Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age (26 page)

STEVE VIKSTEN:
Any company like Viacom or Nick is going to be obsessed with controlling the press and protecting their brand. I understand that. But the truth is the truth. The letter was a recognition on our part, saying, “You have to recognize that a lot of the success of the show is based on the writing staff.”

GEOFFREY DARBY:
For the network to get involved in that, suddenly we’re pulled into that mess and we don’t want to be, because then we’d have to pick a side. Instead, we would say to Gabor and Arlene, “What the frick is going on down there?
And can you clean it up and get it out of the press?
”

JOE ANSOLABEHERE:
Craig Bartlett kind of regretted signing it because of how upset Nickelodeon became. They didn’t want it to become another John Kricfalusi thing. John was on
The Charlie Rose Show
and Howard Stern’s show talking about Nickelodeon “screwing him over,” and Nickelodeon didn’t need any more bad press going on about one of their shows at the same time.

PAUL GERMAIN:
I have three Emmys on my shelf for the work I did on
Rugrats
. If Nick was comfortable with allowing this pretense that I wasn’t there and had nothing to do with it, that’s too bad they felt that way about the truth.

GEOFFREY DARBY:
Paul Germain really was the inventor of
Rugrats
. Not Arlene and not Gabor. I mean, he was working for them, so the three of them get a “created by.” But he was the vision behind it. In story meetings and stuff, we could tell whose vision it was.

CHARLIE ADLER:
I always felt Gabor and Arlene were very much involved in everything. Everything.

PETER CHUNG:
Paul was much more involved in it creatively. Gabor and Arlene were running the studio, and they had to tend with Nick and their whole staff. They were doing
The Simpsons
at the time, and Gabor was very preoccupied by that while we were doing the
Rugrats
pilot.

GABOR CSUPO:
I would say that is a fair assessment.

STEVE VIKSTEN:
I read the letter a few years ago and couldn’t believe how badly written it was. Eight writers and we can’t fucking write a decent letter. We thought it would just be a minor thing. It was buried in a Saturday edition of the
LA Times
, but the crap hit the fan Monday morning. Somebody told me Herb Scannell spent the whole day on the phone, pacing in his office over this. I was worried about my job for about a week. I had no idea it was going to be that big of a deal. But they had a hit show with us. And nobody said anything. I never talked to Herb about it. It blew over.

HERB SCANNELL:
They were all good people, but couldn’t work together. And we continued to work with Klasky-Csupo. Paul went off and got a deal with Disney. A lot of productions have inner workings that are funky. Sometimes they work out and make good work. And sometimes they break apart. That one broke apart.

E. G. DAILY:
We were all blessed to be part of such a great show, and
everybody
played a part in making it what it was. From Paul Germain to Peter Chung to Gabor Csupo and Arlene Klasky and all those characters . . . it was a
team
show, which is why it was so good.

BILL WRAY:
John Kricfalusi was a great team captain. But he had a
helluva
team. And if he ever wants to do another great
Ren & Stimpy
episode, he’s got to re-form the studio. And that’s why another
Ren & Stimpy
episode will never be made. Because he’ll never do that.

CHRIS RECCARDI:
If something’s great, it can’t be stopped. “Man’s Best Friend” is on DVD now. As long as the world gets to see it, everybody wins.

EDDIE FITZGERALD:
When I hear stories about John being testy and saying these things, I’m sure he did. But honestly, who cares? We’re all
so proud
that we worked on it. For a while, together we glimpsed art in the truest sense happen right before our eyes. And we were all part of it.

JOHN KRICFALUSI:
Never in a million years did I imagine that any of the artists I trained and gave such great opportunities to would turn around and sell out the studio and the show that made them famous and restored their artistic pride. A few years after the creator-driven heyday started by
Ren & Stimpy
, everything turned right around again, and those same artists were thrust back into an industry that places artists on the bottom rung of the ladder. There are a couple exceptions left—like
SpongeBob
, where the artists still have some say in the creative process—but the show has not evolved in quality or technique in the way that old cartoons did . . . and the way that
Ren & Stimpy
had been evolving episode by episode.

CHRISTINE DANZO:
Everyone had the best intentions in the beginning but allowed some inexperience, mistrust, control-seeking, and lack of faith to cause production havoc and therefore the end of an inspired show idea. Remember:
It’s only a cartoon.

ALAN GOODMAN:
They still throw slime around. But it’s
very beautiful
slime. Heavily art-directed slime. That’s what changed. Grown-ups took control of the slime and made it pretty.

VANESSA COFFEY:
Two words:
Power Rangers
.

ALAN GOODMAN:
The big change at Nickelodeon came after the vast success of
Dora the Explorer
and
SpongeBob
. Suddenly, there was exceptional wealth in licensed products. Billions and billions of dollars. Companies that get a taste for that want more and more. Before you know it, you are developing shows or acquiring programs that come with licensing attached. Like
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
.

ADAM WEISSMAN:
Audiences are getting bored. Writers have to come up with new ways to keep them interested. In 1993, there were no iPhones, no Internet. What distracted them and what got them in trouble and what kept them entertained was different than today. The shows now have to reflect that. Now you have
iCarly
and she has a web show.
Welcome Freshmen
came from a simpler time. And you can’t go back to that.

DEE LADUKE:
If what’s going on now is not a golden age, it’s because the people at Nick don’t have to make it up anymore. They have a couple decades of experience to back it up.

FRED NEWMAN:
Nickelodeon was kids playing in the sandbox at first. But once the lawyers get into things, it’s all, “Who owns that piece of music and how can we exploit it?” And none of that was there when I was doing
Livewire
. I even kind of shied away from other Nickelodeon projects because Viacom got so whoop-ass on stuff. I’m sorry, I don’t want to sound like a complaining old guy, but . . .

DANA CALDERWOOD:
The same is true in
every
industry. Not just TV. I was there last week, and there’s nothing but boardrooms. Hundreds of offices. They’ve become a
company
now. It used to be one floor and a couple of people coming up with goofy ideas.

SCOTT WEBB:
One of the things that happens within a corporate structure is your boss becomes the customer. You start thinking what’s gonna get approved or what’s the thing that they want, and you stop thinking about the audience. Play is extremely risky and, I have to say, for the most part, completely discouraged within corporations now more than ever before. I mean, there’s
no
playing happening at Nickelodeon now. I guarantee it.

MARC SUMMERS:
It’s not the fun, jovial place it once was. It’s all about the bottom line and thinking a billion dollars as opposed to good programming. Nick from ’86 until right before 2000 was great television. And then . . . they lost their way.

BYRON TAYLOR:
There was only so much airtime during the day when we could run the Nickelodeon shows. There was only so much budget. We couldn’t keep both Nick Studios Florida soundstages busy seven days a week to meet Universal’s demands.

ANDY BAMBERGER:
The final death throe for Nickelodeon Studios was—as always—a double-edged sword. We were now able to afford outside productions with bigger and better ideas . . . but they wanted to shoot their shows in LA and not come all the way to Florida.

BYRON TAYLOR:
We contractually had to have something going on on the stages every day when the park and tour were open. Sometimes there was legitimate production going on. But when there wasn’t, there was the necessity of creating the illusion there was. They called it “camera blocking.” They had all
kinds
of names for it. They had PAs down there moving things around, looking busy . . .

ANDY BAMBERGER:
In 2002, that was about the end of the studios. They sold off all the equipment, all the chairs,
everything
. I happened to be working on a show in Orlando at the time and went through there. They had Olmac from
Legends of the Hidden Temple
! I wanted to buy it, but my wife would’ve killed me.

ADAM WEISSMAN:
The difference I feel is just the success of the shows. I work on shows now where I’ve worked with these crew people for seven, eight years. The same ones! That kind of loyalty is not necessarily common within a network. These people are all nice, they work their butts off, we all make a living, and we’re proud of the shows.

ANDY BAMBERGER:
Now because of
Clarissa
and some other shows being successful, we were able to pay more money to get better shows. That’s when Brian Robbins came in with
All That
and those bigger and better shows. We could use DGA directors and AFTRA talent. But the people who created those earlier shows that led to this success? They didn’t get to enjoy it, because they weren’t involved in the shows that happened at the next level.

MARK SCHULTZ:
Too many of the original people had moved on, had felt the vibe changing. New people were in charge of the network, and new executives were coming in who had titles but not experience.

MICHAEL KOEGEL:
A lot of the people who stayed there were middle-management people who rose to the top. Not very creative, but people who show up to work on time and know how to write an e-mail.

TIM LAGASSE:
It’s true: If you want to get into television, go to Nickelodeon and start in the mailroom and you’ll be an executive in six months.

SCOTT WEBB:
There’s no real meaningful talent that exists within Nickelodeon, and there’s no real industry leadership that happens there either. They’ve squandered everything that this foundation of branding gave them. They threw out the logo. They’ve pretty much thrown out everything that allowed them to be a business that had a powerful relationship with an audience that could live on like the greatest love affairs of history. They decided that was not as important as having MBAs driving business with PNLs and seeing how much money they can make. One of the axioms Gerry gave us—and this was the key to the kingdom: “If it’s good for kids, it’ll be good for business.” Now, it’s, “If it’s good for business, then we’ll make it good for kids.”

ANDY BAMBERGER:
We were all shocked when Gerry left, because she was the heart and soul of the network. Herb is a very thoughtful person, a very creative person, but it was an impossible set of shoes to fill, because Gerry was such a big personality and had been there so long.

HERB SCANNELL:
How was I going to fill Gerry’s
high heels
? People change. Some people who I thought would be with me left early and some people I never thought I’d get on with, I got on with. And we spent ten years doing some great things together. Before, we had just scratched the surface, and now we could build Nick into a really meaningful force in popular culture while continuing to make great stuff for kids. I didn’t see my job as walking away from what Gerry had put down as foundation. I saw it as taking what she had laid and continuing to grow it. And that’s what I did.

ALBIE HECHT:
Herb really encouraged us to create this studio system where we became the fifth-largest in Hollywood.

CRAIG BARTLETT:
Gerry mentored Herb into that spot. And Herb and I got along fine, too. But MTV Networks, Viacom, Nick—every year they got bigger and more corporate than the year before. While Herb was running things, it just grew more and more corporate, and less like you had that personal touch. It was probably just inevitable that that was the way it was going to go. It wasn’t Herb’s fault. Herb’s Nick was still a great place to be, but each year it got bigger and more out of control.

ALBIE HECHT:
People forget that Herb Scannell put Nick at Nite on the map. They forget how unbelievably successful Nick at Nite
was
. Herb understood how to program to any demographic. And Herb had been extraordinarily successful as a programmer and launching Nicktoons and SNICK under Gerry.

GERRY LAYBOURNE:
When I left Nick, we had 56 percent of all kids viewing. We grew from having nothing to having 56 percent.

HERB SCANNELL:
Gerry was the best. So when she left, it was sad. It was almost like a wake.

ALBIE HECHT:
Sure, there were people unhappy about Gerry leaving. There was sadness there. A lot of unrest and worry about what would happen without Gerry at the head. There was definitely a lot of trepidation about Herb taking over, but I think he quickly established both his vision and his ability to collaborate.

HARDY RAWLS:
When Gerry left, they lost a great believer not just in Nick but the way the programming should run.

JERRY BECK:
When she interviewed me, she asked me what a good Nick movie would look like. I told her it wouldn’t be like Disney; it would be like
Yellow Submarine
. The moment I said that, I got the job. She wanted us to go in a new direction. A year and a half into my being there, Gerry left the company and went to Disney for a few years. As soon as she left, the direction for Nick Movies completely changed. Out with the original stuff. “Oh,
Rugrats
is doing well on TV. Let’s do a movie.” I moved on because I wanted to do what Gerry had wanted to do: cool new stuff. Developing movies based on TV series wasn’t what I wanted to do. I ended up going to Disney myself after that.

HERB SCANNELL:
I knew she had been in contract negotiations. I had just put my mother in a nursing home, and so it was a tough week of stuff. I’d had my first kid six months earlier, so there was a lot going on in my life. I walked into the nursing home and was saying to myself, “I really want this job. I love Nickelodeon. I gotta go for it.” I called Gerry and had dinner with her during Christmas break after she left. I told her I really wanted it, and she said she didn’t know that. Six weeks later, I got the job. I loved running Nick. We were the Little Engine That Could.

ALBIE HECHT:
When you think what happened under Herb: Nick Movies, Nick Animation, Nick Records, the Big Help, licensing and business, the rise of Nick International, Nick Online,
Nick
magazine . . . It was all Herb’s ambition to take this brand and express it in so many different ways, to “be present”—as he put it—in kids’ lives and be able to touch them wherever they wanted to touch Nickelodeon.

TOMMY LYNCH:
Things were getting bigger. Changes and new ways of doing things were happening every day. It was fun. Herb brought Albie Hecht in to be his head of production, and Albie is a passionate guy.

MICHAEL KOEGEL:
I left there in ’95, and when things started to change was when they brought in Albie Hecht. He changed the complete tone of what was happening at that place. He ruled by intimidation. And that is not what that network was about up to that point. He’d walk into your office, pound his fist, and say, “What’s going on with your show?!” It was such a different vibe. It was difficult to be around a lot of that stuff.

TOMMY LYNCH:
We did feel we had to have a hit every time we pitched a new show. The world was becoming more competitive. Disney Channel was getting some traction. Cartoon Network came into existence. The big three networks became creatively irrelevant, so it was on. It also became a fact that the kids’ cable business became big business, so every decision had to be vetted by various departments. It wasn’t bad. Just different.

DAVID STENSTROM:
As with anything, if you do the same thing long enough, you become stilted and entrenched in one way of doing things. In order to grow, you have to change. And I think Nick has kept changing. The only thing that doesn’t like changing is a wet baby.

LISA LEDERER:
Unfortunately, I feel like in the nineties it all started to clamp down again. Everything became very particular and subscribed, and the parameters all narrowed again. When you turn the television on, it doesn’t really matter what sitcom you’re looking at: Everybody is dressed pretty much the same way. Their hair’s the same and the look is the same.

LARRY SULKIS:
The stuff I see on Nickelodeon today over my kids’ shoulders, I don’t know whether they’re watching Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, or Disney. Whatever Nickelodeon’s particular signature is right now, I’m not hip to it.

CHRIS VISCARDI:
That’s only grown over the years. If you look at what Nickelodeon and Disney Channel air now—I’m not besmirching them at all; they’re successful in fantastic ways—they’re programming to a much larger audience. And their programming is straight down the middle. At times you see stuff that’s really different and quirky and edgy and odd. But for the most part, that kind of stuff is not there anymore.

WILL MCROBB:
We had tried to be the anti-Disney, now they’re just trying to be Disney. To me, that’s the arc from where it was to where it is now.

ALAN GOODMAN:
They got seduced by the success of Disney’s shows with older tweens and teens living fantasy lives. Wizards, a rock star in disguise, twins who live in a palace. But you can’t beat Disney doing “dreams come true.” They’ve been doing that since
Pinocchio
. And you end up blowing off the younger part of the demographic that identifies with the “regular kid” stories—bucking the establishment—that were always Nickelodeon’s forte.