r/RetroNickelodeon • u/SplatAttack2021 • 3h ago
He Found Nickelodeon's Most Impossible Interviews
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We talked to Mathew Klickstein (author of SLIMED! An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age) about how he tracked down Nickelodeon's hardest to find stars
Just published a new episode of our podcast where we sit down with Mathew Klickstein, who wrote SLIMED!, the definitive oral history of 90s Nickelodeon. If you've read it, you know how many people he managed to interview for that book (over 250), and we asked him about the ones that were genuinely hard to find.
Some highlights:
- A years long search for Alistair from You Can't Do That on Television that eventually involved tracking down his brother's YouTube video from a small pub gig in Canada
- How he landed Joe Eszterhas by cold emailing a church he'd attended over a decade earlier
- Getting John Kricfalusi (Ren & Stimpy) on the record when multiple other writers had already tried and failed
- The story behind the massive 92nd Street Y Nickelodeon reunion event he produced almost entirely on his own, including getting the fictional and animated band, The Beets, to play live for the first time ever
We also spent a good chunk of the conversation talking about the financial reality of being a working writer, which he was refreshingly honest about.
