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

  HEIDI LUCAS: In the episode where Donkeylips had a crush on Dina, we were supposed to go to this dance together—the invitation was originally supposed to go to the character of Michael. There’s this scene where the girls are in their cabin and Telly and ZZ are basically telling my character that I have to go to this thing even though I really don’t want to. And I said something mean about his hair or his breath or what he was wearing . . . and in real life, it hit me: I don’t know this person. That’s not what I would have done in real life. You don’t make judgment calls like that. I wasn’t certain my opinion was the right one, though, and I was thinking at the time that we were getting paid to perform the script that people were getting paid to write.

  STEVE SLAVKIN: Michael Bower’s a really nice guy, and he’s a really talented actor. He actually sort of brought the character of Donkeylips to life. Kids get bad nicknames in their lives. I think this was one of the first times on TV when a weight-challenged child got a mean nickname. And a kid watching this would go, “This is real. We know kids like this.” Or, “That’s me and I can identify with that.” Salute Your Shorts wasn’t some sugarcoated Saturday morning sitcom.

  HEIDI LUCAS: The problem with that is at the end of the day, he has to go home looking like Donkeylips. And that’s a problem I didn’t realize until way later. I could have said something to make him feel better, but I didn’t have the mental capacities to, because I was twelve.

  TREVOR EYSTER: I did feel bad for him in many ways—and looking back now, worse—because he was being made fun of in a way that was not something he could change.

  MICHAEL BOWER: Now I want to get in better shape for my health, but when I was younger, I thought if I got skinnier, I would lose the extra income from acting. Since I was paying the bills and really supporting my family, I was nervous about it.

  MEGAN BERWICK: He takes care of his brother and dad. He was the person who pulled through for his family and had these responsibilities since the time he was really young. When I was eight or nine, I had an agent who told me I either needed to lose five or ten pounds to be the lead girl or gain twenty pounds to be the fat character actor. They say that kind of thing to all kids.

  KENAN THOMPSON: Shit like that, I wasn’t really paying attention. I was cool being me, because I was having fun. I knew I didn’t fit certain free shirts we would get, but I was like, “Just give me a bigger size or I won’t wear this shit.” It wasn’t like I was going to places and they were turning me down because of how I looked. If that was happening, then I probably would have changed certain things. It was more about the people who cared about me wanting me to take care of myself. But I was chillin’. What can I say? I like hamburgers.

  TREVOR EYSTER: At the time, Bower’s defense mechanism maybe was a rough exterior. I was the “brainiac” sharing a dressing room with him, and one day he came out and said, “I just took the biggest shit of my life! I swear to God, it was this size!” Ewww! Gross! To a geek, it was something I just absolutely couldn’t relate to. I tried to politely laugh.

  DANNY COOKSEY: Michael Bower didn’t have to make a joke, because he was there and he would go for it. He was like Chris Farley.

  MEGAN BERWICK: There was this girl on set, one of the extras. And she was really pretty. And snobby, too. Michael goes up to her and says, “I thought you were really, really pretty . . . until I got to know you.” You can’t tell a girl that! But that’s just the way he was.

  MICHAEL BOWER: They enjoyed me, but I don’t think they got my humor, because I was sort of a weird, fat kid. Tim Eyster and me, we had contradicting egos. Now that I know he was a homosexual . . . I got that vibe back then. I was eighteen, nineteen, and knew something was different. But he was very talkative and techie and . . . very Jewish. He was analyzing everything. And I’m one of those free spirits: “Just let it happen.” That was a conflict, sharing a room with him.

  TREVOR EYSTER: I felt very ostracized. For me, going through that geeky, nerdy, awkward prepubescent phase happened in front of the camera. Whether in high school or on set, I was this lanky—well, lanky would imply tall, and I wasn’t even tall—awkward-bowl-haircut mama’s boy with glasses that had a kinda high voice.

  HEIDI LUCAS: I don’t want to say I was Tim’s protector, because by no means did I go out of my way to protect him . . . but I felt like a big sister. Almost. He made me smile in a very innocent way. If he tried a joke and it didn’t work, who cares? It’s just Tim.

  MEGAN BERWICK: Tim drove me insane. He was used to being the youngest, and I was younger than him, so there was all this funny competiveness between us. But at the same time, he just annoyed me. Like a little brother annoys you. Arghh! I didn’t hang out with him. I hung out with all the other kids. I mean, he’s a really nice guy, but . . .

  VENUS DEMILO: Tim was hyperactive and he was the youngest person in a group of kids. He was still part of the group. We all liked each other. But we might have picked on him more. He was kinda nerdy.

  TREVOR EYSTER: It was really tough. What complicated it for me was that I was going through a sexual identity crisis. I’m probably the only cast member who doesn’t qualify as straight. Turns out Danny Cooksey was cordial when he needed to be, but we’re in the bathroom and I hear them talking about thinking I’m a “fag,” you know? Later on, it turned out I met a girl who knocked my socks off, and I realized I didn’t bat for the other team 100 percent either. Which was a whole different realization much later.

  RICK GALLOWAY: Things were a little cliquey on Welcome Freshmen. Chris Lobban and Dave Rhoden got along real well. Jill Setter and Jocelyn Steiner got along really well. So that left me as kind of the oddball of the group.

  DAVE RHODEN: Dude, I was a total dick to Rick Galloway. I owe that guy so many apologies. I was probably trying to overcompensate for being a nerd, and Rick was a dude that we always picked on. The worst thing I ever did was we were in our little break room and we were eating dinner one night and Jill Setter was talking about how her school was doing an adopt-a-whale program and I turned to Rick and said, “How does it feel?” Because Rick was a little chunky back then. And he got up and cried; he left. I didn’t know . . . that Rick had been adopted.

  BOB MITTENTHAL: Rick was a handful. He was attention-starved because he was homeschooled and didn’t get to be around a lot of kids all of the time. As a result, being on set was paradise for him. There were all these people around to talk to and he just loved it. As a result, he could be pretty unfocused and needy at times.

  RICK GALLOWAY: I love Bob Mittenthal. He was always very sweet, very nice, even when things got very crazy. Or seemingly.

  DAVE RHODEN: Bob and I had a great relationship, and in fact, at one point he came to me and was like, “Hey, I noticed you’re not doing all those one-liners and zingers on Rick anymore. Is something wrong?” I was like, “Nah, my mom told me I shouldn’t be doing that anymore.” And he was like, “Oh man, that’s too bad. I thought that was hilarious.”

  BLAKE SENNETT: When I first started, I wanted the others to think I was cool and not bad as an actor. My character was cocky and charming, and I wanted to be that. In the first episode I was in, I had to hurl a baseball with incredible velocity and accuracy so it could sail into home and get the guy out. I had to do that! I can’t throw a ball that incredibly far! I’m not an athlete. I was worried they would think I was an idiot.

  SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ: Early on in Roundhouse, I was playing the mom, and it just stuck. Buddy Sheffield continued to develop it, but I’d like to think my inflection and my delivery had something to do with it.

  BUDDY SHEFFIELD: The mom was just a compilation of every TV mom. The things she was concerned about were what every other TV mom was concerned about. And the dad was a self-contained dad. That’s why I put him in the roll-around chair with the TV and BBQ and everything attached right to it.

  JOHN CRANE: I played a number of characters, but one was the dad who was thi
s big, bombastic idiot. I grew up watching All in the Family, and I always thought my character was kind of clueless like Archie Bunker. Blue-collar, too. One of Buddy’s things was that the dad would always say, “Pull my finger!” He wasn’t exactly the classiest guy around. Especially when the chair came around . . .

  CRYSTAL LEWIS: The chair was definitely like a cast member! Sometimes it seemed to have a mind all its own. It cracked me up that it would have new additions every week, regularly being transformed to fit sketches and episodes. We weren’t really encouraged to climb on it. Also, it might run you over if you weren’t paying attention.

  DAVID SIDONI: The first week, it was just a fight: Everyone wanted to play on that thing.

  SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ: John Crane had tricks with that thing. He could make it go fast and spin it around and stuff. It was really difficult to maneuver, but I never worried he was going to run into me. No one else could be trusted with it, though.

  JOHN CRANE: I was playing the dad on the show because I was about ten years older than the rest of the cast. Micki Duran was seventeen when we did the show, and I was thirty. The rest of the guys and girls were twenty-one, twenty-two. I was married. I had kids. If I hung out or went for a drink after the show, it was usually with Rita, Buddy, and Benny.

  SHAWN DAYWALT-LUTZ: The role you play in a show makes its way into your relationships. And everyone played my kid. Even though I wasn’t old enough to be anybody’s mom on the show, I did feel somewhat maternal about everyone. I still do.

  DANNY TAMBERELLI: I don’t really know where I stopped being myself and started being Pete. Or the other way around.

  TREVOR EYSTER: Sometimes it’s, “Oh, sorry I called you Sponge!” It might be a new friend who’s a fan. I really don’t care, because I felt very, very married to that character. Sponge and I are one. I’ve been both heralded and harshly criticized for that.

  VENUS DEMILO: I’ve always participated in dance and cheerleading. I’m an active girl. So my character fit. It did definitely resonate with me.

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: I was essentially playing myself. It was a strange mix. Even just Roger’s choice of us using our real names created for me a bit of uncertainty: “Am I supposed to be me? Or a character?”

  BLAKE SENNETT: It’s hard to remember what’s real and what’s part of the show.

  VANESSA LINDORES: Pretty much played ourselves. Don’t recall being confused.

  OMAR GOODING: I was definitely playing myself: an excited kid doing what he loves!

  RICK GALLOWAY: I always had problems with the way people viewed me as my character. It was this feeling that people thought I was this stupid actor.

  ALASDAIR GILLIS: Kevin Kubusheskie is another character who was kind of a dopey dimwit that wasn’t him. It was an exaggerated aspect of Kevin being kind of laid-back, kind of foreshadowing the “teen slacker.” But he wasn’t that.

  ROGER PRICE: No one in real life is as dumb as these kids sometimes appeared to be. And they were selected for their high intelligence. We exaggerated their existing character traits quite a lot. Otherwise, they were themselves.

  MICHAEL BOWER: I was a character on a Nickelodeon show named Donkeylips. There was no “development” on that, really. Every role you see on TV—unless it’s an older, really good actor playing it—is always 70 percent that person at that point in their life with the other 30 percent being from acting class or something. With me, they had one fat dude. They weren’t going to say, “Come in for Ug.” That ain’t gonna work. Even the casting director was like, “Oh. You’re here for Donkeylips.”

  KIRK BAILY: It was a combo of what was on the page and what me and Slavkin and some of the early directors fashioned over time. I grew up in a family of four brothers, and the TV shows in the house were Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello. I was exposed to that style really early on. I also did a lot of training in New York City. Movement classes. And I went to Boy Scout camp for six or seven years straight with counselors who definitely had the attitude of, “Get it right or pay the price!”

  ARON TAGER: That’s the secret of playing comedy and playing scary: You believe that what you’re saying is important to you. You don’t have to put on a Bela Lugosi voice. You don’t have to do a Boris Karloff. In fact, all the best scary actors never did anything but play it straight. With the right music and if the director leaves you alone, everything is fine.

  D.J. MACHALE: That’s Horror 101. In most horror movies, they’ll have that little bit of lightness to it to kind of laugh and wink at it. Going to “the funny” is a natural tension reliever, because all the stories are so hyped anyway.

  RICHARD M. DUMONT: Ron Oliver let me have the last line in “The Tale of the Super Specs” when the spirit tries to get the three of us. I jumped under the table and said, “Take the children!” That was just an ad-lib, but Ron and D.J. MacHale were both like, “Yes, yes, yes! You’ve got to put that in!”

  RON OLIVER: Of course, when he came back up, his face was all red and puffy because of the dry ice machine blowing at him. It was kind of horrible.

  RICHARD M. DUMONT: “The Tale of the Super Specs” was, I think, the first episode with my character, Sardo, and was when he said, “That’s Sar-do! No ‘mister’—accent on the ‘doh!’” It was always in the script. It was a wonderful, wonderful bit that came, as best I know, from the wonderful mind of D.J. MacHale.

  SARAH CONDON: It’s very different casting kids than adults. They really have to have the essence of the character in them.

  HEIDI LUCAS: I did not specifically work with anyone on the set for character development. Thankfully—and ironically—being a brat was something that just came easily for me.

  MEGAN BERWICK: The first day of filming, Heidi brought in three racks of her own clothing because she wanted to make sure she looked beautiful. I was like, “Wow!” One of the nice things was that I got a little cooler working with cool girls who taught me how to dress better.

  HEIDI LUCAS: That doesn’t make any sense. That I brought additional clothes to the set? That’s not my recollection at all! Keep in mind, I had just moved from Illinois to Hollywood. I literally packed two suitcases. So I didn’t have a lot of clothes to bring.

  VENUS DEMILO: We all definitely shared qualities with our characters.

  KIRK BAILY: Heidi wasn’t stuck-up. Not at all.

  MICHAEL BOWER: Heidi’s like her character. To this day, she’s in her own world. It has to be her way.

  HEIDI LUCAS: I promise this is not just me wanting to have the world think I’m not a brat, but there’s not a lot to me that was in Dina.

  STEVE SLAVKIN: Heidi was smart, funny, and extraordinarily talented. She was a great actor and a total pleasure to have around. Whatever we wrote for her, she made it better. All of the kids had a little bit of their character in them, and that’s what made them so interesting and real.

  TREVOR EYSTER: Steve is a very diplomatic guy, but I would have to confirm that everyone was very much their character.

  MARJORIE SILCOFF: They loved having kids with braces, and I myself had braces on my last one or two shows. They loved it because of how “normal” it made the kids look. It was frustrating that my awkward phase was caught on video for everyone to see, but there you have it. Making kids feel better about having braces.

  ROGER PRICE: I chose them for their potential, not for their experience. I tried to build up the self-esteem of the kids and let them always be aware of how important they were: to the show, to me, to the survival of Nickelodeon. This had the effect of calming kids down.

  VANESSA LINDORES: I did not audition. Carole Hay was my fourth-grade teacher, and somehow I ended up in her drama class she was teaching outside of school. Roger Price came into the class and would choose children to put on the show. It still baffles me, but somehow I ended up on it . . . for a long time.

  ROGER PRICE: If you’re a girl who looks in the mirror and see
s an imperfect face staring back at you, might you not take a little comfort from cross-eyed Vanessa being on your favorite show?

  JUSTIN CAMMY: Vanessa was cross-eyed and everybody constantly made fun of Lisa’s weight. I was clearly chubby for a period. Some of the kids couldn’t act and were clearly there representing a certain look or group. The show defied the star-good-looks mentality and let kids be kids.

  ADAM REID: The drama class was run in a very noncompetitive way. It was like Second City or Groundlings. It wasn’t like Roger came in the room and said, “You, you, and you are coming on the show.”

  ROGER PRICE: In the classes, it became obvious who was a future star and who was a spear-carrier. Nearly all of the kids got a chance to go in front of the cameras. But the ones that set my Geiger counter racing in the auditions were the ones that continued to do so in drama class and on set.

  ABBY HAGYARD: Alasdair had no reason to be jealous of a Kevin Kubusheskie or a Lisa Ruddy, because everyone was one of a kind. The kids were all taught that. You are what you are, and if you don’t get chosen for something, it doesn’t mean somebody else is better than you; it means that somebody fit the category better. If you’re four-foot-three and he’s six-foot-one, it’s not because you’re not talented. It’s because you’re four-foot-three.

  CHRISTINE MCGLADE: It was more of a collaborative ensemble feeling. No one was put in a special position, including me.

  JUSTIN CAMMY: There were those of us who were certainly not at the level of Christine or Lisa or Alasdair. There was a hierarchy and everyone knew what that hierarchy was. Roger had his favorites. He had a very, very special bond with Alasdair, and when Adam came around, it was clear he was deemed a rising star.

  ADAM REID: They would go through this huge process. The first thing was a height restriction. If you were over a certain height restriction, you were not going to go in. Roger was looking for short kids. They could grow up on the show and still look like a kid.