Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Read online

  DANNY TAMBERELLI: For me, it was typical, normal growing up. People made fun of people for different things. I made it out all right. I got a lot of kids on to the show because I lived in Jersey where we shot, so if they needed kid extras, I would invite people to come. That helped me make friends.

  CHRISTINE TAYLOR: The pilot was going to just be this fun thing I never thought would go any further. When we went off to do it, it sort of felt like a dream. I was really new to it at the time. The day we were going to fly to Arizona for Hey Dude was the day they were announcing homecoming in my school, and that was a big deal. I still went to school in the morning before we drove to JFK Airport to get on the flight. I was still really invested in my “real” life, as I called it.

  DAVE RHODEN: My parents would pick me up right from high school, drive me to the studios, and we’d be there until eight fifteen or eight thirty at night. Get home around nine to eat dinner and then try to crank out homework until around ten. On top of that, we had lines to memorize. Some teachers wouldn’t always collect our homework, but we would be told to do it anyway. So I would literally guess each night which homework assignments would be picked up the next day in class and work on those ones.

  CHRISTINE MCGLADE: I wouldn’t say my grades suffered at all. But I was involved with gymnastics at the time I started You Can’t Do That on Television and had to drop that activity. It might seem like an obvious choice, but it was a difficult one for me because I really enjoyed gymnastics.

  ROGER PRICE: None of the You Can’t Do That on Television kids were encouraged to leave school. Most of them kept up with their schoolwork. There was a limit on the hours they might work.

  ALISON FANELLI: My tutors on set were always very supportive of my academic career. Even if I were to have continued with acting or directing, they still would’ve encouraged me to go to college.

  DAVE RHODEN: Part of Saturday we would be tutored because we were missing a Monday of school every week. Imagine a bunch of rebellious teenagers in a little trailer with one lady at a time who would be tutoring us on multiple subjects. There was one lady they brought in to teach us foreign language. She’d work with Jocelyn Steiner on Latin, she’d work with me on Spanish, and she’d work with either Chris Lobban or Rick Galloway on French. On top of that, she was deaf.

  JASON ZIMBLER: She was an unbelievably impressive woman. Melissa Joan Hart was taking Spanish and I was taking French with her. Both Melissa and I became friends not only with her but with her family. Dave Martel from Pete & Pete is her nephew.

  DAVE MARTEL: My aunt’s an amazing woman and has a great way with languages. She could see by reading people’s lips how they were pronouncing the words.

  DAVE RHODEN: So now let’s focus on the fact that she was deaf. She’s one-on-one with somebody, reading their lips, and her back is to somebody else. We would say the raunchiest stuff behind her back and make the weirdest faces we could make just to make the other person bust up.

  DAVE MARTEL: She would always tell me these stories of kids on set, and it sounded like they were having so much fun. She gave me the acting bug.

  DAVE RHODEN: She couldn’t hear anything. Again, it was horrible. But that was a funny little thing that we’d do. Sorry.

  DAVE MARTEL: She was not completely deaf. She’s just a little hearing-impaired. She wears a hearing aid. That’s a shame that people would take advantage. I don’t imagine she was aware of that.

  KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: There was some teasing and bullying when I was younger, but mostly friends and family were indifferent. As were most Canadians.

  CHRISTINE MCGLADE: Canadians are funny. When people here are successful, they often go to the States because they don’t get support at home. Sometimes we’d get a jealous reaction from kids in the city, but I didn’t get any of that from my close friends I associated with. They just thought it was a funny, strange thing that they didn’t give a lot of weight to.

  ROSS HULL: For me, I probably got more recognition for doing Are You Afraid of the Dark? after we were done than when we were actually shooting it.

  BRENDA MASON: The kids would be amazed when they came into the station and would find bags and bags of fan letters from the U.S.

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: As a fourteen-year-old, I don’t know if I knew what to make of that. In some ways, I thought it would be more interesting to be in the States and sort of revel in that attention. Not that I think that’s of great value now. But as a kid, there’s an appeal to having some of the affirmation about the show’s success, whereas here in Canada, I was just as likely to get picked on or made fun of by older kids: “Oh, you’re on that stupid show.”

  ROGER PRICE: When they flew down to the States, they were sometimes mobbed. The Americans are a demonstrative people, like the Brits. But Canada is a whole country of Minnesotans.

  ABBY HAGYARD: Alasdair was horribly self-conscious after that. It took him a while to get over that. That really blindsided him.

  ADAM REID: It was easier back then. We didn’t have the “kid actor” system that there is today. There weren’t ten agents and whatever for every actor . . . We had kids who were interested in expressing themselves and had a lot to express. We didn’t have kids who were doing things because their parents thought they should.

  MICHAEL BOWER: Timothy [aka Trevor] Eyster’s mother was like a stage mom, and that was pretty tough. “My kid this, my kid that . . .” Oh God, it was annoying! His mother ran his life.

  MEGAN BERWICK: His mom was really difficult. Really mean.

  TREVOR EYSTER: I don’t mean to sound cold, but I’m certainly not concerned about my mother’s reputation.

  DONNIE JEFFCOAT: Omar Gooding’s mom was always on set and was very much a big part of his career back then. It was nice to have her there, because my parents weren’t really around and she did take care of us quite a few times!

  MICHAEL BOWER: There were a lot of mothers on the set, but all of them kind of became part of it. Venus DeMilo’s mother was a manager and ended up managing one or two of the other actors, getting them parts and cameos in other shows. Megan’s mother ended up becoming the set photographer because she had a really nice camera and was taking photos of the cast and crew.

  TREVOR EYSTER: I thought Danny Cooksey’s mom was cool, because I was envious of the relationship he had with her. I really, really liked Venus’s mom a great deal. The few times I met Bower’s father, I thought he was a gracious man.

  FRED KELLER: Christine Taylor’s mom was a stage mother and insisted that she tow the line. Her mom was very chatty, very polite, very nice, but very much watching over Christine. More so than the other kids’ parents were.

  SEAN O’NEAL: My mom was pretty much my chauffeur. She got me where I needed to be for years. She was always involved in the business and with my coworkers.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: Melissa Joan Hart’s mom was difficult. She was. I only dealt with it when Mitchell Kriegman needed another bad guy to step in.

  JOE O’CONNOR: Melissa loved her mom, but her mom’s a show mom.

  DAVE RHODEN: My mom’s an exceptional person. But a little different, I guess you could say. They had called to invite me back to season three—this was told to me by my dad—and at the time I guess my mom thought I was getting a little too big for my britches. My mom’s also borderline bipolar. Very emotional roller coaster–type person. She’d gotten a call one day from Nickelodeon: “Hey, we want to talk with you about Dave’s contract for season three.” And she answered the phone and just went off and was like, “I DON’T CARE IF HE EVER COMES BACK TO NICKELODEON!” Screaming at the top of her lungs and slamming the phone down. That was the end of the negotiations.

  VANESSA LINDORES: Roger would not have tolerated stage parents. That would have driven him nuts. I’m sure if there were any, they got nipped in the bud very quickly.

  ROGER PRICE: When we started looking for new kids, we always arranged it so th
at at the final call the parents were entertained with refreshments in the boardroom by some of the kids who were already on the show. Ostensibly, this was so the new parents could ask any questions they wanted to of the established kids. In fact, it was so the kids already on the show could screen the new parents. Even the best kid in the world would have been passed over if their parents had lamentably failed their part of the audition.

  GEOFFREY DARBY: A lot of kids wanted to be on You Can’t Do That on Television. It wasn’t particularly difficult to find them. We had one diva parent who thought her kid was a star. And that kid was fired.

  ROGER PRICE: I did not much care what parents thought. Their job was to be good, supportive parents to their kids. My job was to make TV shows. Kids were not allowed to take scripts home. Kids do not talk to parents much anyway.

  ADAM REID: That was one thing Roger insisted on: We were never to read over the sketches with our parents. It wasn’t that the scripts were secretive. He just didn’t want anyone to influence what was actually happening.

  VANESSA LINDORES: I don’t remember my parents ever being in the studio. They dropped me off and picked me up. That was it. Later, I took the bus to work. Funny, now that I think about it.

  MARJORIE SILCOFF: Our parents weren’t allowed on the set. Today, AFTRA requires a parent or parental figure for each kid to be on set. There was something about that that gave my mother pause.

  BRENDA MASON: It was a huge leap of faith, considering the bizarre things the kids were required to do.

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: Most of our parents, in retrospect, seemed relatively comfortable with us doing it. If they had any doubts or concerns, it wasn’t really brought up. It wouldn’t have been brought up with us. We were eleven, twelve, thirteen . . .

  ABBY HAGYARD: Roger made sure there was always a female chaperone on set. She was a trained therapist and a lovely woman. She happened to be the mother of two of the boys who had already gotten cast on the show. And if Les Lye wasn’t around, I was around. We had the makeup woman, Carole Hay, Geoff Darby . . . There was no situation—to my knowledge—where the kids might have been taken advantage of.

  ADAM REID: I had one sketch that dug at me. It was Mom and me on the back porch, and I said, “Mom, there’s no way I’m going to school wearing this shirt. This shirt makes me look like a girl.” And I take off the shirt. “What are you doing, Adam?” “And these pants! They’re too tight, and there’s no way I’m going to go to school in these pants.” So I’m standing basically in my underwear, and she says, “Adam, you can’t go to school with nothing on.” “Fine. I can’t go to school.” And I go inside, shut the door, and lock her out. But to strip down to your underwear as a prepubescent boy—and doing it four, five times . . . Everyone’s very respectful and it’s a kids’ show and everyone’s having fun, but there’s still a part of me . . . I felt pretty vulnerable. Brenda Mason came up to me afterward and put her arm around me and said, “That was really good. Are you okay?” And I was sucking back tears: “Yeah, I’m okay, I’m okay.” “You did a great job, buddy.” It felt like a bit of an initiation. If you watch the sketch, you’d have no idea that I’m actually kind of upset or embarrassed.

  MARJORIE SILCOFF: We were all kids, but I know myself to be an above-average sensitive person and the thought of being ridiculed really horrified me.

  BOB BLACK: Marjorie was a relative outsider amongst the kids. I would say Marjorie was more on the edge than in the middle. In any group of kids, you’re going to have someone who’s more in the center of the social action and others who aren’t.

  JESSICA GAYNES: Omar Gooding would sometimes turn and walk away from me because his mother had said at the start of the season, “Don’t make her upset! She has a job to do, and she is sensitive!”

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: Dressing up like a girl or being half-naked or stuff like that? At fifteen, these are not the things I want to stand out for! It was enough to make things uncomfortable. Especially the older I got.

  JOSH MORRIS: Roger loved seeing little boys in dresses. He thought that was hilarious. But the boys didn’t like it so much. He’d pick the boy who least wanted to be in a dress and make him wear it.

  ADAM REID: Five or six of us went down to LA with Roger as kind of a field trip. Roger found out Doug and Matthew had gotten in a fight—it was just Doug being Doug, a bit of a bully—and instead of punishing Doug, Roger said, “Let’s go to a women’s department store.” We all walked in, and Roger said, “Doug, pick your dress. Matthew, pick your dress.” And they spent the rest of the afternoon in dresses as a joint punishment. Through that, Matthew and Doug bonded to an extent. They made it through the rest of the trip together . . . and got along.

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: It was probably ’84, ’85. It was nothing serious. I wasn’t really involved. I wouldn’t have worn a dress.

  ROGER PRICE: People do horrible things to kids and make them wear dresses in real life, too. I went to a German school for boys in Switzerland. It was a nice school. Our dienstmutti or “service duty mom” used to tell us what to wear, brush our hair, bathe us, scrub us three times a day in a tub, make sure we did our homework, and pull down our pants and smack our butts occasionally. She kept a dress, a sort of hideous Heidi outfit for bad boys to wear. If she was displeased with you, you found it on your bed. I found it on my bed a couple of times, but I never wore it. You always promised to be good in the future and she always relented.

  BOB BLACK: Roger’s worldview is that kids and old people are the two most discriminated against. That’s very Roger.

  ALISON FANELLI: What shocked my parents most was when I decided to stop doing it and go to medical school. They expected me to go, be there for three weeks, freak out, and go back to liberal arts. It was harder on them for me to make the change to become a doctor than it was for me to go into show business. What parents say that now?

  MICHAEL MARONNA: I’m so grateful—when I see kid actors having stage moms—that my parents didn’t try to force me into it.

  MICHELLE TRACHTENBERG: That’s the difference between having stage parents—not actually having the choice to be on set—and people like me, who absolutely loved it. I would hate going back to school, because I would always want to be back on set. If anything, I would be too excited to be there and would have to remember to calm down. And to not drink so much cream soda.

  DAVID JOHANSEN: They were good kids on Pete & Pete. Not like your typical asshole kid stars. It was very refreshing.

  HARDY RAWLS: Danny and Michael were incredibly smart kids and knew their scripts. They had to be just as professional as the adults but also kids on camera, whereas, as an adult actor, I acted like a big kid and got paid for it.

  TOBY HUSS: They seemed like “little Vikings,” those guys. That’s how I made that phrase up, actually.

  ELIZABETH HESS: Melissa may punch me in the eye for telling this story, but it is kind of adorable. There was a period of time in the nineties when bustiers were all of a sudden a big deal. Melissa wanted one, and for her fourteenth or fifteenth birthday party, I went to this junior shop and found this cute little bustier. She opened her present from me and she screamed. She was thrilled and shocked all at the same time! She wanted to kiss me and kill me at the same time. She was so embarrassed and so excited. I think they actually created a story line from it.

  ALAN GOODMAN: You know, in one stretch, we did twenty-two episodes, and I think Melissa asked me for three line changes. That’s it.

  MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: Whenever you’re working on any show with a central character, you start to do everything you can to make sure the character fits the actor like a glove. So I started writing around Melissa and would put in things she would actually say and do to make Clarissa even more like her.

  LISA LEDERER: Mitchell used to describe Clarissa as someone he admired. As a woman, I was grateful for that. Yes, Melissa is near and dear to our hearts as well, but her character actually
became a living person to us, and we all felt a responsibility to continue representing her as Mitchell’s original idea. She was a savvy girl, and we liked that about her.

  LISA MELAMED: I knew Christine Taylor liked to sing, so I wrote an episode where her character would sing. I knew Joe Torres was an artist, so I did an episode where I had him draw. Stuff like that always makes the show better because it brings something really authentic to the actors.

  CHRISTINE TAYLOR: That was sort of fun to see an episode being about something that was an interest to us.

  MARJORIE SILCOFF: There was a very sadistic element on the You Can’t Do That on Television set, okay? If they knew you had a weakness, they would pounce on it. You did not tell them what the kids said about you or if your family had a nickname for you. What a lesson for an eleven- to fourteen-year-old! I’m lucky to say, they didn’t find any of mine at the time.

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: There are some things I might question in retrospect—fat jokes about Lisa, and a certain amount that was probably over my head at the time in terms of what was tactful or funny. Probably not always the healthiest thing for kids.

  BOB BLACK: The fat jokes didn’t make sense with Christine McGlade, because she was tiny. It was like, “What the heck?” And Lisa was not a stick, but still . . . There’s just too much that’s happened in the world in connection with teenage girls being afraid of being fat, and I don’t think we need to add to that.

  KIRK BAILY: I did feel at one point, “Donkeylips is going to have another name we refer to him by, right?” As the counselor, they made fun of me—not for weight but for cluelessness. But Ug was an adult.

  MICHAEL BOWER: When you’re that young, you don’t realize you’re being made fun of, in a sense. In that moment, it didn’t really bother me.

  STEVE SLAVKIN: I wanted kids, and I wanted them to be as natural as they could be. I didn’t want them with a lot of makeup or combed hair. I wanted to see them fumbling; I wanted the lisp and the stutter and the weirdness. You embrace them for their kid-ness. Michael Bower just did it. There was no concern that would mess him up or that the other kids would make fun of him.