Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (18 page)

MARK SCHULTZ:
I would go through hours of audience sounds, identifying a whole spray of laughs—applauses, remarks, individual people laughing . . . I filled up a sampler full of all my laugh recordings, and I had them hooked up with touch-sensitivity, so if I hit the keys harder, the laugh would be louder. And if I held the keys, the laughs would sustain. And I could overlay things. I could drop in a giggle or a single person. Sometimes jokes are aimed for guys and they’ll get it faster than a girl will. And sometimes girls will get a joke first. I matched the ambience; the audience recordings were from the same place we taped the shows, so they didn’t sound like they came out of a dead studio. I got to the point where I could make laugh tracks that didn’t sound like canned laughter at all, and I was very proud of it.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
I did not want a laugh track on
Clarissa
. It seemed so fantastic without one. But I lost.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
It
was
a sitcom, and I believe in laugh tracks. They’re cues. You can test shows with and without and they’ll do better with. Why didn’t we do it on
Salute Your Shorts
and
Hey Dude
? Because it’s unreal. It’s outside. Then it
feels
wrong. Whereas
Clarissa
was clearly a studio show. It could’ve been shot in front of a live audience.

MARK SCHULTZ:
I hate the laugh track on
Clarissa
. It’s one of the worst laugh tracks ever.

STEVE SLAVKIN:
Laugh tracks were at that point associated with multiple-camera sitcoms, so I didn’t want to try to break that mold in
Salute Your Shorts
. I have since done single-camera shows with laugh tracks, and sometimes it helps. Ultimately, I don’t know which is better or worse.

ELIZABETH HESS:
Oh, I could do without the laugh track. But because I didn’t grow up with TV, I didn’t know what the status quo was for sitcoms, and so I was like, “You know what? Whatever. If a laugh track is part of the deal, then so be it.”

BUDDY SHEFFIELD:
The laughter on
Roundhouse
was always real. We never sweetened anything or had fake laughter added to the show. It all happened on the set.

ED ALTON:
When there’s a live audience with a laugh track, the music takes a backseat. There’s less of it, and it’s used just to go from one scene to the next. But in a single-camera comedy, typically there’s a lot more, because there’s no audience.
Salute Your Shorts
was like that, so it left a lot of room for music.

PHIL MOORE:
Before shooting one day, a sound guy was doing a full studio audio check and they kept playing different music over and over. I never really paid attention to the song, because I always have a hundred other things on my mind. After hearing it so many times, it got in my head. When we brought out the first studio audience that day, the song popped on and I sang it the whole episode. Went to lunch, came back for another show, and I didn’t do the song. The executive producers and James Bethea came over to me and said, “What happened?” I had to think about it. What do you
mean
? I was just kinda goofing before, but they said they liked that. And it became a staple of the show. Literally, it was a fluke.

DAN VITCO:
He was trying to capture the attention of his audience, so I can respect what he was trying to do there.

MARK SCHULTZ:
Dan Vitco and I wrote the music for
Nick Arcade
, including “Mikey’s Walk,” which came from the
I Dream of Jeannie
theme song.

PHIL MOORE:
My son told me a PA friend of his said it’s a drinking game now, where every time I sing on
Nick Arcade
, someone takes a shot. That’s my legacy: The future of America is getting wasted thanks to my songs!

MARK MULCAHY:
How good a thing can be when the suits keep their hands off of it! That’s why that kind of thing survives. It’s someone’s vision. Nobody told them what to do and they made it and it still works because it makes sense. When something comes along at the right time and people want it, that’s the thing about pop culture. I always say that about Hootie and the Blowfish. You can’t blame
them
. They just did what they were doing and somehow at that moment, everyone wanted
that
. Fourteen million people bought that record. It’s not that good, but a lot of people were waiting for Hootie for some reason, and there it was. Kids wanted what we were and it came.

FRED SEIBERT:
The doo-wop sound we used to start the new Nick was almost the last piece of that communications puzzle that Alan and I brought to the table. We had two specific reasons for bringing those sounds. One: It’s the reason commercials use jingles, that movies use songs—it’s a seductive form of communication. And Alan and I really love black music of every kind. We grew up in the age of Civil Rights, thinking that black music was exotic but that it was more authentic than the other music that was around at the time. And we really believed it in our hearts—even though we used it as a sales pitch—that educating America’s youth with the sounds of black music was good for American culture. What was bad about that? It also reflected the right attitude—that fun attitude of Nick.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
So here’s the
non
-politically correct answer. The year is 1985. We were trying to reach our audience, which at that time—in the cable world of twelve million households—was maybe a few million kids. Upper-class white kids.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
Yes. We were interested in kids with cable.

GUS HAUSER:
The others didn’t get Nickelodeon. We were giving it to those who subscribed. Children who couldn’t afford cable were getting some children’s programming from PBS. Sure, it brings up issues of diversity and income level.

SCOTT WEBB:
We thought we
were
being diverse in our view of kids. From fat and skinny to stupid and smart. We saw that as diverse. I mean, I’m a blind guy, and people looked to me to help figure out the vision of Nickelodeon. So I think we were extremely tolerant. Any artist, any kind of contributor who was willing to show up and do their best work, was welcome at our table.

DEBBY BEECE:
There wasn’t a lot of talk about kids from East LA or Omaha. We just thought there was a lot more that kids had in common by just being kids. Sense of humor, wanting to play and have fun, needing a break, school, bullies, parents—all these things that weighed on kids. And we were going to be the place where they could relax and have fun without having to worry or think or be preached to.

JASON ZIMBLER:
Clarissa
was set in the Midwest and the Midwest is pretty white, right?

JUDY GRAFE:
We did have an African-American boy or girl as part of the group on
Pete & Pete
every now and then. I wish maybe we could have had more diversity, but it would not have belonged there at the time of shooting. We were shooting in New Jersey and in a neighborhood that looked like that. At the time, it was appropriate. Same as on
Sanford and Son
. That was a guy with a junk shop in that particular neighborhood. Why would they have a whole lot of Caucasian people show up?

LARISA OLEYNIK:
It may seem forced to do that kind of thing, but let’s force it until it’s not.

SYD STRAW:
The world is still widely segregated in places, and that breaks my heart. At the
Pete & Pete
reunion, I was astonished by how it was a pretty pale crowd. It
was
a pretty white show, wasn’t it? But the writers were writing what they knew about their childhood. I don’t think they were consciously excluding anybody. It certainly wasn’t a show aimed at inner-city kids, though.

MICHAEL MARONNA:
We were out in Jersey. In White Picket Fence Land. It’s not surprising that we resonated with suburban kids, because we shot in suburbia.

TOBY HUSS:
It was about Will and Chris and where their sensibilities came from. But it was not a racially mixed crowd. It was a lot of white folks.

CHARLES S. DUTTON:
You could have levied that charge on anything that had to do with media at that time. As a matter of fact, when I was asked onto
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
, I thought it was about time they started using black people or people of color on there. Look, I can be totally straight here. I did not let that shade my decision one way or another. If it lacked diversity, then bringing me on was a way to get them to start thinking differently. Now, what they did after the episodes I did, I don’t know. Did the diversity get better? I don’t know.

VENUS DEMILO:
The great thing about Nick was that they had so much ethnicity represented.
All That
,
You Can’t Do That on Television
—those were my shows. I identified with those characters.

OMAR GOODING:
We did a great job of appealing to all kids from all walks of life.

ALAN GOODMAN:
Nickelodeon was always in my recollection a pretty diverse place.

MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG:
We were surrounded by a hundred crew people, and there was
every
race on the crew. So it never felt like
Pete & Pete
was ignoring one or the other race, shape, or size.

LINDA SIMENSKY:
The animation industry is sort of blindingly white and blindingly male. A lot of people who have just moved to this country and are working so hard so their kids can go to college want them to be doctors, lawyers, businesspeople. Something noble. Not makers of cartoons. So you’ll find the industry is very white.

FRED SEIBERT:
White people can make stuff for black people, black people can make stuff for white people, for Chinese people, for Russian people. There’s no magic formula for making anything. What you have to do is understand who you’re making stuff for, not
be
that person.

MICHAEL KOEGEL:
We were just part of what was going on at the time. Diversity became more important down the road. Corporate culture got very politically correct, and everybody was afraid to do anything that wasn’t PC. We used to make jokes about the “PC Police.” When we were casting
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
, we had to make sure we found one or two black families so this could be the “average American show.” We had to do that. We couldn’t have thirteen episodes of white people. That was a constant thing.

JASON ALISHARAN:
Nowadays we take that kind of diversity for granted, but in 1992, D.J. MacHale was
way
ahead of his time in making sure his show represented all kids, not just white kids. There was absolutely no problem with there being interracial relationships on the show, and again this wasn’t commonplace for 1992. They didn’t think it was even worthwhile to comment on it; instead, they just played it like it was normal, which is the greatest testament to representing diversity on a show.

ADAM REID:
Before Roger eventually brought me onto the show, I had called in to see about getting on
You Can’t Do That on Television
 . . .

ROGER PRICE:
Adam Reid wrote me a very erudite letter containing some valuable and pertinent criticisms of the show. I thought it must have come from an adult who either had some knowledge of TV or a considerable gift for analyzing how a show might be improved. I called the number given so that I could invite him out to lunch and see what he had to offer.

ADAM REID:
My mom got on the phone to talk with Roger about how to do that. The first thing Roger said was, “Is he black?”

ROGER PRICE:
I had hopes this kid might be useful. And if he was black as well . . . I had been searching fruitlessly for a suitable black boy. “Er, you don’t happen to be black, do you?” was the first thing the astonished child heard me say.

ADAM REID:
And when my mom told him no, he said, “Oh, too bad. Had I known he was black, I would have brought him in right away, had an interview, and probably put him on the show within a week.” That was a big thing that plagued Roger: He could never find African-Canadian or African-American kids.

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
Roger saw potential in all
sorts
of kids. Regardless of ethnicity. And maybe he had a sense that nonwhite kids were even more at risk to be underappreciated for their abilities.

ROGER PRICE:
We were equal-opportunity slimers. We live in a multiracial society, and it is the duty of the producer making shows for children to, as far as possible, arrange for all of the children who will see his show to have some chance of seeing themselves reflected in it as equal members of that society and with an equal right to have nasty things fall on them from above.

ROBIN RUSSO:
At the live road shows, we were running through audiences, and people were yelling out, “You’re not picking enough blacks! You’re not picking enough whites! You’re not picking enough girls!
You’re not picking enough boys!” And this was during a time when people would throw soda or popcorn in your face.

JAMES BETHEA:
We were completely open when we were looking for hosts on
Nick Arcade
. We didn’t have a type set in our mind. It could have been a
female
host. We didn’t think of ourselves as doing anything momentous in terms of having an African-American host. I was an African-American
producer
, if you want to go that route with it. I didn’t think of myself that way. It just turned out that we had gone with an African-American host.

PHIL MOORE:
Nick Arcade
was nominated for a CableACE Award and we flew to California for the ceremony. While we were out there, the NAACP Image Awards were happening. They arranged for James, Karim, and I to go. It was weird: When we got there, we hadn’t realized at that moment in time, there was no other African-American host of a TV show. We realized we missed out on that. We were just having a good time, trying to make a funny little game show about video games, the best show we could.

PAUL GERMAIN:
People were saying
Rugrats
felt too white, and I respected that. We hadn’t done that on purpose. People said we ought to open it up and make it a little more diverse. It seemed like a good idea to everyone, so we did that.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
There were discussions. “We don’t have any blacks on the show.” I thought we should have a black character. So I created Susie Carmichael.

CHUCK SWENSON:
She was put in for that exact purpose: The show was too white-bread. She was a strong character, she was good at what she did, and she didn’t make mistakes. That was a conscious decision.

MICHAEL BELL:
It was brave. The only thing they didn’t have was a gay kid, which I would have welcomed. Great! Little cross-dresser. Fine with me!

STEVE VIKSTEN:
We didn’t want to make it like
Cosby
, but it was sort of like that. I wanted them to be characters who could be white or black but happen to be black. I don’t think we had any Latin characters. I grew up in Puerto Rico, and I would have loved to have gotten into that.

SEYMOUR GREEN:
For me, every time I would step on the
Roundhouse
set, I would get a big response. Calling my name. A lot of people wanted to see more of me on the show. I felt like, at the time, they should have brought us out on the show more maybe. Not just Rita Hester, but I think Nickelodeon. I think they were a little iffy about bringing us out. I kind of noticed that.

RICK GOMEZ:
My family is Hispanic, and I was probably the most ethnic guy on Nick, or at least on
Pete & Pete
. At the time, I got the suburban idea. Will and Chris were genuinely talking about this small, little world. They were telling the story from that point of view. I don’t think there’s too much to it.

DONNIE JEFFCOAT:
Before Annette left, we had the Latin, the African-American, and the white boy on
Wild & Crazy Kids
, so I was kinda surprised they didn’t get another Hispanic lady to fill Annette’s shoes.

JESSICA GAYNES:
When they brought me in after Annette, I thought, “Why would they want another white kid?” Apparently, it didn’t matter. I was a minority, too: I was an oddball just to begin with. I had super-red hair!

JASON ZIMBLER:
That was great. Being a “ginger” was such a commodity, such an ace in the hole. If you’re an actor, the thing you want to do most is distinguish yourself.
Nobody
has red hair! You win the lottery! That’s not an albatross; that doesn’t hold you back. Of course, a redheaded kid is cuter than a redheaded adult . . .

JOE STILLMAN:
Pete & Pete
was
redheaded
white suburbia. I guess it was the kind of suburbia where I grew up. And probably not terribly representative. We brought in some diversity in terms of Ellen Cleghorn from
Saturday Night Live
.

DAMIAN YOUNG:
While working with her, I wasn’t thinking about her race. It was my first episode and I was very green at that point. And we had to kiss. I had done some work, but nothing commercial, really. She was a huge star. Obviously, I was a little nervous about that.

JIM JINKINS:
It’s pretty common knowledge that Skeeter was African-American. And I love that, because I did not consciously set out for that to be the case; I just thought he looked good blue.

BECCA LISH:
Skeeter was blue. Not any other color. Just blue. When I as Judy say the line, “Is he the blue one?” it was more about how the older sister can hardly be bothered to
keep your little friends straight, DOUGIE!
It could as easily have been any characteristic of any character. It never occurred to me that the show wasn’t speaking to any and every kid who turned on the TV.

DAVID CAMPBELL:
I don’t know what kind of TV you have, but Skeeter was
blue
. The whole idea for the colors is we were addressing those issues early on: Look, we’re not black people, we’re not Mexican, but we want the cartoon to speak to all groups. How do we get past the barrier of ethnicity? And Jim said, “Let’s try coloring them all different colors.”