Nickelodeon:The Best of Slimes

Today we tell the story of the kids TV network that changed it all, Nickelodeon.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck,
and Jerry's here too, and that makes this a good
old-fashioned Stuff You Should Know edition.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's right. And unfortunately, we have to issue a COA
for this one.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Oh, yeah, and it is pretty unfortunate for sure.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah. I mean, you see the title Nickelodeon and you
think just a rip-roaring good time and nostalgia fest. And
it is that, but we kind of tell the whole
story of Nickelodeon, which very sadly includes some sexual abuse.
And so trigger warning for people in general and definitely
for parents listening with kids.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
There you go. Well done. We should just edit that
as a clip and anytime we have a COA, just
pop that in. Yeah, great. All right. So let's get
to the fun nostalgia part first, at least, right?

Speaker 1 (01:01):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
So Nickelodeon was probably a little after your wheelhouse, right?
Were you always a little too old for Nickelodeon? Or
was there ever a Venn diagram with you and Nickelodeon
and happiness in the middle?

Speaker 1 (01:15):
There's a brief time of a little bit of Nickelodeon
stuff for me, but I was just on the edge
of being a little too old. But some of the
stuff Like, I definitely remember You Can't Do That on
television and a little bit of Double Dare.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
But, yeah, I mean, this was right in the middle
of your wheelhouse, though, I bet.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
I watched this all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, that's great.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
I watched Pinwheel. I watched, like you said, You Can't
Do That on television, Double Dare. What else did I watch?
Danger Mouse, Inspector Gadget. Oh, wow. I mean, just basically
anything they would put on. Today's special. I was huge
into today's special. Anything they would put on, I would
definitely watch. And I loved it. All.

Speaker 1 (02:01):
I love it. Well, this one's for you, baby.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
Thanks a lot, man. One thing I did not realize, though,
is that Nickelodeon started in my home state of Ohio.
And I don't know if you've noticed or not, but
I'm pretty selective about when I claim Ohio is my
home state.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (02:18):
And I know you love to rub it in that
you're an Atlanta native and it's just, you know, I'm
a newbie, a carpetbagger. But at any rate, that's where
Nickelodeon started, actually, in Columbus, Ohio, as part of like
this test that Warner Cable did. Pretty forward thinking test
in 1977 where they're like, hey, you know, everybody watches

(02:39):
TV with antennas. We're going to launch the first cable
network in the United States, if not the world. Right.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Yeah, it was called Warner Cable. They opened that studio
in Columbus, like you said, and they had 30 channels
at first. I guess you pronounce it cube, huh?

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, that's what I'm going with.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
Q-U-B-E. And you could pay $ 10 a month and, you know,
Depending on what you were into, you could get shows
like Flippo's Magic Cars. They had an early show, kind
of preceded Star Search even, I think, called Talent Search.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, and I was wondering if Star Search grew out
of Talent Search, and I could find no correlation.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, I couldn't either. So we give that rumor two
and a half stars.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Very nice.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
I used to love Star Search.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
I never really watched it that much, but I do
know that Rosie O'Donnell got her start there. Oh, really? Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Oh, she killed.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
I was a big fan.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
She won like 15 weeks in a row or something
like that.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Was she, well, it had adult stuff too, or was
it just kids?

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Oh, her sets were filthy.

Speaker 1 (03:44):
Right. So yeah, they had talent search, but the cable
system had a gimmick at first, which was a remote
control that was wired to the cable box, I guess,
that let you interact with the shows. And it didn't
work out. I think they realized that that, gimmick, like

(04:05):
didn't fully work. Uh, they also had other financial difficulties and, um,
I think it launched in 77 when it was done
by 84, but, um, one of the channels, which was
pinwheel or C3, uh, lived on, it was created by
a woman named Vivian Horner, uh, who came from the TV,
the great TV show, the electric company. Yeah. And it

(04:28):
was commercial free programming for preschool kids.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
20 or no, 12 hours a day of it, 14
hours a day on weekends. And like you said, commercial free.
And that was the network, right? And Pinwheel also had
an eponymous show called Pinwheel, which I also watched a lot.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
Now, what was that?

Speaker 2 (04:49):
I mean, it was a show where live human actors
interacted with puppets. And the most memorable character for me
was Gary Gnu.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Oh, is that where that came from?

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, there's no Gnu's. Wait, there's no Ganoos, like good
Ganoos with Gary Ganoo.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
I've heard Gary Ganoo. I had no idea what the
origin was.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
So any word that started with N, he said good,
like he added that G at the very beginning.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
What a bit. Can you imagine him just hanging out
late one night, smoking a joint and being like, I've
got it.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, it was one of those things. It was late 70s,
early 80s, pot smoking, like kids... Like kids programmers, essentially,
is what that kind of show was. Okay.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (05:35):
It was good. But the whole network was called Pinwheel
2 at first until somebody was like, hey, I really
like the sound of the word Nickelodeon. And they said
it like 50 times in this one meeting. And finally,
everybody was worn down enough that they were like, we'll
change the network Pinwheel to Nickelodeon. I think that was
in 1979. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
Yeah, 79. And you're right. I think, you know, a
Nickelodeon was like an old timey like movie house that
you paid a nickel to get into. But they didn't
name it for that reason. I think they like you said,
I think they just thought it had a nice ring
to it, I guess.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Yeah. And also, weirdly, they had a an old timey
man is their first logo, an old timey man looking
into like a I guess like a small movie player. Yeah.
And it was like right in, it dovetailed with that
era where if you went to Wendy's, like their wallpaper
was made of like 1910 newspaper ads. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
Old Wendy's is great.

Speaker 2 (06:31):
And Tiffany lamps and all that.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Uh-huh.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
I'm still unsettled by those high lace women's boots.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
That they always advertised.

Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah. Too sexy.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
I might have seen ads for wicker wheelchairs, too. Maybe
that's where that came from. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
Your biggest fear.

Speaker 2 (06:46):
Yeah. But at any rate, they got rid of that
after a couple of years, and they came up with
the first good Nickelodeon logo, which is a silver pinball
with Nickelodeon written over it in different colors. It was
very pretty.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Yeah, very popular bubble letter style at the time. A
year later, in 1980, a guy named Cy Schneider, who
was an advertising executive, became the first president of the network.
He had a little experience. He was involved on the
marketing advertising side. when Mattel sponsored the Mickey Mouse Club
in the 50s. So he had a little bit of

(07:21):
experience with kids TV from the ad side, but this
was kind of a new jam for him. So he
started marketing Nickelodeon as the young people's network. And they
had some, you know, fun shows. I do remember, I
didn't watch any of these, but I remember Reggie Jackson's
World of Sports. I remember that being a thing. And
I also remember the Leonard Nimoy show being a thing.

(07:43):
Leonard Nimoy's standby, colon, lights, camera, action.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, I never saw or even heard of either of
those shows. But it kind of gives you a taste
of how Nickelodeon started out as slightly, it skewed slightly older.
So I can see 14-year-old boys watching those.

Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, I was nine at the time. So I was
aware it was around. I was aware of the show Livewire,
which was a live tape show in front of a
teenage audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater, even in New
York City. It was like a current event show. So
I knew about that show and it was really popular.
It won their, gave them their first Cable Ace Award.

(08:23):
And then I don't think we mentioned that they were
splitting airtime. Like they ran programming during the day, but
the A & E network was on after hours. Right.

Speaker 2 (08:34):
Sexy ballet.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Livewire, I looked into that a little bit because I
never watched it. I don't know that I'd even heard
of it to tell you the truth. But when I
saw like the set, It rang like a little bit
like a vague bell, but it was definitely older kids,
kids older than me, like teens. And there is a
there's a clip you can find of Adam Horowitz, King

(08:57):
Ed Rock from BC Boys. Oh, yeah. As a 17
year old posing as a like he went into the
audience of Livewire and he asked a question of Africa Bambada,
who is the guest at the time. He's like, hey,
have you heard that new record from the Beastie Boys,
Cookie Puss? And he got Africa Bombada to admit, like, yeah,

(09:18):
he'd listened to it and he had the record and
he liked it without ever saying, like, I'm one of
the Beastie Boys. Like, he was just plugging this as, like,
just some average audience member. It's pretty great.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
Oh, that's funny. I mean, Livewire had some good stuff. Like, R.E.M.
performed on Livewire in 83.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
The Ramones.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
The Ramones did. I know that Frank Zappa was a guest.
So they were definitely, like, somebody... Cool was running that show.

Speaker 2 (09:41):
Yeah. And not only like they were cool enough to
want those people on, they were cool enough to get
those people on that show. Right.

Speaker 1 (09:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
This is on Nickelodeon, everybody. And this is it was
one of their first like really great shows. And then
something else changed almost immediately. when Nickelodeon just really started
getting going. They brought on a woman named Geraldine Laybourne.
And she was kind of like, not the antithesis to

(10:09):
Cy Schneider, but certainly had a different view of what
Nickelodeon should be doing. Cy Schneider's thing was, you know,
like you said, he came from the advertising the kids world.
What's wrong with that? And Geraldine Laybourne's whole thing was like,
let's find out what the kids want and go on
that premise and not try to sell them stuff. Let's

(10:30):
just like really make this a network for kids rather
than just saying that's what it is. And really it's
for advertising or something like that.

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Yeah, for sure. I think Schneider was a bit older too.
If he was working on the Mickey Mouse Club in
the 1950s, this was like 30 years after that.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
And she also recognized like, hey, you know, a lot
of people are treating this network in these shows as
a stepping stone, like get in the door doing these
children's shows so they can go on and do other
things in Hollywood. And she was like, I want staff
that like wants to do this and wants and is
dedicated to like kids programming, which seemed like a really

(11:07):
kind of savvy move, I think.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
For sure. For sure. It didn't matter whether you did cocaine.
That was not part of it. It was how do
you feel about kids programming? That's right.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Full stop.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
One of the things that Nick did, I'm just going
to call it Nick because I watch so much of it.
I'm on a first name basis with it. Yeah. But
they would basically poach TV shows from Canada. Yeah. They
still do. As a matter of fact, there's still like
a lot of the shows that were on Nickelodeon that
I watched as a youngster. I was like, something's not
quite right with this show. Turns out they were all Canadians.

Speaker 1 (11:42):
As an American, it seems slightly sideways.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Exactly. I'm like, these people are really nice.

Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, exactly. You Can't Do That on Television was a
Canadian show that came from Ottawa Station a couple of
years previous from its debut on Nickelodeon in 1981. And
that was a great show. It was created by Roger
Price and Jeffrey Darby. And it was a skit show
that was like squarely aimed at making kids laugh, like
that kind of humor.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah. And one of the ways that they did that
is that the Teen and even preteen actors had like
a say in how the scripts went and like what
the scenes were. And so that was cool in and
of itself, because, I mean, they were speaking directly to you.
It kind of ran through that filter. And then also
they would. The show itself was almost like a character.

(12:32):
The show itself could be like a set or a
scene or something like that. And not just like them
chatting in between shooting. Like there could be, if I
remember correctly, there was a scene where one of the
kids was playing a character who was chained up in
a dungeon. And another kid who wasn't dressed like them
just came in and took over for him because that

(12:52):
kid had to like go home and do homework or
something like that. And they did it in the middle
of the scene. So it was just kind of weird
like that, and it really worked for that show. It's
a really good show. I went back and watched it,
and you definitely have to be of that age to
really appreciate it, but I remember loving You Can't Do
That on Television.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Yeah, I went back and watched a lot of this stuff,
like clips on YouTube, and I realized that I watched
more of this than I remember watching, I guess. And
I remember that guy... Who was the main guy on
that show, like the main adult cast member?

Speaker 2 (13:29):
His name was Les Lye.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
Les Lye. That's it.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
I think he went by Les, too, because they all
went by their real first names.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Yeah, it was kind of like if you've ever seen
the Larry Sanders show, it was kind of like that.
They would have these meta moments.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
Right. Well put. This preceded the Larry Sanders show and
was actually where it came from.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Are you joking?

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Well, it might have been.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
You never know.

Speaker 2 (13:54):
And Alanis Morissette was also on it, too, because you
can't have a Canadian TV show without having Alanis Morissette
on it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:00):
Ironic that she was on that show, right?

Speaker 2 (14:01):
I don't know. Do you think?

Speaker 1 (14:05):
Well, that was where the slime came from. Nickelodeon is
very famous for its slime. In fact, I am using
the title that Livia, who helped us with this, titled
it Nickelodeon, the slime of our lives. Great title. Yeah.
But Nickelodeon has always been associated with that green slime,
and it got its first dump on you can't do

(14:25):
that on television.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Yeah, if you said I don't know, you would get slimed.
That's just how it went.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
Oh, is that the trigger?

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Yeah, I don't make the rules. It's just how it went.
Except for one show, and this just goes to show
you how early 80s this was. They had an episode
where the Russians took over, and the slime was red
slime instead. If anyone who said the word freedom would
get slimed.

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Well, apparently the story of how it became green slime
was an accident because they had made the slime but
couldn't shoot that day or something, and it turned green
by the next day, and so they ended up with
green slime. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
And then I guess you would get a bonus of
something between $ 25 to $ 50. I guess it depends on
how much you held out for. And they would shoot
all the sliming scenes at the end of the day,
and then you would get slimed, and then they would cut,
and you would run off to the showers because... Different
iterations of slime sometimes turn to paste in your hair
if you didn't get it out fast enough. And they

(15:23):
finally found the right one is a methyl cellulose blend
that had zero allergens in it. So they could even
dump it on audience members without fear of litigation. Right. Yeah.
Or at least them winning litigation. But it went through
all sorts of different things like cottage cheese, vegetable oil,

(15:44):
vanilla pudding, jello for a little while.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah. Applesauce.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
Should we take a break?

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Yeah, I'm getting I'm getting kind of excited. So, yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
All right. It's getting good, everybody. So we'll be right
back with more on Nick.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (16:22):
All right, so You Can't Do That on Television was
a pretty decent success, but Nickelodeon itself was not like
a huge hit yet. In late 83, a guy named
Bob Pittman, who we've talked about, one of the founders
of MTV, and our boss at iHeartMedia.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Several rungs up. I don't know if he would consider
himself our boss.

Speaker 1 (16:48):
I think he may know who we are, at least.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Perhaps.

Speaker 1 (16:52):
Yeah, Bob runs iHeartMedia, and he became head of Nickelodeon's
parent company, which was Warner Amex at the time. He
was in 83. He was a lot younger than Cy
Schneider was. And the writing was on the wall that
like Schneider wasn't going to be around too long and
younger folks were going to be running this younger like

(17:15):
viewership network.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Yeah, and Pittman had a lot of cred around the
television world because of MTV just from two years before, right?
And so he took over Nickelodeon, or he didn't take
over Nickelodeon. When he became the head of Warner Amex,
he was now over the people who were running Nickelodeon,

(17:37):
and he took an interest in it early on. And
so after Schneider left, Geraldine Laybourne was put as the
head of the network. And now Nickelodeon really blossomed. Like
this is the Nickelodeon I remember and like really loved.
This is 1984, I think. Yeah. One of the first
things that Laybourne did was she turned to the Fred

(17:58):
Allen agency, which had helped basically figure out how MTV
should brand itself. She said, do this for Nickelodeon. And
they got to town. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:08):
The other thing they did was they started selling ads
and commercials.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
Right.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
Which they realized, I think, pretty quickly afterward, like, hey,
that's a pretty good idea to start getting some money
flowing in. So Fred Allen firm comes in. They said,
all right, we're going to do focus groups. We're going
to get kids together and we're going to find out
what they want. And what they found out was kids
were kind of roundly annoyed by adults that were patronizing

(18:37):
and trying to get them to watch something that basically sucked.
And they were tired of it. So they said, you
know what we're going to do then? We're going to
craft this network around this idea and this theme that
like this is for kids and this is for kids
to stand up, stand up and like shout like, hey,

(18:57):
you're not listening to me like this is for us
and do things that we want to see finally.

Speaker 2 (19:03):
Right. If I remember correctly, an early iteration of their
new logo was a child setting a couch on fire
inside a living room.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
I think you're right.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
Yeah. But they actually did redo the logo. They're like,
this pinball and rainbow letters thing is so childish and patronizing.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
Cy Schneider. Come on.

Speaker 2 (19:22):
I still like it.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
Oh, really?

Speaker 2 (19:23):
Yeah. I thought it was very cute. All right. I
would look at it all day long if I could.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
Well, you can do that if you want to.

Speaker 2 (19:32):
But they, I guess I could. But they changed the
logo by essentially picking what designers roundly think of as
the ugliest color around. It's Pantone. 21. I don't know
if you say the zero first, maybe. Pantone 021 Orange. Yeah.
now recognized pretty much everywhere as Nickelodeon orange. But at

(19:53):
the time, because everybody thought it was so ugly, no
one used it. So Nickelodeon basically claimed this ugly color
and it became just like completely synonymous with the network.
It was a great branding move.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Yeah, actually, I just looked up the previous logos and
I had forgotten the little pinball multicolored balloon letter thing.
But now that I see it, I totally remember it.
It was a good logo.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Yeah. Anything with different color balloon lettering is A-OK in
my book.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Well, you're a child of the 80s like me.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
And, you know, as we'll see, many of the sets
and everything in the 80s were like... I guess we'll
get to that, but they had some pretty legendary, like,
Super 80 sets on their shows.

Speaker 2 (20:33):
Yes, they do. Man, I could look at pictures of
those all day, too.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
But the logo was animated, so it could, like, you know,
take different shapes. Like, sometimes it was an ice cream
cone or a rocket ship or something. And then later on,
when slime became, like, sort of what the network was,
you know, at least, like, a symbol of the network,
it looked like a slime splat, and that's kind of
what they stuck with.

Speaker 2 (20:56):
Right. They also did bumpers. You know, coming in and
out of commercial breaks, like the animated ones. There was
a series of them by like a doo-wop singing group
called the Jive Five.

Speaker 1 (21:10):
Those are great.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Do you remember those? Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
And I went and watched some of them today and
I was like, oh, yeah, I remember these. They were great.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
There are two standouts.
Nice. There's
another one. I've never been able to do it. It's
too fast for my thick tongue, but it is great.
So just go look up Nick Jive 5 bumpers and
you'll see what I'm talking about.

Speaker 1 (21:34):
Well, what was the fast one? Like, just tell me
a slowed down version or something so I might recognize it.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
Um, no.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
No? All right. I'll look it up after. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
You're going to have to do that. Hey, man.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
I admire your, you know, gumption to stick up for yourself.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
I thought about it.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
So with Lay Born running the show, they started doing
some pretty great original programs. They had a sketch show
called Out of Control that I remember is hosted by
Dave Coulier of Full House.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
And a show called Turkey TV, which I had not
heard of until I saw the description that it was
like a clip show basically hosted by a VJ essentially.
And then I was like, yeah, I think I remember
that one.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
I do not remember that one at all, but they
would do something that Nickelodeon was also really good at.
Besides poaching Canadian shows, they would go overseas and find
funny clips or funny commercials or whatever. Sometimes other clips
from other kids shows like in completely different languages. And

(22:42):
then they would overdub them in English and use them.
And they did that with Turkey TV a lot, too.
So that was like that was fantastic. They just did
that all the time. Now I'm like, yeah, those kids
were totally Danish. I had no idea at the time.
But again, I was like, there's something not quite right
about how these kids are dressed and the toys they're

(23:02):
playing with.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah, that's funny.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Yeah, that's exactly what it was. I was watching that
without knowing it.

Speaker 1 (23:08):
That's just funny that a kid can be like, something's
slightly off here and I can't pinpoint what it is.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:14):
Because you didn't know they did stuff like that back then.

Speaker 2 (23:16):
And I always shrugged and was like, whatever, it's still
fun to watch.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
It's on TV.

Speaker 2 (23:20):
It was always there, you know. The Great Gazoo was
over my shoulder like, it's European, dum-dum.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
So, Laybourne went back to Darby, one of the guys
who co-created You Can't Do That on Television. It's like, hey,
what else you got? And he said, what about like
a game show where kids go through kind of a
crazy obstacle course or do these wacky things? And that
was the seed of the idea that became Double Dare.

(23:48):
I watched an episode of Double Dare earlier today, too.
It was a lot of fun to see.

Speaker 2 (23:52):
So good.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
And it was like Truth or Dare, where you could
answer a trivia question or dare the other team if
you didn't have the answer. And if they didn't have
the answer, they could double dare back. And generally, at
that point, the team would opt for what was called
the physical challenge. And it was, you know, the one
I watched today was two kids stand on one side
of the room. and throw eggs at the two kids

(24:17):
on the other side who are blindfolded and holding like
marching band crash cymbals in their hand. And the first
one to just randomly crash a crash cymbal as the
egg comes at them without being able to see it
is the team who wins. So just really fun, dumb
stuff if you're, you know, nine to 12 years old.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, like what a great idea. But not only though
was it like, like there were great little parts like that,
The whole thing, every single part was just operating on
all cylinders. Yeah. The host, Mark Summers, was somehow perfect
for that show.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
He was great.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
He was wonderful. The set, like you said, it was
in the Memphis style, which was huge in the 80s.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Like Pee Wee's Playhouse was Memphis. You would know Memphis
if you're not familiar with the term. You've seen it
a million times. But those sets are just a feast
for the eyes. And then, yeah, the things they came
up with, one of my favorites was the picket, where
you had to, for a physical challenge, you had to
get a flag out of a giant nose. And to

(25:21):
get the flag out, you had to pick out boogers first.
And then slime would come out of the nose. And
then after all that, you had to stick your arm
all the way up there and pull the flag out.

Speaker 1 (25:31):
That's just so fun to create shows like this. Like,
that's what kids want to see.

Speaker 2 (25:36):
Exactly. Yeah. And then the other thing. every single contestant
was so psyched to be there. And it took it
so seriously. It was completely sincere. It was just a wonderful,
I love Double Dare. I could watch Double Dare all
day long.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah. You can do a lot of this stuff all
day long. Can you imagine getting that phone call or
letter in the mail where you are picked to be
a contestant on that show and what like that must've
felt like as a kid?

Speaker 2 (26:04):
Yeah, for sure. For other kids, I, I, I would
have dreaded that. Oh, really? Yeah. I was that kid
who was like in the circus when the clowns were
coming down the aisle. I would be like, do not
pick me, please. God, please don't pick me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:19):
That was my dad.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
What? He would, he wanted to be picked? No, no, no.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
My dad would always.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Like, I wonder if I should even say this. I
think I will. No, I'm not going to say it.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Okay. Okay.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
My dad was not a participant. Let's just say that.

Speaker 2 (26:34):
All right.

Speaker 1 (26:34):
Well, in life like that.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
I'm with him on that. I just I don't like
I don't like the spotlight, you know.

Speaker 1 (26:41):
What about today? If you like went to a theme
park and they were like, let's get this guy out
of the audience. Would you do it or would because
you've got a lot of experience on stage?

Speaker 2 (26:48):
I would have to do it. I mean, you're a
jerk to not just do it if they pick you.

Speaker 1 (26:52):
But you wouldn't like love being picked.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
No. And I would be just like breathlessly anxious the
entire time.

Speaker 1 (26:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:59):
They'd be like, why is that guy's hand trembling?

Speaker 1 (27:02):
That's funny because you stand on stage in front of
like 2,000 people and are great.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
I know, but think about how much stage fright I
had to get over.

Speaker 1 (27:09):
That's true. And you're still standing up there with your
hand trembling.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Exactly. Have you ever seen me on stage at a
Stuff You Should Know show and I'm picking up my
water with both hands? Right. It's because they're too trembly
to pick them up by themselves.

Speaker 1 (27:24):
Well, maybe that's part of the magic. It makes you good.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Thanks, man. I think you're great too because you're so
laid back. It's just so easy for you.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
Hey, we're the yin and yang, you know?

Speaker 2 (27:34):
I'm the shuddery side.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
That's right. So these were all shot at the time
in Philadelphia at the WHYY studios. And, you know, it
was a big hit. Mark Summers, everyone loved him, like
you said. And that was not their first, but, you know,
one of the early, like, big, big breakouts that made
Nickelodeon kind of a juggernaut.

Speaker 2 (27:55):
Yeah. One of the other things that made Nickelodeon a
juggernaut was After A & E was like, sayonara, we're
going to form our own full network. Nickelodeon had the
evening hours to fill all of a sudden. So they
just did what you do. They went and turned to
reruns of classic TV shows, but they branded it as

(28:16):
Nick at Night. And I was into this too. Like
I seriously had Nickelodeon on all the time. This is
the stuff I would watch when I would go buy
a six pack of Kingsbury non-alcoholic beer and Slim Jims
and Twix and just settle in for the night. It
was just sit there and watch like F Troop and Mr.
Ed and I Spy. I just, it just, the whole

(28:36):
network just spoke directly to me. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
I mean, I still say if I had like one wish,
it might be to For you and I to have
grown up in the same neighborhood and been the same age.
I could have learned a lot from you.

Speaker 2 (28:49):
We'd both be a lot different, I think.

Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, probably so. I'd be more like you and you'd
be more like me.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
Exactly. There's probably a lot of listeners out there right
now who are like, wait a minute, you guys didn't
grow up in the same neighborhood? I wish.

Speaker 1 (29:01):
So the network grew. They eventually would partner with Universal Studios.
And open a, like, studios there and kind of moved
Nickelodeon there, which was a big deal because all of
a sudden that was like a tourist attraction. And if
you were a visitor to Universal, you could sit in
the audience and maybe even be on some of these
shows if you got pulled from the audience.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
Not me. Not me.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
And after Double Dare, they were like, these game shows
are kind of hot. So they had a show called
Finders Keepers. I don't think I watched this a ton,
but I definitely remember because it was a big, giant,
fake house. and they would hide stuff in there and
kids could just basically completely destroy the place looking for
the hidden items.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yes. I don't know if I watched that one either.
I went and looked at pictures of the set and
that didn't really ring a bell, but I was familiar
with the concept guts. I'd never heard of before.

Speaker 1 (29:54):
Same.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
It was like, um, uh, ninja warrior type thing, I think. Yeah.
But again, Nickelodeon years and years before Legends of the
Hidden Temple. It was essentially like a double there where
you would answer questions, usually geography related. And then for
the physical challenge, it was running through this giant temple

(30:17):
that was like cross section. So you could see the
person running through in it. And there are secret passages
and stuff you need to find, like the artifact or whatever.
I didn't watch that, but I remember seeing ads for
it when I was watching the next level of stuff
on Nickelodeon, like Pete and Pete.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
Yeah, the late 80s and early 90s. And this is,
you know, late high school and early college for me.
So I was definitely out of the picture by now.
But I remember for sure the show Hey Dude. And
I remember us in college even, I think, sort of
ironically watching it occasionally. Okay.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Okay. Yeah, I didn't watch that. I didn't watch Salute
Your Shorts or Clarissa Explains at all, but they were
all sitcoms, like live-action sitcoms. Yeah. And they were huge hits, right? Yeah,
oh yeah. The one that gets me, and this show
is Canadian too, if I'm not mistaken, but The Adventures
of Pete and Pete.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Yeah, that was a big one.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
Is still one of the best shows ever made. Like,
it still holds up. I never saw it. You're just
going to have to trust me. I didn't know I
was about to stun you with that revelation.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
No, I mean, I was just too old and I
never caught it after. So I've heard the legend of
how great that show is. I should probably check it
out now.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, you should. And you know who else would love
it is Ruby. It's totally up her alley, like the
kind of weird humor. I really think she'd like it.
All right. We'll check it out. The only time that
I've ever been starstruck, Chuck, that I can remember, like
genuinely starstruck, was when we did a live show in
San Francisco at the Mariners Hall. Uh-huh. And we followed

(31:51):
a Pete and Pete reunion. Oh, that's right. They were
there when we were coming in and I could not
believe who I was in the same room with. I
hung out and talked to little Pete. Big Pete was
kind of in and out, but I just, I was
just barely hanging on during that conversation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
I remember one other time you were starstruck when we
got to go to the Simpson stable read and we
met Matt Groening.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Fair enough. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
Because I was the same. You and I were both
like tiny children.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
It's true. That's true.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah. It was great. Should we take a break?

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yes.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
All right. We're going to take a break and move
into the cartoon era right after this.

Speaker 2 (32:53):
So I think one of the things we're back, by
the way, Chuck, and one of the things that Nickelodeon
is now thought of more than anything else is a
place where like some really great cartoons have been birthed.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Not the least of which was Ren and Stimpy, which
I always associate with MTV because it got picked up
by MTV. Like, I think while it was still original
stuff was running, but they syndicated it so fast that
MTV had it, too, if I'm not mistaken. But regardless.
It started out on Nickelodeon.

Speaker 1 (33:24):
Yeah, the Ren and Stimpy show, a show called Doug and,
of course, Rugrats, all premiered in 1991, which is kind
of crazy because those shows were all huge.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
Laybourne was still the network head in 91, but left
about five years after that and was succeeded in 96
by a guy named Herb Scannell, I guess.

Speaker 2 (33:45):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
And he really, I guess, was like, this animation thing
is the thing. We should keep doing it. Um, Ren
and Stimpy, uh, and you know, parents, this is where
things get a little dodgy. If you want to tune out,
if you have kids in the car, but, uh, the
creator of Ren and Stimpy, uh, John Crisfalusi, uh, he
ran the first two years, two seasons of that show.
And it was really his brainchild. And it was such a,

(34:08):
just amazing, wonderful, hysterical show. Uh, but apparently he like, um,
couldn't stay on budget and would blow a lot of deadlines.
So he, they were like, you're out of here. And
the last three seasons, I think he was not a
part of and everyone was crushed at the time. But
then many years later in 2018, it was he was
exposed to women, came forward and was like this guy

(34:31):
sexually abused us in the 90s when we were 13
and 15. I think one of them like he had
a full on like relationship as a 15, 16 year old,
which is just, you know. Horrendous and sick. And he
later on gave a pretty terrible non-apology where he blamed

(34:51):
his mental health at the time and his poor impulse control.
He quit the business. The statute of limitations had passed
to do anything about that, unfortunately. But that was, you know,
that was unfortunately sort of the sad way that Ren
and Stimpy ended.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
Yeah. Ren and Stimpy, like you said, it carried on
without him for years and it was great. Still, too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
So by 96, Nickelodeon is the biggest thing in the world, basically.
They had the most daily viewers of any cable channel,
and they held that spot for 16 years, which is
quite a run. They had a bunch of other big cartoons,
one called Hey Arnold that I'd heard of. The Adventures
of Jimmy Neutron. Boy Genius was a big one in
the early 2000s. And then, you know, kind of leaning

(35:39):
away from these sort of wackier shows. They had shows
like Avatar, The Last Airbender, and then it's spinoff, The
Legend of Korra, which is voiced, Korra is voiced by
friend of the show and friend in real life, Janet Varney.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
Yeah, I saw that. It's pretty awesome.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
It's the best. Ruby really got into that show and
for a while I was watching it with her and
it's really good and Janet was very sweet and would
send Ruby birthday videos with her like kind of talking
as Korra and it's just, Janet's the best.

Speaker 2 (36:09):
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I remember you telling me that,
and now I've connected the dots.

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
Yeah, so we've gone way out of my wheelhouse now.
The last one, the last cartoon that I watched consistently
came out in 93. It was Rocco's Modern Life, which
was really great. And I also used to watch Doug.
It was a sweet cartoon.

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, I remember Doug.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
Kind of like a Diary of a Wimpy Kid kind
of thing a little bit, too. You know, he's just
too gentle for, you know, his age group or something
like that. But far and away, the biggest cartoon that
ever came out of Nickelodeon, the biggest cartoon that maybe
had ever been on television was and is SpongeBob SquarePants.

(36:51):
And that started in 1999. And a guy named Steven Hillenburg,
who I guess studied to be a marine biologist kind
of famously, he created SpongeBob SquarePants instead. And I think
it was probably a pretty good move on his part.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Great move. It's still going today. It's in its 17th season.
As of two years ago, when it hit its 25th anniversary,
the world learned that Nickelodeon had supposedly earned $ 16 billion
from SpongeBob retail stuff.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
Toys and clothes and, you know, you name it. Like
anything up to and including a Broadway musical.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, and Hillenburg... Got a substantial chunk of that. He
had negotiated, I think, from the outset, like a pretty
decent amount of the merch percentage. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
George Lucas advice.

Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah. Oh, yeah. The back end is what you want, right?

Speaker 1 (37:44):
Well, no. Lucas was like merchandising. Like he negotiated that
Star Wars merchandising early on. And from then on, everyone
was like, that's the move.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
Yeah. It's always really paid off for us in ACES.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
Well, I think they got mad at him about that, though, right?

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, so we can kind of jump ahead a little
bit because today there's a lot of Nickelodeon fans who
are just really upset and heartbroken and frustrated because they
feel like the network was allowed to really get run
into the ground. And they lay the blame mostly at
the head of the network from 2006 to 2018. Her
name is Saima Zergami. And she is apparently well known

(38:23):
for not being happy that Hillenburg made as much money
as he did from the SpongeBob. rev share arrangement. And
so she made sure that if you were a new
creator coming to bring a show on to Nick, you
got zero bagel percentage of the merch sales from your creation.
So that would scare away new creators who had anything

(38:46):
good under their belt, right? So that was one thing.
So much so that they actually had what can really
only be taken as a desperate attempt to attract new talent.
They had a Nickelodeon animated shorts program in 2012, which
is like, hey, if you're unknown, submit a brief version
of your cartoon and maybe we'll pick it up. You

(39:07):
don't do that if you have like established creators coming
to you with shows, right?

Speaker 1 (39:12):
Yeah. That's kind of a sneaky way to get free programming.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Exactly. Or to get people who you can exploit because
they're hungry to get their foot in the door, right?
So there's that. She also turned down Adventure Time when
it was picked to Nickelodeon first, which is like if
you're a cartoon fan and you turn down Adventure Time,
you're just a pariah. Yeah. And then also, Chuck, and
this is much more serious, she is basically, she's really

(39:36):
criticized for essentially turning her head the other way, looking
the other way, while a guy named Dan Snyder basically
carried out a reign of terror among a lot of
the live action fans. shows that featured child actors who
did not get enough protection from the network.

Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, for sure. Like there was a systemic, um, child
sexual abuse problem at Nickelodeon. That's the only way to
say it.

Speaker 2 (40:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:03):
Uh, there was a documentary, uh, did you ever see it?

Speaker 2 (40:06):
No. Uh, what's it called? Quiet on the set. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:08):
Quiet on the set, colon, the dark side of kids TV.
It was a couple of years ago and I watched it. Uh, it's,
it's pretty upsetting, but I'm sure, um, you know, you're
a big Nickelodeon guy, so I don't know if you
want to, You know all this happened, but it might
be upsetting for you to actually see the documentary.

Speaker 2 (40:22):
Yeah. I mean, even without being a Nickelodeon guy, I'm
sure it's upsetting, right? It is.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
But Dan Schneider, you may know him. He was an actor.
He was Dennis on Head of the Class. He was
in Better Off Dead with John Cusack.

Speaker 2 (40:37):
That was him? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
He was the sort of loser neighbor who the exchange
student lived with.

Speaker 2 (40:44):
Yeah. I never put those two characters together, but yeah,
I see it now.

Speaker 1 (40:48):
So that's where I knew him from. But he started
out as a writer in 1994 on the sketch show
All That and created some of their biggest live action shows.
The Amanda Show with Amanda Bynes, Drake and Josh, Zoey 101, iCarly,
Henry Danger. Like these are humongous shows. And at the
time he was being criticized, like even while he was

(41:10):
there of like, man, this guy's like putting pretty overt,
like sexual humor in these shows. Shows and like making
girls do like really kind of pretty obvious sexual things like,
you know, things that were very phallic. Like, obviously, like
when you see clips in the documentary, it's just like, man,
are you kidding me? Like, why didn't someone say something?

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Right.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
It's just so obvious. Well, later on, he denied like
we never did anything like that intentionally. He basically gaslit
everyone with his apology later. But there was more abuse
going on, too.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Right. Yeah, Drake Bell, who I didn't watch it, but
I'm guessing he was one of the characters on Drake
and Josh as well. Yeah. He started out on The
Amanda Show with Amanda Bynes. He had a dialogue coach
who sexually abused him, a dialogue coach named Brian Peck,
who was convicted in 2004. 2004 was also a bad
year in that production assistant named Jason Handy, who worked

(42:07):
with some child actors on All That and The Amanda Show.
He got a six-year sentence for sexually abusing two girls.
And then a few years after that, another Nickelodeon worker,
an animator named Ezel Channel, was convicted of sexually abusing
boys at the studio. So this is what I was
saying when I was saying, like, Saima Zorgami is– not

(42:30):
very well thought of among fans, just at the very
least for that, just for not doing anything about that.
And even if she or the other heads didn't know
what was going on, the fact that there was that,
that it was that easy for people to prey on
child actors. You got child actors, man, like they deserve

(42:54):
special protection, even more than your average kid. Because your
average kid is not in a situation with a bunch
of creators and teamsters and whoever else. Right. Like when
my niece Mila is on the set, both of her
parents are there. And at least one of them is
there all the time. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:13):
I'm sure.

Speaker 2 (43:14):
Like that's just what you have to do if you
have a child actor. And apparently that's just not what
was going on everywhere in these shows. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
No, it was way more lax back then. And, you know,
you hear all this stuff and you're just like, what
is going on at Nickelodeon? And the sad truth is
it was a kid's network with kid shows with kid actors.
And that's where, like, someone who's a predator will, like,
go and get a job. And it's deeply, deeply upsetting
that that happened and was allowed to happen. And there

(43:46):
weren't more protections in place. Like, the documentary is just
a brutal watch.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
I bet. So Dan Schneider finally, after I think 24 years, maybe? No. Yeah.
24 years at the network. He was fired because an
actress named Jeanette McCurdy, who was on iCarly and also
starred with Ariana Grande on Sam and Cat, which is

(44:11):
an iCarly spinoff. She basically came out and was like,
I'm not going to keep quiet any longer. And she
started essentially like saying like Dan Schneider did this, Dan
Schneider did that. Dan Schneider insisted that I wear a
bikini for a hot tub scene, even though I wanted
to wear a one piece. He encouraged us to drink
as like 16 year olds and stuff. Right. So that

(44:32):
was enough to get Dan Schneider pushed out. But then
she went further. She published a memoir in 2022 titled
I'm Glad My Mother's Dead. And there's not some ironic
twist to that title. Like it's exactly what you think.
Or it sounds like she was glad her mother's dead,
in part because her mother pushed her into acting and

(44:53):
basically set her up to be exposed to the stuff
she was exposed to. And in that, she refers to
Dan Snyder as the creator. And she just alleged some
more stuff, too, that really just put a really negative
light on Nickelodeon.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
Yeah, I mean— Viacom CBS at the time, they did
an investigation and came out and said, well, we don't
have any evidence of sexual misconduct, but Dan Schneider was
verbally abusive, we found out, and he threw tantrums, so
he's out of here. When she, and this is even
more upsetting, when all this came out, after Salmon Cat
was canceled, she had a conference call. This was Jeanette McCurdy,

(45:32):
the actress who wrote the book, and the victim, one
of the victims, she had a conference call with a
bunch of agents and managers, and She was offered, and
didn't take it, but she was offered $ 300, 000 just to
never talk about it again. Don't talk about Dan Schneider.
Don't talk about Nickelodeon. And she turned it down. And
then after that, there were leaks to the media that, well,
the series really ended because she was mad that Ariana

(45:55):
Grande was paid more than her, which is about as
vile as it gets.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
What scumbags, man. That's just terrible. So, like you said,
that docuseries came out and really just kind of got
the point across about what was going on. There's a
journalist who was part of the documentary Scotchy Cool. And
they said that a lot of these people are still
working in the industry, by the way.

Speaker 1 (46:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
So like you said, Schneider, Dan Schneider issued an apology
on YouTube, but you said it was a non-apology. I
didn't watch it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
I mean, he basically gaslit everyone and was like, yeah,
you know what? I did some embarrassing things, but I
didn't intend to have any sexual jokes on the show. Like,
you're just seeing what you want to see, basically.

Speaker 2 (46:38):
Right. And then Nickelodeon didn't do itself any favors by issuing, like,
a really legalese non-apology itself, saying they couldn't corroborate or
negate allegations of misdeeds decades ago. Like, get over it.
This sexual abuse is, like, 20 years ago. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
Pretty disappointing. Nickelodeon, like you said, has really gone downhill
a lot since then. And, you know... partially because that's
kind of what happened to a lot of cable TV networks.
Like people, including kids, obviously have been moving away from
traditional television and that model. And kids probably like quicker
than even older viewers. So their ratings have dropped a lot.

(47:18):
You know, they were number one for 16 years, the
number one cable network. Now they are the 60th, six
zero most popular cable channel with about 122,000 daily viewers. But,
you know, they're diversifying. They're doing programming for other TV
networks and also doing like web stuff and app stuff.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
Yeah, I looked that up. It's about it's about the
same that Disney Channel, not Disney Plus, but the cable
Disney cable channel gets every day. So it seems like
it's not just Nick, but they also have about two
point five times what Cartoon Network gets. But it's only
a third of what TV land gets every day.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
So.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
Oh, wow. People go nuts for those Friends reruns.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
I watch those in hotels a lot.

Speaker 2 (48:06):
Do you?

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, like, you know, flipping it around. They have the
awful motion smoothing on all the hotel TVs.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
No, you hate that.

Speaker 1 (48:14):
Oh, man. Of course I do.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
I just don't even know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (48:18):
Well, I'll have to show you sometime.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
But some of those older studio audience sitcoms don't look
as bad with that on.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
I see.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
So that's why I watch that.

Speaker 2 (48:28):
Yeah, once I've seen the Friends without the laugh track videos,
I can't watch it anymore.

Speaker 1 (48:33):
Oh, yeah, I forgot. Those were fun.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
It wasn't a big loss. But anyway, that's Nickelodeon, everybody,
for you. Sorry to end it on a bummer, but
that's the state of affairs right now. Hopefully it'll come
back and get great again. And in the meantime, while
we wait for Nickelodeon to get great again, how about
listener mail?

Speaker 1 (48:53):
All right, this is short and sweet. Hey, guys, this
is On Rope. When rope is cut to length and
used for a purpose on a ship, everybody, it becomes line.

Speaker 2 (49:03):
Hello.

Speaker 1 (49:04):
Chuck was using line when hoisting jibs and sails. I've
never sailed myself, but whenever I talked with my boss
who did sail, I would say rope and he would
correct me and say, no, it's line on a boat.
So as soon as Chuck said rope in his Nantucket story,
I stuttered. it's all good to me though guys but
passing this along in honor of my old boss and
that is Bill from Latitz I guess is how you

(49:28):
pronounce it L-I-T-I-T-Z Latitz Latitz.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
What is that in a state or is it its
own micronation I've.

Speaker 1 (49:35):
Never heard of it. I'm going to look it up
right now, though, while you chit-chat.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Okay. Well, thanks a lot, Bill. We're going to try
to figure out where you're from.

Speaker 1 (49:42):
Pennsylvania.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
Okay. Pennsylvania. I could have guessed that.

Speaker 1 (49:46):
Yeah, Lancaster County. I love it. Sure.

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Okay. Oh, hey, Bill hangs out with the Amish there.

Speaker 1 (49:51):
That's right. All right.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Well, Bill, be sure to tell the Amish we say hi.
And if you want to be like Bill and correct
us ever so gently and kindly like Bill did, you
can send it in an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Speaker 1 (50:07):
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.