I didnt know anything about them.
I basically cold-called them.
Do something based on toys?
Credit: Nickelodeon; Courtesy Everett Collection
Or do original programming?
And my vote obviously was original programming.
I didnt want to do anything based on toys.
Courtesy of the Nickelodeon Animation Studio Archive and Resource Library
So thats how it started.
I took the ball and ran with it.
I basically just started hunting.
Courtesy of the Nickelodeon Animation Studio Archive and Resource Library
I went to LA for two weeks in late 88 and did pitches every hour.
I put the word out to animators: Im looking for ideas, Im looking for concepts.
The less developed, the better.
Courtesy of the Nickelodeon Animation Studio Archive and Resource Library
I want drawings, not a big pitch.
Nickelodeon gave me an hour and a half that we were going to fill as a block.
My idea and Nickelodeons consensus was to go find whatever you want.
Courtesy of the Nickelodeon Animation Studio Archive and Resource Library
I didnt want a consistent look like Disney.
I specifically wanted and was desperate to have three projects that looked completely different.
The first Nicktoon which Coffey sent to pilot came recommended from a friend.
Courtesy of the Nickelodeon Animation Studio Archive and Resource Library
Doug, a small-town dramedy about an imaginative middle-schooler, was born from a pitch by creator Jim Jinkins.
Id worked at Sesame Workshop, at HBO, at MTV.
And I had done one little disastrous animation for Nickelodeon.
It wasnt very good, either the experience or the result.
Often, they were dark or troubled or sometimes funny.
Id done other stuff trying to figure out who that was and why I was drawing these things.
Thats a life-changing phone call.
So I met Vanessa in her office and held up my little book proposal.
And he was like, Yeah… And I immediately knew what the show was going to be.
JINKINS:Doug is an exaggerated version of my memory of being a kid.
And then ran back down the hall, and Jim was just kind of in shock.
JINKINS:She came back to the room to say, Youre going to go to pilot.
And Vanessa to this day is like this.
She trusts her own gut and has a great vision for things.
She had experience in animation, and trusted me on maybe what I didnt even know I could do.
COFFEY:Doug, to me, was a show that was so missing for kids.
Really, since Charlie Brown.
It was speaking directly to them, to their feelings, their fears, their lives.
That really was Nickelodeon.
Nickelodeon was, Were kids.
Were the kids channel.
And so I thoughtDougfit into that perfectly, because it was their demographic and their story.
NEXT: We started to draw crazy-looking babies.
And the more outrageously funny they looked, the more we liked them.
[pagebreak]
Coffeys second find,Rugrats, was the least-developed pitch of the bunch.
Thats how it happened.
It was like magic.
Everyone was pointing atThe Simpsons do something like this, but for children.
Not your regular Saturday morning cartoons which everybody knew for 30 years.
And Arlene looked at our kids and said, Lets do a show about babies.
That film always stuck in my mind, and I continued thinking, Why was the baby doing that?
SoRugratswas basically the same theory: If babies could talk, what would they say?
PAUL GERMAIN (creator,Rugrats):Arlene said, I want to do a show about babies.
But thats all she had.
So that night, I went to bed thinking about babies, and what can we do with babies?
And I thought, I bet hes faking us out.
I bet when the adults leave the room, he suddenly shows his true colors.
I just had this fantasy.
Its what you think when youre a little kid.
You cant understand how a baby can be like that.
And I woke up thinking about that.
I pitched one that had four pages and five colored boards.
Vanessa looks at that and goes, No.
My next one has one page and one colored board.
Half a page and a black-and-white board.
Now Im down to my single-paragraph pitches.
No, no, no.
And I get to my list pitch, which is literally a sentence.
And she goes, I love it.
They didnt have anything written, no drawings.
But I said, Good!
Lets develop it together.
Rats on the rug, right?
And I thought, what a great title for the show.
At first Nickelodeon was a little nervous because they thought people wouldnt know what it was.
Theyd think it was literally a show about talking rats.
Because it reminded me too much of 80s Hasbro.
I said, The only thing: kindly, dont do realistic drawings.
And they said, Thats easy for us.
KLASKY:Our aesthetic was offbeat and quirky.
I personally didnt draw the way Disney did.
I drew artsy, cartoony, humorous drawings.
And Gabor came from traditional animation, but hes a visionary.
We both loved European art and Japanese animation.
Some people thought our style was ugly.
We thought it was beautiful.
CSUPO:We started to draw crazy-looking babies.
And the more outrageously funny they looked, the more we liked them.
They are all part of this world as I conceived it.
The human characters were integral to the concept and played off each other.
After I pitched this concept to the Saturday morning networks, they all thought I was crazy.
The black kid who is smarter than the white kids.
It was still too weird for Saturday morning.
I couldnt even sell-out right.
COFFEY: John came in during my L.A. hotel stay.
When I pitched their personalities and storylines she laughed and liked them even more.
COFFEY: I asked him if we could take those two characters and develop a show.
NEXT: The next thing youve got to do is build your production bible.
[pagebreak]
Nickelodeon ultimately ordered eight pilots and tested them across the country.
I oversaw them to a degree, but I didnt bring them in.
My three were the projects that were pitched to me.
JINKINS:Dougtested higher than the rest, it turned out.
I would argue it was because it was familiar.
It was the story of being a real kid.
That was the whole point.
But hes not cool.
Hes not a typical Nickelodeon kid who is powerful or cool.
Hes not a Charlie Brown loser, but hes sort of just in the middle.
Hes the guy thats trying to figure out whats going on.
And thats so true.
You havent gotten so self-conscious or cynical or sarcastic.
Youre still able to use your imagination or dream.
One or two might even believe in Santa Claus.
Youre beginning to wonder, but youre not sure.
And all these things I know are ancient stories, because I think kids are vastly more sophisticated today.
GERMAIN:Nick loved [Rugrats].
The thing did so well.
It was six-minutes long, and it was very well-directed by Peter Chung.
I did the voices, the voices mostly being the adults.
What was established right at the pilot was its about the intrepid exploration of the world.
Everythings new, everythings fantastic and gigantic, and even the most mundane things are exciting.
COFFEY:They greenlit the series forDougandRugrats, but Gerry wasnt really comfortable withRen & Stimpy.
Herb [Scannell] didnt really likeRen & Stimpy.
I mean, I was, but I knew it was so special.
And so I begged.
Ill be honest, I actually begged.
And so she gave me greenlight forDoug, 13,Rugrats, 13, andRen & Stimpy, 6.
JINKINS:The next thing youve got to do is build your production bible.
All those things let it become more and more real for me.
I wrote the whole thing like a software book from back in the day.
It was a labor of love.
In my minds eye, all the characters were already there.
He had Penny, a pig, and Home Fry, a chicken.
The idea was, Lets go to the Funny Farm.
Thats actually very easy for me, because once I create a character, I know them inside out.
The harder part was keeping the other story folks focused from veering away from their personalities.
Their idea of personality is to give them catch phrases to say over and over again.
For me, if I believe in the characters, the stories write themselves.
I get inside the characters and let them create the situation or story.
KLASKY:Initially, Paul and Gabor and I sat around the dining room table and talked and drew.
The characters in the pilot were Tommy, Phil, Lil, Grandpa, Stu, and Didi.
We started there, and then it expanded.
CSUPO:We started to put together this group of drawings and select.
So we knew that we needed a really sweet one.
We needed a little bit of a troublemaker.
We needed a little boss, and thats how we came up with Angelica.
GERMAIN:Once we went to series, we didnt really have enough characters.
I remember Gabor showed me an image of Chuckie that someone had drawn.
And he said, What if this were a bully?
And I said, He doesnt look like a bully to me.
I thought, What if we did a different kind of bully?
What if we had a girl bully?
I had been chased around and picked on by this girl in 4th grade when I grew up.
So then we came up with Angelica.
Shes a little older.
She can talk to adults.
Shes kittens and flowers to the adults, but shes a monster to the kids.
Thats how we came up with Chuckie.
COFFEY:Nickelodeon would ask aboutRugrats: Well, is the animation going to shake?
Is it too pre-school looking?
GERMAIN:There was a writer named Steve Viksten who just loved Angelica.
And this all really resonated with kids.
We tried to talk directly to kids and say, This is what its like, right?
This is how you feel.
But I was never nervous.
I was always excited.
Because I didnt really have anything to lose.
For me, I was just so passionate about the opportunity to be creative with such freedom…
It was an interesting job at the time.
A company that had never done a series of animation themselves, let alone three at a time.
JINKINS:Back in those days, every other day was different.
Were all just going to catch on fire!
The making ofDougwas very much like the show itself.
COFFEY:My job was to tell them to just go for it.
And my job was to pull back.
But oh my gosh, the stuff that was thrown at me… NEXT: I dont even remember who came up with Nicktoons…
I wasnt a fan of that.
Nicktoons was a new frontier.
Saturday morning cartoons at the time were about as entertaining as homework.
KLASKY:Nickelodeons target audience was 6-to-11-year-olds.
I think they gave us some leeway at times, and sometimes they didnt.
We took a lot of risks, and there was room to take them.
GERMAIN:We made a choice when we were doingRugratsto appeal to two audiences: kids and adults.
We got rid of a lot of topical stuff, which is not easy to do.
It slips in, and you do forget sometimes.
[Laughs] How did we know?
We know what kids like.
That kind of gross stuff.
And I would think Kricfalusi felt the same way.
He was not particularly kind about what he thought of our show, but thats cool!
Like I said, we were from different planets.
That made more sense to me.
COFFEY:I can only describe it as, I let my instincts work for me.
I wanted to create a meal.
A good-for-you, life-sustaining show, which isDoug.
And thenRen & Stimpy, which is just pure sugar.
Theres nothing good for you in it.
Its just fun to eat.
COFFEY:We started having think tanks about what we should we call this block.
I wasnt a fan of that.
NEXT: Dougwas always the third, sort of adopted child that was a little ignored.
Harry Potter under the staircase, is how it felt.
[pagebreak]
On Aug. 11, 1991, the shows premiered on a Sunday morning.
That day was dreamy.
But we werent on Saturday mornings.
We decided to launch Sunday morning.
It was really an interesting way that Nickelodeon laid out the plan to watch.
I thought it was really, really good.
The block started, and the ratings improved from a 1.0 to a 2.0 really fast.
It was promoted really well on-air by Nickelodeon and Scott Webb.
And we broke a record of 4.0 on our third re-run of the first episode.
We all got our bonuses.
GERMAIN:We were very curious about the numbers we got, and they were a whole new world.
The numbers really surprised us because we thought theyd be higher, but Nickelodeon was really happy with them.
They could sort of see the future in them.
The executives were all leaning towardsRen & Stimpy.
They liked the edginess of it because it felt like a show for them.
And we were often called that baby show.
And I was shocked.
I go, Really?
Theyre 12 years old and they still watch Rugrats?
That was surprising to me.
But as these kids grew up, they started finding these Easter egg jokes [for older people].
I didnt even know what that meant at the time, but now I get it.
It had some of that double appeal.
KRICFALUSI:The day of its premiere, Vanessa called me and told me they were getting great reactions.
She faxed over a funny letter from a little boy named Anthony.
Love,Anthony,P.S.
and bring your costumes.
I was reading it as the fax was coming through the machine.
I tore it out and ran into the story room to read it to everyone.
Then I said: Lets do it!
Lets have Ren and Stimpy visit Anthony in his country!
JINKINS:The show was pretty much like the character Doug.
Or pretty much like me.
At a glance, youll be like, So what?
And thats how this shows history was.
It was a slow build, and it really took years for people to make it destination viewing.
But once people figured out that part, they wanted to be there.
COFFEY:It was all about ratings, and it was a success based off ratings.
Whats the plan for a replacement?
And I said, Wait a minute.
You dont need to do that, because theyre going to work.
And he said, Vanessa, you dont know that.
Ill confirm of it.
And yeah, 25 years later, guess what?
Real Monstersto join the animation fold in later seasons.
The shows legacies as we view them now are long and celebrated, but layered.
I mean, we probably went too far.
When I watch some episodes now, Im like, Oh my God, did I really approve that?
And it wasnt easy.
I got in trouble.
John thinks he got in trouble, he should have been in my shoes.
JINKINS:I dont thinkDougwould have a chance of ever selling these days.
That would be a miracle, absolutely.
Those are direct quotes.Dougwas always the third, sort of adopted child that was a little ignored.
Harry Potter under the staircase, is how it felt.
And it only went to 52 instead of the guaranteed 65 [episodes].
Its a great show.
But we didnt leave Nickelodeon.
Nickelodeon sort of left us.
Even grown men, now 30, they say thatDougmade them a better man.
CSUPO:Rugratswas our very first creation, which Im really proud of because it succeeded greatly.
It gave me confidence about pursuing other ideas.
KLASKY:I didnt realize the impact thatRugratsreally had until recently, actually, in the last five years.
Because all these kids grew up, and they could all express it now.
We get letters and phone calls and people ringing the doorbell at the studio.
Ive heard it all over again, that mantra, and they all say the same thing.
Thank you for my childhood.
I think Nickelodeon really deserves a ton of credit for that.
COFFEY:The circumstances of time played a huge factor, because these shows werent committee-driven.
They were creator-driven or, creative-driven.
Everyone who touched any of these projects made the shows work.
Its not a one-person job.
It literally took a village to make those shows work, and I love all of them.
Were talking 25 years later about these shows for a reason.
And its not because they were different, but because they were good.
Id love to see all three of them come back.
All I can say is it was the hardest and best experience Ive ever had in my career.
