Free Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age by Mathew Klickstein Page A

my first thing:
Do kids want to jump in that crap?
    ALAN SILBERBERG: In the beginning of
Double Dare
, I didn’t get how it was gonna work. How were people going to
want
to get into the physical challenges and go running through baked beans?
    ROBIN RUSSO: I felt the opposite of that. Once I saw the very first group that came in for the very first show of
Double Dare
, I turned to my stage manager and I said, “This is gonna be a huge hit.”
    GERRY LAYBOURNE: The first day that we shot, I’m sitting in the bleachers and the set is so spectacular. The kids have
never
seen anything like this. The doors open, the kids come in. It was electric. I have never heard so many little kids swear in my life. It was fantastic.
    KENAN THOMPSON: Along with
Danger Mouse
and
You Can’t Do That on Television
, I was a big
Double Dare
fan. On
Double Dare
, they were just having a good time, you know what I’m sayin’? Jumping around in whipped cream just for fun. On
You Can’t Do That on Television
, they were getting
slimed
. No other network was sliming people like that. The image of that green stuff coming down—every time I would turn it on, it would stay with me.
    ANNETTE LESURE: The type of stuff we did on
Wild & Crazy Kids
was fun for
any
kid. At the time, producer Richard Crystal—who is Billy Crystal’s brother and is a clone of him except for being lanky and narrow—did specifically ask me if I was into sports. And I said I didn’t play football or anything like that. But it was very exciting because it was new stuff every week. Stuff I’d never heard of before that they’d just randomly make up. One week we were on donkeys playing basketball, and another we’d be on trampolines or something else.
    VENUS DEMILO: The pie fight with Heidi and me was really great. We stayed up so late doing that. Throwing pies, resetting, throwing pies, resetting . . . The next morning, I had to take my entrance exam for high school, and I still had whipped cream in my hair!
    HEIDI LUCAS: There was an episode with a celebrity rock star coming to camp, and ZZ and I had to lay on the grass and use parts of our body covered in powder so he could see us from the plane flying overhead. Afterward, I was picking baking dough out of my hair and nails and every part of my body you could possibly imagine that could fit dough—which was disgusting—for days. That probably showed on my face. Could I have been a little high-maintenance? In times like that, yeah.
    HARVEY: As I was the “goofy sidekick,” when it was time to try out a new stunt or something, there was a lot of mess and I said it was okay, that I was low-maintenance. But here was my one hard-fast rule: “I’ll do anything, jump into any substance you want . . . as long as the cameras are rolling.” As long as I knew it wasn’t just for somebody making me jump in a big pile of green shit, as long as it was for the narrative thread of the show. Which is a pretty highfalutin phrase to associate with
Double Dare
.
    ROBIN RUSSO: Being the only female on
Double Dare
, I always got the brunt of the mess. I didn’t mind the mess itself, and I got messy
a lot
. The problem was when I’d get
really
messy. Especially on the road show. I would have to get on a plane twenty minutes later. It’s hard to fly when you’re smelling like eggs and gook.
    DONNIE JEFFCOAT: I was the one on
Wild & Crazy Kids
who got picked on, because I think Omar Gooding was protected by his mom half the time, so she would never let them do half the stuff they did to me to him. Any time there was a stunt or something crazy-messy, it was usually done to me. By the last season, I started complaining. “Really? At ten o’clock in the morning, you’re going to pour this vat of crap on me?”
    JOANNA GARCIA: At one point I had been slimed more than anybody for promotional things we had done. I would always blow the challenge or something and would end up getting slimed more than anybody. But I was okay with