the kid had only gotten to, like, Obstacle Six based on the fact that he fell down this thing. The father came to me and said, “Large-screen TV for Obstacle Seven, or I could sue you. Which would you rather have?” We gave him the TV . . . and then screened every application after that. If anybody’s parent was a lawyer, we wouldn’t let them on the show.
HARVEY: No kid was ever a poor sport. And we’re talking hundreds and hundreds of kids. The only ones who were a pain in the ass were the parents.
MARC SUMMERS: In Family Double Dare, we had parents who would pin their kids up against the wall. “I needed that car and you screwed it up!” They’d grab the kid by the neck. We’d have to separate the parents from the kids.
HARVEY: A lot of stuff would get revealed there. We could really see sometimes what didn’t look like a good relationship. I’d feel bad for the kid, but of course there wasn’t anything we could do except try to make the kid feel better in that one moment.
MARC SUMMERS: We were out on the road one year in Philadelphia, and we used to pie the parents like crazy. If the parents weren’t hit in the face hard enough from my perspective, I would say, “That’s not how you do it! This is how you do it!” And I would really trash the parents. We do the show on Sunday, and by Wednesday I get the call from the Viacom attorneys: “Do you remember Philadelphia, when you threw a pie in a parent’s face? She’s suing because she said she can’t have sex anymore.” And I started to laugh my ass off. Seriously? They ended up giving her $25,000 to go away. Once you’re successful, people try to screw you.
DONNIE JEFFCOAT: We made it through sixty episodes of Wild & Crazy Kids pretty unscathed. It was when I did the traveling live shows with Marc Summers and Mike O’Malley that I started getting hurt. We’d be doing the slime and whipped cream stuff and they would be mopping up. I slipped a couple of times and fell straight on my back. One day in the middle of a sentence, I fell off a thirteen-foot drop into an orchestra pit, I think in Alaska. I couldn’t walk for several days.
SEAN O’NEAL: There was an episode of Clarissa where I fell off the window. But honestly, the toughest part was getting up. I had to lie on my back and wait for my cue, then time how long it took to get up. I had to hunch over my knees as I made my appearance.
ALISON FANELLI: I got to do my own stunts on Pete & Pete. I got strapped to a car in a bunny suit going thirty miles an hour.
MICHAEL BOWER: Every time we had a stunt or something like that, Kirk Baily would throw his whole body into it. He wouldn’t care. When we saw him really commit to everything, some of us decided to work harder, because that really came through.
KIRK BAILY: There was a scene with Christine Cavanaugh, who played Mona, and she’s in the boat and I make the decision to jump in after her. And I’m supposed to dive off the dock into what was two feet of muck water. I grew up a swimmer, so I know how to dive . . . and I remembered that my friend from high school had tucked his head and broken his neck in shallow water at a lake, so I turn my head to the right to make sure I wasn’t tucking my head. And my head hit the water so perfectly that I blew out my eardrum. They got me up and they said, “Are you okay?” I said I was okay, but my left ear started gushing blood. They took me to the hospital
, and I ended up having three surgeries to repair my eardrum. Which still isn’t working.
ROBIN RUSSO: On one of the road shows, Marc fell and he got hurt. He had to be taken out on a stretcher! Marc lost a little bit of hearing that day. He fell hard. I had to do the show myself, and it was funny because everyone thought my job was really easy and fun. It wasn’t that difficult, but I don’t think they realized until I had to step into Marc’s role and they had to step into mine how much it took for Marc and I to work together as a team.
MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: There was a scene with a bunch of us—the motley crew—walking to a fence. We’re supposed to drag because it was the hottest, longest day of the year. And there was a boy who had ADD and his parent didn’t watch him and he went and had like twenty sugar packets from the craft service table. When “action” was called, he got really upset because the director told us to go really, really slow. I was going slowly, and he shoved me down and ran to the fence because he was on a sugar high. I happened to fall on my knee and slice it open on a piece of glass that randomly was there. So I’ve always had a scar on my knee from that one day. I went to my school trailer, put a bunch of Band-Aids on it, and said, “We gotta finish the scene!” Finally, when we were done with the whole day, when I got into the car to go home at night, I burst out in tears: Oh my God, it hurts so much! That is one of my most vivid Pete & Pete memories, funnily enough.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: At the end of the show, kids would go up and hug Marc, and they were all messy. We always assumed he hated it because it meant he had to go and change outfits. We knew he was clean and neat, but never really put the OCD thing together with that.
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 18