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

were friends. I wish she had stayed around longer. She was very focused on her singing, but she wasn’t weird about it. I’m not at all surprised by her success.
    JOHN BINKLEY: I had a strong commitment to casting fifteen-ish kids to play fifteen-year-olds. We had only one issue in that area, and it was a pretty clear one, because it turned out that Brooke—played
brilliantly
by Robyn Ross—wasn’t actually fifteen when we started. We hadn’t been validating people’s birth certificates or anything. If they looked right, that’s what counted. But I discovered after the first season that she was eighteen in the second round, which was shot about a year after the first one. And she started looking older. By the third season, all of a sudden she’s nineteen and she’s
really
looking older. We reluctantly let her go and recast her. Robyn was
not
replaceable. I made a mistake. We should have kept her even if she looked forty-five.
    CHRISTINE MCGLADE: My last couple of years, I was so
clearly
older than the other kids that it probably wasn’t a good thing for the show. I had already moved to Toronto and was ready to get on with my life and was flying back to do my stuff. I probably stayed on a good couple of years past my due date.
    ALISON FANELLI: The last year of the show, Michael and Chris and Will and I sat down and really thought that Michael and I were getting a little old for the stuff they were writing. It was a
kids’
show. So we knew that we might be getting phased out if
Pete & Pete
did continue, especially with Danny getting older and the “Nightcrawlers” episode
that focused more on him and his friends. So that helped me launch out of the business.
    KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: It was difficult to watch that happen to someone else knowing it was just a matter of time before you were done. It was a very different lifestyle during production, and for a kid who’s in the middle of stumbling through the world trying to make sense of everything, it was a huge part of our identity. So to lose it, you lost that part of who you were, that extended family, those relationships, that routine, and all the conveniences that came along with it.
    JOSH MORRIS: Roger tended to lose interest in the boys when “their balls dropped,” as he’d say. He wasn’t interested in them anymore. He probably wasn’t even interested in them as
people
anymore. And he had gotten very close with a lot of the boys on the show. I know that happened to Alasdair.
    TOBY HUSS: These kids had all these different people in their lives. And when you take that away from them, it’s a jarring and weird thing. It was for me, too.
    ALASDAIR GILLIS: And the timing—being fifteen, sixteen—a lot of figuring out who you are, about being vulnerable. I might not have been able to vocalize at the time a sense of needing to be reassured. Letting kidsknow that there’s nothing wrong with them—it’s really just this thing we’re doing where the fit isn’t right, and it’s more about networks than it is about the people. It’s strange: There’s a lot there in terms of knowing how important childhood or being a child was for Roger in particular—that’s what drove him—and then there was an unspoken realization that I was growing out of the thing that was central or important to him on some level. None of us were going to stay kids. It took a while to figure some of that out.
    CHRISTINE MCGLADE: At the beginning, it was harder because the kids were more close to my age, and by the time they left the show, they were good friends of mine. That was a bit weird because kids would grow out of it really quickly, whereas I was in some sort of weird time machine where I wasn’t aging.
    RICK GALLOWAY: I was just happy to continue the process, but that was the hardest thing, saying good-bye to cast members and hello to new ones. You spend three years with some people of a solid team and it’s just . . . awkward. We were so young, and it was a decision made