Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (10 page)

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. There’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.

MICHAEL BOWER:
There’s a rubber chicken in every episode of
Salute Your Shorts
with a cigarette in its mouth. I don’t believe it was in
every
episode—depending on editing, it might not have made it into the cut—but it’s definitely in a few episodes.

BLAKE SENNETT:
Danny was a huge Zappa fan. He introduced
me
to Zappa. There was some Zappa chicken business—a rubber chicken reference on one of those records. So that’s where the rubber chicken came from.

VENUS DEMILO:
It was more of a crew thing. And people would put clothespins on your shirt.

MARK SCHULTZ:
At Nick, we constantly carried fistfuls of clothespins, and when someone wasn’t looking, we’d “clip” them. A typical clip job was getting one on somebody’s collar.

KEN SCARBOROUGH:
The one question I get asked is, “Did you ever put something dirty in there?” Why would I do that? What is the upside of hiding dirty things for children to find in there? In the first place, it’s just a gross and weird thing for anybody to do. And secondly, moms are always eagle-eyes and you get those crazy letters from somebody who sees something in the background that isn’t there. On Doug’s wall, we had a poster that said
I “HEART” TOFU
because of the song “Killer Tofu.” And we got a letter from a mom asking us why Doug had a poster on his wall that said
I “HEART” F-U
!

CHUCK SWENSON:
It wasn’t a straight-on shit joke, but there was something they wanted to do on
Rugrats
about an enema once. It was a show called “Grey Gardens,” and there were two little old ladies—a play on the documentary of the same name—and one of them thought one of the babies should have a high colonic. Arlene Klasky just thought that was over the kids’ heads and inappropriate as well.

MARY HARRINGTON:
Vanessa Coffey and I were reviewing a storyboard for
Ren & Stimpy
and it was a holiday episode. There were dingleberries in it. We thought they were
holly
berries. I had
no idea
up to that point what a dingleberry was. I thought it was a Christmas berry. And so did Vanessa! Somebody caught it in Standards.

BOB CAMP:
We sometimes got dumb notes from Standards and Practices, but that’s normal. On “Prehistoric Stimpy,” we got a note to please remove the marijuana plants from the backgrounds. They were ferns. I called the head of the network and asked if the Standards lady was retarded.

BILLY WEST:
There were people at Standards and Practices who would see these bikini-clad babes that were drawn and someone there said, “Why does it always have to be women in bathing suits?” So whenever the situation would present itself, the artists drew men. Big, model-looking men with abnormally muscled bodies and bow ties like Chippendales dancers. And then those same Standards and Practices people came out of their coma when they realized what the animators were making fun of.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
Animators are not saints. Go to any animation studio—Disney or anyplace—and they all have sacrilegious and nasty things up.

MELANIE CHARTOFF:
What a different world it was one floor away from the writers and actors. There were all these young artists making faces at themselves in the mirror, trying to capture accurate muscle moves as they drew our characters. I was invited into the men’s room to see the S&M drawings of Didi inside all the stalls. They had her decked out in leather, with whips and chains: the whole dominatrix regalia. Shocking!

TIM LAGASSE:
Because you’re so restricted to what you can say and do on a kids’ show, the outtake reels are . . .
filthy
.
Sesame Street
,
The Electric Company
,
Between the Lions
. They’re reels I can’t show
anyone
! I’ll bring them out at a party and go, “I will play this
once
. You cannot have a copy, and I will
never
play it again. Pay attention.” Puppets beating each other up with baseball bats, puppets fucking, Big Bird’s filthy swearing at people . . . You have to do those kinds of things to get it out of your system.