Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (29 page)

BOB MITTENTHAL:
I was working on a film and these PAs came over and said, “We heard you worked on
Double Dare
!” They just fell on their knees: “Thank you! You
made
my childhood!” And that’s pretty gratifying. So I have no shame about it at all. Maybe I should . . .

CHRIS VISCARDI:
When the Internet started to really grow, we were shocked about how many people would talk about
Pete & Pete
with the passion of a rabid following, because it’s been so long since the show’s been off the air.

WILL MCROBB:
You make something, you go into the time machine, and you come out seventeen years later to see what happens. It’s pretty amazing to consider: We may have only gotten a 2.1 rating and they took us off the air, but seventeen years later, there’s all these twenty-six-year-olds who are saying
Thank you so much
.

JASON ALISHARAN:
Since it’s been about twenty years since I was on the show, I don’t get recognized in public.

CHRISTINE MCGLADE:
There’s a certain age group of people who still sometimes recognize me, and that’s an odd experience.

ALISON FANELLI:
It’s been
such
a long time. I’m
really
surprised when I’m recognized. The last time it happened, I was in medical school and I was at a Starbucks with pj’s and glasses on. My hair was short-short. And someone was like, “What are
you
doing here?”
How did you even notice me?
It might be harder with Michael and Danny. “Where’s the tattoo?”

RICK GOMEZ:
I was walking around a Kmart in Manhattan and a couple of kids were with their family chasing me around the aisle and laughing: “It’s Mike!”
Wow, what is Maronna going through?

DAVE RHODEN:
Several years after the show, I was eighteen or nineteen and I was in Florida at a hotel pool with a bunch of friends. At this age in my life, I had grown out my hair—at least chin level all the way around—and had a big, fat, thick goatee and an earring in my ear, and I had put on a lot of muscle. This little girl who was probably up on the eighth floor of the hotel balcony screams, “IT’S MERV!” And all my friends just died laughing. They were like, “Yes, it is!” And I was like, “How did this little girl from, like, eight stories away recognize me with long hair, goatee, and an earring?” I didn’t even feel like I was the same person.
Seriously, you remember that?

ANDREA LIVELY:
I was never seen on
Nick Arcade
,
and that’s the way I wanted it to be. It was really cool that I could go out and people wouldn’t know who I was. I could have a life
and
do what I did on
Nick Arcade
.

HOWARD BAKER:
I was visiting New York City once and was walking down the street behind these four club kids who had homemade backpacks of the characters. They called each other “rugrats.” I told them I was the director on the show and they went berserk! I was a bit overwhelmed by the attention and thought they were going to kidnap me.

CONNIE SHULMAN:
It’s surprising how many times when I’ll say something at the grocery store or something and that twenty-year-old range will pick up on it real fast. To think, this little orange-faced blond girl was a role model for some girls that are now in their twenties.

RACHEL SWEET:
The show I’m working on right now, we have a bunch of interns in their mid-twenties, and the other day one of them said, “Oh my God! You wrote the theme song to
Clarissa Explains It All
?” And then she sang it for me.

ARON TAGER:
I still get phone calls every once in a while, fans of Dr. Vink. And they all give me the line,
With a v-ah vah-vah
. But it doesn’t happen that often, so it’s fine.

RICHARD M. DUMONT:
Of course I get the catchphrase from anyone who recognizes me. That was annoying for a little bit.

KATHERINE DIECKMANN:
We didn’t have any sense of who we were reaching when we were making it. I’ve had students who saw
Pete & Pete
when they were kids, and it’s really interesting to me when they’re so passionate about it. It lets me see the effect of how it shaped people’s sensibilities. To see all that work and that it really had meaning for people is fantastic.

MELISSA JOAN HART:
There’s always, at least once a day, someone who comes up to me and basically says, “I remember you from
Clarissa
,” and they feel like they’re in this exclusive club. It was a cult hit, so when people say it to me, they have this little wink of their eye. It’s so funny to see the reactions of people who were really moved by that show and character.

DANNY TAMBERELLI:
You have to be a certain kind of person to really enjoy
Pete & Pete
. I find people who come up to me or like the show are people I would relate to or would be friends with. I don’t think I’ve ever been approached by someone who’s recognized me from
Pete & Pete
and felt kinda weird about it. Some kind of big jock dude or whatever.

RICK GOMEZ:
I’ll go on a set and my second AD will come up to me and say, “Endless Mike, man!” And he’s
thirty
! These shows were being made for him. Now we’re all working together, and that is the coolest shit. Those are the people I end up having a martini with at the end of the night.

TREVOR EYSTER:
I’ve been a security guard on a night shift when things were tight and there were kids there who probably watched me on television. I was too embarrassed to tell them who I was.

BLAKE SENNETT:
My own demon was feeling like a fraud. When I transitioned into music with Rilo Kiley, kids would sing the
Salute Your Shorts
theme song at me and yell from the audience. They would bring “Pinsky sausages” to a show, and I wouldn’t know what they were doing.
Are you fucking with me?
I got off stage and cried, I was so bummed out and humiliated. I thought I’d never be taken seriously.

MEGAN BERWICK:
Freshman year of high school, after
Salute Your Shorts
and a movie I did, I hadn’t booked anything for about six months. I said something in my English class and one of the boys in there said, “What do
you
know? You’re just a washed-up has-been.” I was like, “Yeah. You’re right. I am. That’s exactly what I feel like. Thanks for pointing that out.” Sophomore year, my history teacher was doing roll call the first day of class and she reached my name and she said, “You’re that girl on that Nick show.” “That’s me!” “My kids love that show. I can’t
stand
it!” “Okay . . .” And then she asked me for my autograph later. It’s a weird dynamic.

MICHAEL BOWER:
We got degraded all the time. I worked at CityWalk at a comic book store to make some money and had people come up to me and make fun of me. “Why do you work here? You’re a
star
!” Boy, they take your pride and they shove it down. They make you feel like crap.

JASON ZIMBLER:
If somebody was secure . . . or
insecure
—let’s frame it right—and had to prove themselves, if “Ferguson” wasn’t cool or they were “cooler than” or whatever that is,
I had to contend with that. And I had mechanisms to contend with that. If there was a group of people there, and somebody was trying to be douchey, then I just wouldn’t really pay attention to them.

BLAKE SENNETT:
Later, I realized people weren’t ridiculing me. They were just trying to connect: “I saw that show! I was part of that! You are part of me!”

ALASDAIR GILLIS:
People will want to find affiliation—I understand things from our childhood can hold a very special impact as something you want to connect with—and the fact that it was part of people’s childhood might have a sort of staying power.

VANESSA LINDORES:
For some people, we were the cheeky background noise to their middle school/adolescent years. These are important years, and while those people are still around, we will be meaningful as fond memories.

JOANNA GARCIA:
I was recently with my husband and two of our best friends in Orlando at Harry Potter World, and our guide on the tour took us through the whole place. As a treat for me, he brought me back to the old stages where we shot
Welcome Freshmen
and
Clarissa Explains It All
, and I got to see my old dressing room . . . and now it’s totally transformed and totally different. But the moment I walked in, it smelled the same to me, which was this really great sweet smell. And it just brought me back to a really wonderful time in my life.

TREVOR EYSTER:
People have asked me where
Salute Your Shorts
was shot, and I don’t know because I was driven there as a kid and am estranged now from my mom. I would like somebody to tell me how to get back, so I can go hiking there. I don’t even know how to get back to where my memories are, frankly.

MICHAEL MARONNA:
All of us were there. It’s one of those things we can come together on. A lot of people are like, “Oh, I grew up with you!” Nickelodeon is a kids’ network. So it’s not surprising that the kids watching would identify with us. Since we can’t freeze time, all these people in their thirties, dealing with their jobs and lives now, they still remember those times. It’s the chance to relive their childhood, but a little weirder. And it’s immortalized on TV, so it’s more reinforced.

SANDY KAVANAUGH:
The first word my daughter ever read was “Nickelodeon.” She pointed to it on a T-shirt and said, “Nickanee!” It’s been there for her her whole life.

CHUCK VINSON:
When my daughter was really young, we would put on episodes of
Clarissa Explains It All
and she would be really into it, which put a smile on my face:
Yeah, Dad directed that.

E. G. DAILY:
My kids were at that age where they were
huge
Rugrats
fans. It was always on in the house. I was pretty much the coolest mom on the block. I was the “Tommy Pickles Mom.” Kids would come over and say, “Do the voice! Do the voice!”

MARTY SCHIFF:
I always joke with my children that they have to refer to Nick as “The Network Daddy Built.”

JULENE RENEE-PRECIADO:
I actually still have VHS tapes of the show, and I show them to my kids. The last season of
Roundhouse
, I was pregnant with my daughter and gave birth to her about a month and a half after the show got canceled. She’s going to be eighteen this year, and we quote the show
all the time
.

ROBIN RUSSO:
I have a son and daughter, and when I showed them
Double Dare
about five years ago, my daughter burst into tears because I was getting hit by a pie. And now my daughter has a teacher who was a
contestant
on
Double Dare
!

DOUG PREIS:
I didn’t have that to share with my kids. They missed that. They know that Dad does stuff for Vlasic Pickles and Lucky Charms, but in terms of network things and
Doug
, it’s sad in a way. There are discs and stuff, but it’s not the same. That was a different time.

BOB MITTENTHAL:
Because I
worked
in the field of kids’ TV, I knew just how stupid it could be. So I tried to keep my kids away from it. But I should show it to them, just to get a reaction out of them.

ROGER PRICE:
I didn’t like my own kids to watch it at the time, not because I was afraid it would corrupt them but because it sort of reminded them that their dad spent his working day having fun with other children. Or so I thought. It made me uncomfortable, anyway. My son told me only recently that he was about the only kid in school not able to talk about the show the next day. He felt quite out of it.

DEBBY BEECE:
As a mother of three young children, I was always telling my kids to turn off the TV set.

JOHN CRANE:
I was over at the Nick offices not too long ago, and I honestly don’t think they know the show. Some of the executives, I’m not even sure they’ve ever seen it!

MARK SCHULTZ:
The memories of working on the early shows were like campfire stories. They didn’t have any relevance. I began to feel irrelevant. It was time for me to move on.

ELIZABETH HESS:
I watched the episodes of
Clarissa
once they were finished. And I think for the most part, that was it. Sometimes now my students say, “Let’s have a
Clarissa
party!” And I’m like, “Nooooo! No, no. For you, it’s nostalgia. For me, it’s a really beautiful time in my life I don’t need to revisit.”

JASON ZIMBLER:
Those shows, those characters, the writers were partly your teachers. Because you listened to them as closely as you listened to your middle school science teacher. And those are data points. Those are like clear harkenings. Those are the ways you can call back your twelve-year-old life by way of these shows.

SEAN O’NEAL:
I went through a roller-coaster ride, I’m not going to lie. I had many ups and downs and trials and errors after
Clarissa
. It wasn’t until four or five years ago that I decided to give LA a try. I wasn’t really involved much in the industry after the show except for commercials and what my agent would call me for. I wasn’t pursuing it. So the industry didn’t pursue me. And I did go through some really tough times.

TREVOR EYSTER:
I’m in back pain and can’t afford a chiropractor. I’ll probably lose my car any day now and am really amazed I haven’t gotten a court document yet. But I’m happy, you know? I’m happy because I’m living authentically. I’m happy because I think “happy” is a choice we all make outside of our circumstances. I don’t look like a geek anymore. I’m kind of a jock now, really.

JASON ZIMBLER:
I did hope that the show would result in the “Ferguson” brand or the “Jason” brand, where the stock would rise. But I decided to go to college and left the business. I think I was scared, actually. When I was a kid actor, I had this perverse, overarching confidence that I was King Shit, walking into the room knowing I was better than anybody else in the audition. Somewhere on the show, I think I grew up.