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

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