VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons 251
Viacom wasn’t about to waste page space advertising the product of a
competitor for syndication revenue.
When we were first handed the art for Pelswick we saw a twelve-yearold
boy in a wheelchair and a tall guy with a bushy white beard who could
disappear and had magical powers. And we were given an earlier writer’s
script that (all together now) “didn’t work.” We quickly did a new pass and
the show got up and running. We went to a meeting to discuss what we’d
written and someone said, “We thought you did a good job writing for God.”
“GOD? The guy with the beard’s supposed to be GOD?”
“You didn’t know that?”
“You’ve got a show with a motherless crippled kid and his best friend
is God?”
They didn’t see the problem with that.
Nickelodeon wanted a distinctive voice for the part of Mr. Jimmy, as
God had been named. A deep, world-weary voice that would add both star
value to the show and a funny ironic comment on the whole Supreme Being
thing. Early suggestions included Keith Richards, Iggy Pop and Tom Waits.
We ended up with David Arquette.
Santayana said fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you
have forgotten your aim. The proper behavior, I feel, after realizing you
can’t get the big star you want for the sixth lead is to forget about casting a
star for the sixth lead. But in this case, and in many others, the original
inclination somehow hangs in there like a herpes sore.
The early development of Pelswick was incredibly annoying: make
the show more realistic but make sure that elderly characters like Gram-
Gram are always cool and hip: (p. 23 Gram-Gram: “acquire this land... for
a song” – please change ‘for a song’ to something more kid-accessible.
Perhaps, ‘reeeeeeeealll cheap.”) Pelswick’s father is a university professor
but don’t have him say anything intellectual that wouldn’t be “kid-relatable.”
Children in testing seem to love the stone-dumb friend Goon but please
avoid making fun of the stupid. Please make the other best friend ethnic.
No toilet jokes, even though kids love them. Please add some X Games
because kids like those. Please build up the character of Pelswick’s
antagonistic female classmate Julie. And please give Julie a funny black
friend. Please enlarge Julie’s and Sandra’s roles in the series...
Note that if you follow all of these notes to the letter, you get Jimmy
Neutron, and his friends Carl, Sheen, Cindy and Libby.
This was the series where we got the note, “Today, there are not too
many kids walking around with a book. I think we could make this more hip
and current to place a computer in his hands…” (In the next paragraph they