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

it.
    BOB MITTENTHAL: The problem with the messiness is it became an arms race at that point. How do we top ourselves every time? There was some frustration on that level.
    ALAN SILBERBERG: Yeah, it was pretty crazy. What was hard was trying to come up with different ways to make messes.
Double Dare
got bigger and bigger, and the stunts got bigger and more mechanical. It was a lot of pies in the pants; I mean, how many different ways can you do that?
    MIKE KLINGHOFFER: We always used to say at
Double Dare
that one of the reasons that show was successful was your parents told you not to play with your food and we’re letting you play with your food. It’s as simple as that. You were going against authority. You were going against the convention.
    BOB HUGHES: We have no regrets about misleading children. We all grew up in the sixties and seventies, and we were all completely antiauthoritarian. It was just built into our DNA. We had suddenly been given this megaphone and we could turn on authority and say what
we
wanted to say. And that what
you’re
going to say isn’t always right.
    ALAN GOODMAN: It’s not that we ignored the rules and it’s not that we thumbed our noses at the rules. It’s that we didn’t
trust
the rules more than we trusted our own understanding of things. So we actually lived by a lot of rules. We just questioned them first. I still do that in my career today.
    BOB HUGHES: And a lot of times that helped us, because we did things that were unexpected or different. But other times . . . it hurt us because we were so naïve.
    ELIZABETH HESS: I grew up with such a strict upbringing. For me, it was so liberating to be a liberal, permissive, generous, nonauthoritarian figure. I think
Clarissa
in a lot of ways broke a lot of the sitcom-y rules. I feel there’s something very empowering in it for the kids watching it. So maybe the parents on the show are fallible and they trust their kids more than they should, but the message of that in
Clarissa
is that if kids mess up, it’s about parents giving you some space to figure it out instead of having all the answers and being overprotective. It’s a good thing I’m not a mom, huh?
    CHUCK VINSON: With
Clarissa Explains It All
, it took me back to when I was a young kid and there were things I wanted to say to adults . . . but couldn’t really say them. And I think that’s what the success of the show was: You may
think
it, but Clarissa
said
it.
    ABBY HAGYARD: If there were more of that kind of stuff, you’d have fewer, say, Columbine issues. When you feel, as a human being—age has nothing to do with it—that you don’t matter, that your opinion has no weight, that you have no value, that there’s no future for you, that no one cares . . . that’s the worst situation to be in.
    CHRIS VISCARDI: We loved the idea of having a really defiant character like Little Pete. A character that would do and say all the things that we probably never as kids ourselves would have been able to express for kids. That also came out of the sensibility of the network at the time.
    WILL MCROBB: Occasionally there was a word we couldn’t use. We could use “blowhole” and “fudgelicker,” but we couldn’t say “nipple.” It was pretty arbitrary.
    HEATHER SHEFFIELD: The way we arrived at “sucks hose water” as a catchphrase was Nick wouldn’t let us say something “sucks.” It had to “suck eggs” or something. And somebody said, “Can we say it ‘sucks hose water’?” Sometimes Standards and Practices could be odd at times. I did a bit that was a Pamprin takeoff that would give
other
people cramps. They didn’t want to touch the subject of menstruation, and when they did agree to do it, we had to be very overt about it. They were really weird.
    D.J. MACHALE: There was some concern from Nickelodeon up front that there was gonna be a big push-back against
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
So much so that they asked in the beginning if we could base our