Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (12 page)

GEOFFREY DARBY:
I don’t think we should listen to market research that says little girls love princesses and mermaids, so let’s do a show about mermaid princesses. That’s the
opposite
of what we should be doing.

BOB KLEIN:
Keep in mind, these were some of the first children’s focus groups ever done.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
My background was in research, and it basically taught me that if you talk to even two kids, you’re better off than if you go blind. So I immediately set up a focus group for
You Can’t Do That on Television
, and it taught me a lot about focus groups. This focus group leader
hated
the show. She thought it was disrespectful and hideous. So when I arrived at the focus group, she said, “Well, I’ll do the best I can, but it’s a terrible show.” Everything she did with the kids in the room was to get them to say negative things. And we came back with a very negative report because one of the kids was kind of a bully and it wasn’t cool enough for him. So then all the kids heaped on. But they knew every character and they knew every line of dialogue. And I knew they loved the show but they just weren’t saying it. You have to talk with kids one-on-one about it because of peer pressure. So that was very helpful. Every single thing we did was a learning experience, and the great thing was nobody was watching us.

ROGER PRICE:
One day, I got a very nasty letter from lawyers representing the newly released
Ghostbusters
movie, saying that I had stolen the idea of green slime and must cease immediately from further use of it or they would take action. I wrote back pointing out that their movie was released in 1984 and we had been dumping green slime on kids since 1979; so the opposite was the case, and they must have stolen the idea from
us
. I heard no more about it. But it was interesting that some lawyers did believe that a creator could have proprietary rights to green slime.

ALAN GOODMAN:
Slime, for Roger Price, was a way for kids to “act up” to adults. To punish them for the crime of being parents. But it evolved when it became the symbol of Nickelodeon. As a symbol of the demarcation between grown-ups and kids, getting slimed became a badge of honor. Sliming Tom Cruise at the Kids’ Choice Awards was a way of saying, “We accept you. You’re one of us.”

ALBIE HECHT:
In 1994, we moved the Kids’ Choice Awards to the Pantages Theatre, and the conceit was we would start it out as a very austere and serious event that gets busted up by slime and chaos. In my mind, there was only one person big enough to pull that off, and that was James Earl Jones. With his voice and the theater, you can
see
it. So I get on the phone with him—he’s like a hero to me—and he goes, “HELLO, ALBIE.” That
voice
comes on and I’m like,
Oh my God, it’s James Earl Jones
. I pitch him the idea of doing the show, being in a tuxedo and getting slimed; it’s gonna be great—kids all over the world . . . And there’s silence. At this point in my career, I know silence is not good. And he goes, “Albie, I don’t think so. Thank you for your time.” And he hangs up. I’m crushed. I don’t know what to do; it’s sort of been written for him . . . Two minutes later, the phone rings: “ALBIE? JAMES EARL JONES.” What did I do? I must have done something wrong! He says he just talked with his granddaughters and they said that he
must
do it because sliming is the biggest honor he could have.

ALAN GOODMAN:
When we started to build our tone, our look, our sound, our style, we went against the grain of what was normal because we didn’t see a lot of value with normal. We really didn’t have the money to do anything else. So we had to have our own point of view.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
One of the bugaboos that we were fighting was that cable shows had a
look
. That “public access look.” That nonprofessional, nonnetwork look. When we were trying to establish who we were, production value became very, very important for us. It couldn’t look cheap or like a “little kids’ version.”

LARRY SULKIS:
There was no money for gloss. Man, this was about as close to “I’ve got some costumes in the garage, let’s put on a show” as you could get. And it definitely looked that way. But that added to the fun of it!

DAN SAWYER:
It seemed low-budget. Or revolutionary.

KATHERINE DIECKMANN:
Improvisational, DIY, punk was very much our aesthetic. We’re just going to take these kids and go to some suburbs in Jersey and
shoot it, man!

BYRON TAYLOR:
Everything at Nickelodeon turned out to have a major learning curve involved with it. Over the first five or six years, it developed quite a bit.

SCOTT WEBB:
There are two people who are gone who really should be counted along with Fred Seibert here. One is Tom Pomposello, who helped us come up with our sound identity with the doo-wop, which helped us communicate a lot of our attitude and was the foundation for a lot of our animation identity as well.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
That’s why Tom was important in those days—and this is because
I married an audio engineer: Sound is really important on television, especially back then.

SCOTT WEBB:
The other person is Tom Corey, who designed the Nickelodeon logo. Tom Corey really understood these ideas about designing a logo that could be as expressive as kids were and as flexible a design that we could keep fresh. There are rules for the logo. But the logo is an ever-changing orange shape. It could really be anything, as long as it fit within some basic design rules.

GEORGE EVELYN:
Each Nick logo was something different. A graphic shape, no outlines, usually. A flat, bright orange bone or hat or whatever.

SCOTT WEBB:
Whenever we put it on air, we always wanted to make it like a big sticker and kind of in your face. Lime green and orange were the two colors that Tom Corey proposed, because they are both international distress colors. They’re attention-getting. Designers always want to change what they’re working with. Like, whatever the last guy did was a piece of shit.

ALAN GOODMAN:
The flat orange-colored logo was deliberate, and the idea was it literally slaps on, basically obliterating the end of the scene and saying it’s our brand. The original idea was it was just an orange thing, but it had to be something that wouldn’t be orange in real life. So it couldn’t be an orange, for instance.

GEORGE EVELYN:
We directors and designers would sit around, sifting through the logo branding spec sheets, and pick our favorites, sort of divvying up the pile. Nick’s mission was “have fun” and have the logo at the end. And “we like orange.” Other than that, it was pretty open.

JOEY AHLBUM:
When I got the audio track for what would become the first dinosaur ID, I was trying to come up with ideas and a good friend said “kids love dinosaurs.” I started drawing and came up with the sneaker-wearing doo-wop dinos. And then I gave them an irreverent Nickelodeon twist. They were wearing sneakers, they were mixed with modern technology—watching TV, listening to a Walkman, and even driving cars. They were also done in bright, poppy colors, all with that amazing doo-wop track. It added up to pure magic and pure Nickelodeon.

MIKE KLINGHOFFER:
Up to about 1985, Nickelodeon really had almost no original productions. So everything, every attitude we had, had to come across in basic thirty-second blasts through our on-air promotions.

CHRIS VISCARDI:
What was great about Nickelodeon at that time—particularly working in On-Air Promotions—was it didn’t have a lot of original programming. So pretty much all the money they had went into interstitial programming. Even though we were making promos—“
Mister Ed
will be right back after these messages”—we also got to do other interstitial programming that was animated or allowed us to do film shoots and all these post-production effects. It was like going to film school all over again.

SCOTT WEBB:
The promo department was a great incubator for Will McRobb to really find himself. He was unbearably shy when he showed up in the early days, and the
environment in which we were working really allowed him to open up and share his work more to others.

WILL MCROBB:
As golden as that golden age might have been, I really don’t think
Pete & Pete
would have been made into a series except for the fact that it came out of the promo department. It all came out of Scott Webb’s department, and he had the autonomy to make the sixty-second spots that caught on the way
The Simpsons
caught on with
its
shorts.

JOE STILLMAN:
Scott was really the keeper of the flame and kind of embodied a grown-up kid at Nickelodeon. He really kind of emotionally and spiritually kept Nickelodeon on track.

SCOTT WEBB:
I was twenty-eight at the time, maybe twenty-nine. In the early days, my approach really resonated, and that’s one of the reasons I became the promo producer I did, then the creative director I did. People would say my blood was orange.

WILL MCROBB:
Scott really bled orange. He was the truest of the true believers. He could handle it all from a purely creative and from an advertising point of view. Sadly, Scott is legally blind. But that only added to his mystique. We had to sit really close to him. Scott had a guru persona.

SCOTT WEBB:
I had become a freelancer for Fred Seibert at the Movie Channel. And shortly after I got there, I began to have a problem with my eyesight. I thought I just needed glasses, but I went to a doctor and learned fairly quickly that it was not correctable. It was a problem with my optic nerve. When I got that news, I sort of felt like my life was over. I couldn’t imagine how I could ever be a functioning production assistant. I couldn’t read, I couldn’t drive. I didn’t know how I would ever produce television, and I felt like my life was over. The day I got that news, I went to Fred and did everything but say the words, “I quit.” I went and I told him that I had a problem and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to do anything. And so he said to me, “You have a lot of problems: You’re really lazy and you’re disorganized. You’re irresponsible. And I expect you to go back to your desk and get to work. And if you have trouble with your eyes, you should let me know.” Fred did some heroic things for me in those days in the way he stuck his neck out. This was way, way,
way
before the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Fred made sure that I got some really wacky equipment to help me do what I needed to do. To have somebody step in to say that he believed in me at a time when I didn’t believe in myself was a huge turning point for me in my life. I really felt at that moment that I wanted to dedicate my work to kind of prove that Fred did the right thing. Losing my eyesight was a really dark period in my life, and it was a dark journey. But I figured out how to be a producer as a visually impaired person.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Scott was a producer. He wasn’t running it all. Debby Beece was running it.

JOE STILLMAN:
In fairness, the essence of what Nickelodeon became was something that also came from Fred/Alan. They really focused on what makes Nickelodeon Nickelodeon. Why we weren’t Disney. That kind of stuff.

FRED SEIBERT:
We started as promotion consultants and eventually became programming consultants, then a full-service ad agency for Nick. From their standpoint, we were rock-and-roll guys. We were hired to solve a problem. Nick had no ratings; what could we do that people hadn’t done before us? We had a lot of theory, but we needed executional proof, and Scott Webb was the
lead
of executional proof.

WILL MCROBB:
All the years that I’d been in the promo department really felt like we were an underdog team of commandos trying to do something that was good, and everything that
Pete & Pete
became was really fueled by that same identity.

CHRIS VISCARDI:
I’m sure there was a little bit of jealousy about our getting a chance to do that. We eventually broke off from the On-Air Promos Department and kind of went freelance to make
Pete & Pete
.

BYRON TAYLOR:
The design of
Double Dare
was inspired by an Italian movement from the 1980s called “Memphis.” There was a design firm that did all these crazy pieces of furniture, and they eventually got into architecture design. It had kind of a post-punk feel to it, perhaps. Other things were Rube Goldberg and the game Mouse Trap.

DAVID ELLIS:
Byron had an interesting approach to color and line design that hadn’t really been used or exploited at all. He was a genius in his approach to what Nick was all about. It was imaginative and new.

BYRON TAYLOR:
If you look at weapons G.I. Joe toys have, they look like they are from World War II but are stripped of detail because of the scale. That “toy-ness” was something I always wanted to go after in designing obstacles as well as props for the stunts. That’s my aesthetic criteria.

ALBIE HECHT:
Oh, Byron’s
amazing
. He’s in the DNA of Nick.

BYRON TAYLOR:
Jim Fenhagen had already designed the
Double Dare
set—completely established the look. But they still had the obstacle courses that needed to be designed. All of that stuff, we had to determine what it would look like. And my work at Nickelodeon sort of snowballed from there.

HARVEY:
If you saw Byron outside, you might have thought he was, like, a pharmacist or maybe a librarian. Then he’d come up with these ingenious, almost perverted sort of torturous kinds of things: “We’ll make ’em reach up into this giant nose” or “We’ll send ’em down this slide and have them land in this mess.” There was always a fine line between its being real torture and just torturous fun.

BYRON TAYLOR:
Very few strictures were placed on us.

DANA CALDERWOOD:
I liked the Sundae Slide because that was always fun to shoot, with kids coming down headfirst or slipping and landing: We were guaranteed to get a big, wonderful shot and splash at the bottom of the slide.

BYRON TAYLOR:
I was probably the first person to go down into the Gumball Machine. It’s very exciting to be inside. There’s usually a frown on my face, and I wound up coming out with a smile.

DANA CALDERWOOD:
That’s the type of stuff I would do on my lunch hour: play on the hamster wheel. Just the idea of a one-ton human hamster wheel was so clever.

HARVEY:
Byron was such a bizarre, creative guy. It was like this sort of weird Santa’s Workshop—the giant hamster wheels and huge nose that blew snot out and all this stuff Byron created with his team.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
Double Dare
was a pretty smart set design. It was really designed to look like a bathroom. The glass brick walls, the tile-esque floors . . .

BYRON TAYLOR:
Jim Fenhagen had designed a very beautiful set that the producers had imagined as a swimming pool. Bob Mittenthal describes it as a bathroom. Geoffrey Darby described it as a natatorium. That’s sort of his pretentious explanation, which is apt.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
They weren’t the boss, so they can use all the terms they want, but I gave the direction and I said I want it to be a natatorium, which is what caused those tiles. “Bathroom” never entered my mind. Why “natatorium”? Because I liked the word.

ALAN SILBERBERG:
There’s something about appealing to the kid audience that a stunt had to be both fun and not too dangerous but still challenging. We would sit around at dinner—because, you know, a lot of us were living in hotels and going out to dinner all the time—and throw ideas around that way. At one point, there was a Writers Guild strike, and since we were not a guild show, we hired some of David Letterman’s writers to see if they could come up with some stunts. And they did
not
work. Beyond the obvious, there were some things that came in from that group that were extremely conceptual and just . . . didn’t work.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
During the very first taping, the kid gets to the first obstacle and it’s a flag in a bag of feathers . . . And the kid spends the entire sixty seconds trying to get the flag. It was the only obstacle they hadn’t tested. So they then had to spend an hour cleaning the feathers and goop. The second time around, the camera fell back into the French toast or whatever and we had to start again. We needed to do
four shows a day
to make this work, and we’re now into hour five of taping this
one
show. I go home. I’m just like, “Oh God, this is the worst thing. It’s never going to work. We’re dead.” I’m on the phone with Debby Beece, who says to me, “Don’t worry, Geoffrey will figure this out by Monday.”