The Adventures of Pete & Pete: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your two PiZZ of pedantry. I'm Alex Heigel, but Tunia's of Pedantry, and I've Jordan run Talk and today, Jordan, we are talking about one of the odd ducts of Nickelodeon's nineteen nineties Heyday.

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Speaker 1: Although weren't they all They all in a beautiful way. We'll talk more about that.

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Speaker 2: What a great era, though the exceedingly strange sitcom that baffled parents and children are like, that's right, we're talking about the Adventures of Pete and Pete. I was not like a huge fan of the show. In fact, I think I was just completely baffled by it. I don't think my brain had fully evolved enough. You had a larger head than I did as a child, so you had more cranial space to process.

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Speaker 1: I just don't think my frontal.

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Speaker 2: Lobe was developed enough to fully take in it's sort of surreal and mundane blend. But watching clips of it recently, I've really and several episodes are available on YouTube with Hungarian subtitles, and I think that's one of the only ways you can see it right now. It's not on DVD, it's on DV, there's physical LEAs, but I don't think it's streaming. I don't think it's even streaming on whatever paramount is the I think paramount is the Nickelodeon streamer. But I've really come to appreciate its unique appeal and joys. I mean, for starters, it's a show that opens with a cold open about a character going to the beach to quote beat up the ocean, not because he's angry, but because he's mad that summer is ending.

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Speaker 1: He's not mad at the ocean. I find it hard to believe that you didn't do that. Well.

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Speaker 2: Then it proceeds directly into a credit sequence in which a metal plate in his mother's head gets its own credit. So that show is.

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Speaker 1: Rubber tattoo And well.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, Petunia, but no, that show is rubber stamped into a hard win for me, solely off those two things about you.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, this was a very special show for me because I was a big fan of Nicket Night and all the old fashioned sitcoms that they would air late into the evening, and this always felt like a very subversive send up of all that, of all those kind of like Leave It to Beavery, I Dream of Genie.

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Speaker 2: B which the creative team came out of the promo department and so half their job was cutting promos for when Nickelodeon was rerunning those shows. So that's certainly I think that's a valid observation, makes so much sense.

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Speaker 1: This was also probably the closest to grunge that I ever really got at the time, in the early nineties. I mean, which I guess I'm basing purely on Little Pete's Holden call Field plaid hat maybe, And it definitely there was a strong Pacific Northwest vibe in that show. I would say I was shocked to learn that they actually filmed it in New Jersey, But yeah, I really appreciated the gen x era Nickelodeon before it sort of went the way of the the more kid friendly, orange splat, brightly colored Nicktoons, SpongeBob type stuff, because it was a lot weirder and more surreal in the early nineties, or at least that's how it seemed to me, and in Pete's Pete specifically, I remember that there were elements of it that kind of made me sad. I don't know if you picked up on that very much by design. Actually, yeah, there's something really melancholic about it. And you know, the end of the summer episode is a great example, and I always think of the one where I think you mentioned it later on the episode where I think little Peete's grounded and he tunnels through the yard using a statue of Liberty toy or something. Back in the news in a big way this week, Baby for Time, we are nothing if not zeitgeisty, my friends. Yeah, it was just it almost felt like you were watching a sitcom about a time that, even though it was contemporary, it had already gone by. It was very like Vasoline on the Lens, almost sand Lottie in a strange way. So did you watch it much when we were kids or was this really your first exposure to like sitting down and watching full episodes.

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Speaker 2: No, I did remember watching it. I just remember like being like what and I think, and I think I think I was just more keyed into the animated stuff at of Nickelodeon at the time.

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Speaker 1: I mean, except for our Are You Afraid of the Dark, and.

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Speaker 2: Maybe a little of all that, But I was always way more into like Ren and Stimpy and KaBlam and like some of the Angry Beavers and obviously Rugrats, and yeah, some of their their live action stuff. I was like, these aren't cartoons, although they are, you know, yeah, very much cartoon characters.

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Speaker 1: I love. I loved all the live action stuff. I love Salute your Shorts.

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Speaker 2: Yeah this I do remember Salute your Shorts, mostly because of the theme song. The show Pete and Pete The Adventures of pet and pt is centered on the Wrigley family, who live in the fictional suburb of Wellsville, which is just miles from the Canadian border, five hundred miles from the Hoover Dam, and not far from the beach.

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Speaker 1: Again Pacific Northwest.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right, it actually does kind of give those vibes. And the brothers Big Pete played by Mike Marana and Little Pete Danny Tamborelli, and their parents Dawn played by Hardy Rolls and Joyce Judy Grave. One key aspect of the series combination of the surreal in mundane is how the two lead characters share just that one name, which is something never commented on by anyone in the show. They are always just referred to by each other and everyone else as Pete.

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Speaker 1: I love this. It reminds me of how on Arrested Development, it takes many, many episodes, possibly several seasons for George Michael to say some throwaway joke about like, are you sure talking about me and not the singer songwriter? I love that?

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Speaker 2: Vulture positive as being important to the DNA of two shows that followed it, Erie Indiana and Malcolm in the Middle and Pete and Pete's plots and episodes tend to center around the fairly ordinary trials and tribulations of being a teenager and a family member and a kid at that transitional age, but with overfictionalized and seemingly untethered from reality embellishments that pop up up. You already mentioned the aforementioned statue of Liberty show, but there's also a time traveling plot connected to daylight savings time. Mom's aforementioned metal plate in her head that you can pick up radio signals for sure, sure, yes, yes, yes, yes, you know. Pete has one tattoo that is explained and then a full back tattoo that is never explained. Yeah, it's it's but it's you know, the weirdness of it is. Uh, it's not lamp shaded, it's not drawn, it's not over emphasized. It's just how things are here. And so I have a question for you, a question to not continue. You have you have a number of tattoos.

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Speaker 1: I was wondering during the many occasions in which you receive tattoos or chose tattoos, did Little Pete's tattoos of Petunia and the full back ship? I believe tattoo did that have any impact on us soever? I mean, it's funny.

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Speaker 2: I haven't looked at his like I don't think there are high res versions of his ship tattoo available, but like that full that that that ship is like one of the many classic traditional tattoo archetypes like rigging and masked thing to the point where you see it in a lot of archival material from like traditional tattooing of the fifties and sixties.

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Speaker 1: Because he'saly the first tattoos I ever saw, like, at least in a big way.

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Speaker 2: It's actually a very funny story. Because I have the bulk of my tattoos are from one artist in Brooklyn. Her name is Sue Jivan. She's an incredible woman.

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Speaker 1: I wrote a.

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Speaker 2: Story on her for people, and you know, she is on a song too, in one of our songs. Yes, she's lived with stage four breast cancer for a very long amount of time and is just continuing to tattoo. And she was also a one of the people who work together with the ACLU to turn over the illegality of tattooing in Massachusetts. So she's an incredible and has incredible life. And while I was at the studio that she worked at for a time, I chose her, And that studio is owned by another famous Brooklyn artist. And the reason I went with Sue is because that guy asked for like a three hundred and fifty dollars drawing fee, which is like a sort of controversial thing in the tattoo community about whether or not you can charge a drawing fee or whether or not that's including the price, blah blah blah. So that scared me off. And then when I went there to actually show up for her first tattoo, he was doing a tattoo on another guy and it was a tattoo that this guy's grandfather had gotten while he was in the Navy, and this guy asked him. And so this is in addition to the three hundred and fifty dollars drawing fee and the two or three hundred dollars an hour that this guy charged. This kid asked him if he could have the drawing because he wanted to get it framed, and the artist said no, which was like, I was like, wow, you dude. I'm glad I went with Sue and a lifelong friendship was formed.

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Speaker 1: No, I don't know. That's all useless for you.

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Speaker 2: Well, from the show's prolonged road from a series of shorts cooked up by renegades from Nickelodeon's promo division to a full flow to its endless cavalcade of prominent guest stars, to at least one of the Pete's explanations for their characters' names, here's everything you didn't know about the Adventures of Pete.

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Speaker 1: And Pete.

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Speaker 2: It was that downtown Manhattan sensibility. Catherine Deekman, one of the show's three principal creatives, told Vulture she worked on more episodes of this than any other director, and much of it sort of as you mentioned squasi grunge, early nineties, Austin link Letter, Slacker, Flannel, Pacific Northwest Kill Rock Stars, Elliott Smith, Silver Lake Echo Park. Now I'm just bullshing that esthetic is largely hers. She immediately goes on to say that show could not have come out of la It couldn't have come out of any number of cities you could mention. The sensibility was very much the wor world where Hal Hartley was making movies and where Jim Jarmush made Stranger Than Paradise, and where Steve Buscemi was doing these performance art pieces. All of us had come of age with the eighties New York sensibility in music and film and style and everything else, and we were all living in the same world. It was all part of one just salt that was filtered into a children's show.

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Speaker 1: Thank you for sharing that weird Steve Buscemi's skit the other day on YouTube. Because I had no idea he was part of the downtown art scene.

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Speaker 2: In this neither and the other guy, I had no idea he was so tight with Marky Boone, who or Mark Boone Junior, who is like just like sort of one of the guys that Central Casting calls up whenever they need like a grizzled biker guy. I think he's probably most famous for a long running role in Sons of Anarchy, but he's been in a ton of stuff, and just the fact that he also came out in that eighties scene and you can see him in like I think that's what was that clip from eighty seven, eighty eight, eighty eight eight, Yeah, just him as Steve Buscemi just doing like essentially like improv free performance skit in like a very small room to no one, really wild, And Steve Semi is a New York icon for another reason.

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Speaker 1: Yes, that's right. He was a volunteer fireman and then he re enlisted after nine to eleven to help with the rescue effort. So we love, love Steve.

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Speaker 2: And refuse to answer any further questions about it other than simply saying these are my brothers.

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Speaker 1: Really? Oh that was his quote? Yeah wow uh.

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Speaker 2: Deekman elaborated in Matthew Klickstein's monumental Tone Slimed an oral history of Nickelodeon's golden Age, which should be required reading for anyone interested in this stuff. She said, improvisational diy punk was very much our esthetic. We're just gonna take these kids and go to some suburbs in Jersey and shoot it man. The show was filmed largely in Leonia, Jersey, with other locations in northern New Jersey as well, like Wayne, Cranford and Bayon. I like pronouncing Bayone with a Cajun accent, like Bayon, New Jersey. Sorry to the state of louisianaat Kingfish Cajun people.

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Speaker 1: You imagine if Doctor John grew up in New Jersey? Can you mention Bruce Springsteen was Doctor John? Bruce Springsteen grew up in Louisiana. That would be funny, right, probably awesome?

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Speaker 2: Actually, yeah, Uh that's what No, that's what I that's the thought experiment I want to I want to pursue, can you do.

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Speaker 1: Boy on the Run as done by uh, Doctor John. He'd probably say boy.

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Speaker 2: You'd say boy, maybe we were Boy to Run because isn't that the like, that's the That's the joke about credence, right, is that they uh you know, born on the bio boy born in uh yeah, and it's like, dude, you're from northern California.

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Speaker 1: Anyway.

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Speaker 2: Series co creator Christmuscardi said it was less conscious than that, though, He said, we were always into things like punk and punk rock and post punk, all the important genres pop punk, yeah, goth punk uh and people like Iggy obviously Iggy Pop, who guests repeatedly in the show, and we just wanted to bring those people to it. The third of the series, creators Will McRobb told The A V Club that Pete and Pete's brain trust didn't even come from the tradition side of the network. He said, we were just promo guys for Nickelodeon. We spent our days promoting Mister Ed and Donna Reed and Dennis the Menace, all shows that were on Nickelodeon at the time. And because Nickelodeon wasn't so much about like crushing Disney, it was more about let's make a place that's great for kids, there was a lot of time in the commercial break to do image ads, as they were called, which didn't have to be about the shows. They could just be about what is it like to be a kid?

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you said this earlier. It makes so much sense that Pete and Pete has this kind of fractured Nicked Knight sitcom vibe, not.

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Speaker 2: To harp on my repeated point that capitalism is the death of all creativity and will kill us all, but it is insane how this show made it from thirty second interstitials to widely awarded shorts and then to a full series. That's like, I guess the equivalent of that would be like YouTube now or to like adult Swim, or like I don't know, one of those TikTok and TikTokers.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but was it? I mean, this is a stupid analogy, but the Simpsons were a cartoon segment on The Tracy All Sketch Show and then they were used to sell Butterfinger Bebe's I think before it launched as a sitcom. So maybe capitalism does breed innovation. This is the beginning of Heigel's slow turned towards the right.

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Speaker 2: You come back, I have like a haircut, and I'm all, like, you know, you're really not embodying an abundance minin set right now, Georgan TMI Grind Set, Rise and Grind.

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Speaker 1: Well, as you mentioned, Pete and Pete started as shorts that were originally supposed to be about Pete and his dog named Pete, and he's premiered in the spring of nineteen eighty nine, part of the Creative brain Trust. Will McRobb told the av Club, we initially were going to do it in a cheaper way. It was going to be more like a documentary style approach because that was cheaper, and we were going to do that with Adam Bernstein, the director. And then at my high school reunion, my ten year high school reunion at Ithica High School that summer, I ran across film and music video director Catherine Diekman, who was much cooler than I was in high school. Ten years on. She was doing RIM videos and I was feeling like I was the King of Nickelodeon, and we connected. Deecman was, indeed, as you write, cool as hell. She'd been writing as a frustrated journalist in her twenties, writing four, among other places, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. In her words, mostly on film, sometimes on music. In nineteen eighty six, she did a piece on RIM's Michael Stipe and the two actually become lifelong friends, and later she said, Michael asked me kind of out of the blue to direct a music video for him. She took Stipe up on his offer. And made stand in nineteen eighty nine, and then attended that fateful ten year high school reunion soon after. Hate that song. I know it's one of the least good. Bam, he's got that truck driver key change at the end. God, but I do remember the video, Yes, me too, so yeah, right, I mean it's kind of that it all comes out in the wash. Yeah. Was it automatic? For the people named after a like a fried chicken place or something, or a barbecue place? And that was something that the chef would call out from the kitchen when he was like serving up orders. Did you just say to me never mind? All right? Deakman told Vulture, I did a storyboard for them and for the first sixty second spot about little Pete's tattoo Petunia, which Will had written, the reason I got the job was when Mom sees Pete's tattoo, My drawing for her face was a wooden spoon covered in chocolate pudding hitting the floor. I like that. It's a great visual. Deaqman wasn't the only music video fluent creative. Adam Bernstein, who we mentioned earlier, the director who's gone on to work on Fargo and Thirty Rock, directed music videos for They Might Be Giants and Beastie Boys.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, he was nominated for his work on Fargo and won an Emmy for thirty Rock.

00:16:50
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Should I watch thirty Rock Jordan for this seventeen thousandth time?

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Speaker 2: Yes, I know you're traumatized by his screenwriting school, but yes, yes you should.

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Speaker 1: Mcrob continued to the AV Club. Once Chris Fascardi met Catherine, it really felt like a great mix, and with Catherine's input, we decided to make these little shorts into movies. They shot nearly twenty of these shorts over the course of two years. Now, at the time, Nickelodeon's programming department, according to all of the creative brand trust for Pete and Pete, was this big lumbering machine that made the shows and had a million people giving input, just like it is now. It wasn't designed for speed or creativity really, and the promo department was just this little punk division in the midst of all this more corporate stuff. So we were free to do what we wanted to do. Basically, they said, you've made twenty nine minute long pieces, why don't you just make a show now.

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Speaker 2: From there, they made five half hour specials, all of which won ACE Awards, which were I think someone described it as sort of the Emmys of children's television at the time, or cable television at the time, because cable was so relatively new. But Mcrob continued, Nickelodeon still would not have gone to series without a producer that had done shows for them. I think he was doing The Secret World of Alex Mack at the time. This guy Tommy Lynch who's a friend of ours and became like the ultimate friend of Pete and Pete he was putting together a deal with Nickelodeon to do more shows. He saw the specials and said, well, how come this isn't a series, And we're like, well, you know, they work fine in specials, but we're not sure we want to invest in it as a series. And he's like, well, hell, if I'm making a deal with you guys, I want this to be one of the shows. I will turn this into a show. I will be the executive producer of the show and get it on the air. And at that point Nickelodeon thought, well, if Tommy Lynch thinks it's good enough to make into a series, why should we give it to him we'll make it. And that's the real story. It took somebody else wanting to make it for them to think, well, maybe we'll make it, and that's what really got us into the first season. Ah the industry.

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Speaker 1: Katherin Deekman also traces a thread from Pete and Pete to quasi sad childhood focused sitcoms like our beloved Freaks and Geeks. From the beginning, Pete and Pete was all about this melancholy and emotionality of childhood as much as it was absurdist, she says, and Slimed, we sort of took that approach to talking about childhood which was not sentimental and not corny and not obvious. It was more about the strange things that happened in childhood and how truthful those are. See. I love that because there's so many things that we just sort of take as you know, fact, as children that years later we looked back on and just think, what the hell is that all about? Yeah, Mcrob said, also Enslimed, we really got off on putting together ideas that were on the surreal side of things. The summer vacation where nobody knows the identity of the guy who brings some ice cream every year, which was an emotionally traumatized story about a guy who can't handle intimacy. Remember that one. I love that one. Yeah, that's the one where Michael stipeguest stars. Oh yeah.

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Speaker 2: Of course, since three show creators were all in their twenties and none of them had kids, As Deecmon told Vulture, none of us had any idea what kids were like, except maybe from our own childhood, which Will and I referenced a lot. Chris grew up in Auburn, which was like thirty minutes away from Ithaca, and so we all had a similar frame of what the childhood experience was and what mattered and how we wanted to express that. She added, inslimed, it was more about the strange things that happened in childhood and how truthful those are. We put that idea into our downtown New York sensibility, and that's really what Pete and Pete was. Mcrob added and slimed. It was a very square show masquerading as a hip show. The values were really like love your brother and be good to people and honor your imagination. There was some subversive behavior like staying up for eleven Nights in a Row, which is the Nightcrawlers directed by Deekman and her favorite episode. But if you remember, at the end of that episode, Pete and Mom are closer than ever and they respect each other's boundaries. We really honored the rituals of childhood.

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Speaker 1: Mcrob told Vulture, we really believed in Nickelodeon, and at the time it was designed to be the anti Disney, which is funny because earlier didn't he just say that Nickelodeon at that time wasn't designed to take down Disney.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that phrase anti Disney comes up so much when they're talking about this era of Nickelodeon, And I actually don't really remember or I don't really know if that was just sort of the unofficial creative like logline or uh, who knows.

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Speaker 1: But I find it really interesting the way he elaborated, and he said Disney was about a certain way of looking at childhood and Nickelodeon was about trying to capture what it was. M Yeah, I like that a lot as well. Ye. Chris Fuscarty, I've gotten CHRISTMASCARTI Will Mcrob and Kevin Deekman all confuse at what exactly they do, but those are the three who are responsible for creating and bringing Pete and Pete to life. Christmascarty used the Neil Young adjacent term ragged glory to describe he and Mcrob's shared aesthetic, explaining that quote, things don't always add up and don't always look very pretty, and sometimes the dots don't connect, but there's a certain glory and beauty in that, and we definitely strive to achieve that on Pete and Pete. Mcrob elaborated, if things got neatly tied up in a bow, we would untie them. I thought that said urinate on them, which is different. Or we would do a funny cutaway somebody that would disrupt the scene in a way like I just did. Or you would give Toby a chance to do some weirdo antics.

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Speaker 2: Toby huss who plays already the strongest man in the world.

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Speaker 1: Yes, they do some weirdo antics in the middle of the scene, just to undercut some slightly sentimental dialogue, things that would give it a certain weirdo edge. It might not completely make sense in the long run, but something to us that felt kind of glorious and fun.

00:22:23
Speaker 2: The simple look of the show, which was a single camera set up as its opposed to three. It was shot on locations posed in the studio and had a more cinematic, perhaps filmy appearance as posed a more conventional stage. TV aesthetic sent Pete and Pete Park from the other live action Nickelodeon shows that were shot at the network studios, like Clarissa Explains It All or Are You Afraid of the Dark, which was imported from the Bacony hinterlands of Canada. We didn't know a lot about making TV, but we knew that we wanted to make it look different than any other show in the air, this Carti said, and that was one of the reasons that we hired Catherine. She had a very distinct style. It was very playful and light, and we loved her use of cutaways and found footage. It gave it a real arts and craftsy feel, which we really loved. But this didn't mean the show wasn't labored over. John Inwood, the show's cinematographer, says and slimed that with Pete and Pete, there was an effort to choreograph the show in a way that would give it a design From the beginning to end and from scene to scene. That's not the style right now. He was saying this in two thousand and three, where we have the documentariization of shows like Parks and Recreation, which he had just worked on, so he's coming from a place of authority. Those shows embrace a looser, messier documentary style. Student executives have embraced that because it's led to shorter days, quicker shooting time periods, and the bottom line is it's cheaper. Katherine Deekman, with her background and admittedly taking influence from filmmakers like Jean Luc Godard, labored over the sound cues to the edits of that show. Alison Finelli, who played the character of Ellen, says and Slimed picking music and sound effects was kind of Will and Chris and Catherine's baby. They spent hours and hours just going through the stock music and using the stuff that no one else had had. Catherine would search for hours to just get ten seconds on the show. And regardless of whether imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Deekman isn't having it. The next quote that follows and Slimed comes from her. Ah, it kind of got on my nerves. Because SpongeBob and all these shows completely stole that idea and went to the exact same cues. In fact, oh yeah, I know those cues, she said while she was watching them, because I found them for Pete and Pete. They were all in the stock library, but nobody was using them that way.

00:24:28
Speaker 1: I wonder what they were. Did she give any examples?

00:24:31
Speaker 2: It's probably well, you know, I mean, the history of like stock libraries is really interesting because there's like a ton of it that was would have been recorded, like the British stock sitcom music. There's like a ton of it recorded by like Ace session guys who were like the killer jazz musicians on the scene at the time, the KPM Music Library. There's a bunch of it on the streamers. It's just it's like rippin' like incidental jazz funk stuff. But so that they might have had through Nickelodeon's through amount. I guess like that kind of stock library might have also been classical music, you.

00:25:05
Speaker 1: Know, serious question. I wonder if Jimmy Page played on any of those British to come That's a great question. I mean, who just turned to pretty recently. Yeah, and is dating probably a seventeen year old, I'll say one of Rock's most prolific pederasts. Adding to Pete and Pete's weirdly timeless but also influential aesthetic was the wardrobe choices, which mostly came about as a function of practicality. Alison Finelli, who played Ellen, the best friends slash love interest of Big Pete, who love interest right towards the end of the series. Yeah, she says in the book Slimed. We had to wear a lot of our own clothes. You couldn't wear anything too trendy, and we couldn't identify the state or town we were in. Janie Bryant, who designed the show and went on to work on Mad Men, added I always loved using vintage pieces because I felt it was a great way to express these characters who were so quirky. We know about this special world, the special neighborhood, and using those accents of vintage pieces combined with contemporary clothing made the show look incredibly special. It almost as a Wes Anderson aesthetic to it. It totally does Pete and Pete with these kids who were dressing like adults. That's the beginning of the inspiration. I live in Silver Lake and neighborhood in Los Angeles. And it's true all the hipsters look like characters from Pete and Pete, although that book was written probably like fifteen years ago. But yeah, fashion and fashion has moved on, But yeah, Big Pete. Actor Mike Morana told Vulture Chris and Will were both upstate New York preppies. Catherine was a music video director and more bohemian with the crazy hats. Big Pete was dressed more like a preppy, and Little Pete dressed more like a trucker or a mechanic. I guess Catherine won in the case of Danny. I think it was also her projecting herself more onto Allison, who had a fun wardrobe. Allison is Ellen the girl next door. Mcgrob added, we were trying to make Little Pete a badass. Was more about Holden call Field than grunge, and he only wore long sleeved shirts to cover his tattoo. And as you mentioned at the top of the episode, fans will remember that Pete's forearm has a tattoo of Petunia a. She's a mermaid, right? She a mermaid or like one of the figures on the front of a ship. Hang on, I thought she was a mermaid, but someone called it a pin up. Why can't it be both?

00:27:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, mermaids can be pinups. No, she has legs. It's just like a leggy redhead. Really now, I want to look this up. I mean not that I don't trust you. I just oh, oh yeah.

00:27:32
Speaker 1: But there is like a nautical vibe about her, right.

00:27:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, temporary tattoos if you want it. But you said they make temporary tattoos of her. If you want to go for that vibe.

00:27:46
Speaker 1: That's my twenty twenty four energy and early Pete and Pete short. It is explains that little Pete got the tattoo of Petunia as a Mother's Day gift, infuriating his father and causing his mother to faint the ship tattoo on his back. However, he is never explained as you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: After these messages, pretty much all the show's creatives were a fan of Mark mccahey of Miracle Legion, who eventually produced the show's anthemic theme song, Hey Sandy, which we will listen to now it's a great song.

00:28:39
Speaker 3: Bestyistange you look inod happily.

00:28:46
Speaker 1: I can tell for happy dogging again the dog I do love a song. It whips and completely unintelligible. Is there a full version of that?

00:29:07
Speaker 2: I just you know, I didn't look that much into it, but there probably has been in the intervening thirty years.

00:29:12
Speaker 1: The band's polaris right. It's like a made up band name.

00:29:16
Speaker 2: Pretty so Will mcgrob and I had lunched together. I'm okay, he recalls and slimed. At the time, Miracle Legion was having legal trouble and nobody in the band wanted to do it. I had a partner in the band and we wrote most of the songs, and he didn't want to do it, so Miracle Legion couldn't do the music. I had never written music on my own, but I volunteered to do it anyway, and then I presented him with the song Hey Sandy, and the rest is where we are now. People have obsessed over what the hellmm'kayley is saying in that theme song for the intervening decades, and apparently, while it's something that the people connected with the show enjoy and or laugh about, it wasn't by design. Deekman says, and slimed. Believe me, if Mark could concoct a mystery that people would talk about this many years later.

00:29:58
Speaker 1: But I know that he didn't.

00:29:59
Speaker 2: He's not that calculating. The performance video was shot in three or four hours.

00:30:04
Speaker 1: Moul Kay.

00:30:04
Speaker 2: He recalls being asked to jump around and up and down, get up, get up and get down. If you got the feeling, jump across the ceiling, which he did not want to do, so, of course, for one take he acquiesced and did just that, and that's where most of the footage comes from. Uh, he said, I had never written a theme song to anything, so I certainly didn't have any reason to think that it would be a successful theme song.

00:30:28
Speaker 1: But it was. It's like that sometimes. Katherin Deekman later told Vulture the show kind of evolved through a shared taste in terms of the way the kids looked and the way it was shot and the kind of kids they were. They weren't going to be show busy kids at all, and that helps set the tone for the show. Chris Vascardi told the av Club of casting their titular leads with Danny Tamborelli for Little Pete, he just came in the room, and he was the kid. He just had that kind of firecracker quality to him. He was funny, and he was adorable, and he was small, and you just know, Oh, the kid had a certain electricity to him. And Michael Morana big Pete. There are many things we could say about Michael with the cast thing, but his energy was just very different than Danny, and the contrast between them was very funny. Michael was definitely much more cereble. Not that Danny's not smart, but Michael Morana just approaches things in a much more terrible way. He's a little bit more sarcastic and rye and dry. He contrast that with Danny and his character, who's just a little bit more of a punchy in the face kind of a kid, and it was a pretty great combination. I don't know if we knew it right away that Michael was the one, but we definitely knew he was in the top two or three. New York native Marana was cast at a weird time in his life. He later told Vulture, when I got the show in the summer of eighty nine, I was eleven turning twelve, and it just started at a new school turning into an adolescent was part of my everyday life at that point, and it's not surprising that that that came out in the character. I'm grateful for that. Marana also played big brother to Kevin McAllister in the first two home alone films, but those were easier for him to see than his early work in the Pete and Pete shorts. He said, I didn't have cable TV growing up. We only got it after Pete and Pete went in the series production, So we used to go up and down the block on Saturday nights to my sister's friend's house to watch the first thirty second episodes air in between a couple of Nickelodeon shows. Hardy Rawls, who played Pete's dad, who I remember being kind of abusive. Is that just classic sitcom dad? He was a man of his time, Okay, okay, he said. In Slim, Danny and Michael were incredibly smart kids and knew their scripts. They had to be just as professional as the adults, but also kids on camera. Whereas as an actor on camera, I acted like a big kid and got paid for it. Toby Huss added that Artie's inshow honorific for the kids little vikings came from him being impressed by Marata and Tamberelli's work ethic can you do A? Can you do an? I actually can't.

00:32:51
Speaker 2: I didn't have any I didn't prep anything for this one. I didn't have any of those in my pocket. I love Toby huss So you ever see the maligned two or three season HBO show Carnival.

00:33:02
Speaker 1: No, oh no, no, no, he's in that. Yeah, he's in there. He's great. Arch you here, Arnie, Arnie, Arnie, strongest man in the world.

00:33:13
Speaker 2: Oh my, that's a considering. I hadn't prepared that. Yeah, that was pretty pretty good off the top. As for the names, Marana told the names Pete and Pete.

00:33:23
Speaker 1: Oh okay.

00:33:26
Speaker 2: We tend to just make up reasons when people ask us at conventions and stuff like that.

00:33:30
Speaker 1: This one is my favorite.

00:33:31
Speaker 2: When I was born, our dad wasn't there, and when little Pete was born, our mom wasn't there, So they just ended up picking the same name.

00:33:38
Speaker 1: Somehow.

00:33:38
Speaker 2: That's good as good as Eddie, honestly, most adorably, the two pets are still friends and had a podcast they ran for almost ten years. They reconnected in Brooklyn. In fact, when Marana happened to see Tambarelli at McCarran Park on the Wimsburg Greenpoint border during the park's mid aught heyday of hosting indie bands at the pool. The day was pretty hot and Tambarella was pretty hungover, and soon after we connected, he proceeded to puke in between two cars.

00:34:04
Speaker 1: There on Laurrimer Street. Maronnock told the Ringer there was.

00:34:08
Speaker 2: An earlier, sadder meeting. In nineteen ninety seven. Marana was living in New York and working as a bike messenger and he ran into Danny at an audition and his bike had just been stolen, so Danny's father who gave him a ride home. It's really cute that they're friends, though, and that Danny Tamborelli like has fronts and plays bass in a band.

00:34:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, didn't He used to work at like some hip Lower East Side. I want to see, like Pianos or something, Arlene's Grocery one of those places, or maybe he just played there a lot, because I thought I remember I had like friends that used to come across him. That tracks. Actually one of the executive producers of this show, Noel Brown, I think know it was Danny Tamborelli. I think he like pitched him a podcast or something. I don't know. I forget how they're connected. Did you ever used to go see shows at mccaren Park was kind of phasing out by the time that I was had gotten there. I was doing.

00:34:56
Speaker 2: I remember seeing stuff at North Side when outside was a thing and CMJ when CMJ was a thing.

00:35:03
Speaker 1: We don't have things anymore. No, it's all just content. And I saw guided by voices.

00:35:08
Speaker 2: And one of the funniest interactions I ever had was with a guy who was playing in a band with at the time. He's real head in the sand guy about a lot of stuff, and he.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: Was like, who are these again?

00:35:18
Speaker 2: I was like, they're guided by voices and he's like, are they British? I was like, no, they're just wasted.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, I saw. I think the one band I saw at the pool was oh Man, one of those like two syllable band names from like the late Oughts art Mau Mau Mau Mau tap tap rather than Juju Man Man's man Man, oh Man Man. I love man Man. It's man Man. Took me a second, I found it. I found it. They're Philly boys. Danny Timbrelli seems to have enjoyed his time on Pete and Pete. He talks and slimed about how his parents worked to keep him grounded. He worked in a bagel store while filming All That a couple of years after Pete and Pete, and played basketball and baseball While doing Pete and Pete. He maintained a social circle by inviting his friends from school to come and act as extras on the show. I love that. As you mentioned, he's still a musician, playing bass and fronting a band called Jounce. It's just a great name, and in fact, he got his first bass for an episode of Pete and Pete, which we'll get to in a second. He does, however, have a telling quote later on. He said, I don't really know where I supped being myself and started being Pete or the other way around. Yeah.

00:36:26
Speaker 2: I was in a section about how these kids kind of dealt with some of their fame, and Rick Gomez, who plays Endless Endless Mike.

00:36:33
Speaker 1: Or that's a great day he really is.

00:36:38
Speaker 2: He was talking about how he was like in New York with Mike Marona and people were like running after him screaming. Pete he was like, oh, apparently Danny Tamberelli gave or is still giving.

00:36:49
Speaker 1: We have no way of knowing. Keenan Thompson guitar lessons. That's just cute. And he has a sketch comedy group called man Boobs, which is less cute. I won't know if that's still going. Is that still going on or is that from like ten years ago, the sketch thing, or oh, I don't know. Who gives a shit?

00:37:08
Speaker 2: I think about a Google sketch comedy group called man Boobs. I cherished my algorithm.

00:37:14
Speaker 1: Too much for that.

00:37:17
Speaker 2: Little Pete's torrent of kid insults did occasionally cause problems with the network, Like Rob told Vulture, we could say blowhole and fudge liquor, but we couldn't say nipple, which was pretty arbitrary.

00:37:28
Speaker 1: Are there any insults that you had as a kid that you were particularly beloved by you?

00:37:32
Speaker 2: I think I got a lot of mileage out of fart. But then I read the novelization of the movie Blade when I was like ten, and that that introduced me to mother, and so I was cursing a blue streak pretty early. TVQH.

00:37:49
Speaker 1: Did you swear around your parents?

00:37:51
Speaker 2: No, I didn't cross that rubercon until, like I was into college. Now I do all the time constantly, so is my which is amazing versus like a.

00:38:02
Speaker 1: Sailor my sister and I still don't. That's part of the reason why I fought to have a censor beeps on this show. Aw I'm sorry, I'm here f it up for you, he shot with a mouthful sandwich.

00:38:15
Speaker 2: Tambarelli continued to work for Nick after Pete and Pete went off the air, but he admitted to the ringer that he and Marona were in different places in their life at that time. We were in that moment of being just old enough where if you went to first grade in fifth grade, then yeah, we're in the same elementary school, but if you're not in the same middle school and you miss each other in high school. I was dropping into high school as Mike was dropping into LSD, I mean college. I'd like to unpack that at some point they have a great rapport. I didn't listen to like a ton of the podcast that they had, but it's funny.

00:38:45
Speaker 1: Viscardi told the av Club of Alison Finelli, who played Ellen the Girl next Door whennew right away, when we saw her because she was just so different and so quirky and so charming and so much like a little adorable girl next door. So cas thin can be a brutal process because you can see hundreds upon hundreds of people who are just wrong the miny lay eyes on them, but then somebody walks through the door and it's like, Hallelujah, that's the one. In Slimed, Finella recalled the literal and figurative growing pains of doing the show during such a pivotal time in her life. She said, I got to a point where every scene they were putting powder on my face because we were just oily teenagers. After a while, they were more conscious about giving us different dressing spaces instead of trading off in the same space. But mine was near Michael and Danny's. It was super awkward. She added. We were all really close, and it was really hard for Michael, Morana and me when they started writing the romantic stuff on Pete and Pete. The kisses were absolutely horrific for us. Both both times, we avoided each other for an entire week all. Marana also experienced some hormone related issues during that time. Judy Grave, who played his mom said. Something everybody noticed was when Michael's voice was changing. We were all like, what does that mean? Is he still going to be Pete? Then once she was becoming an early teen idol, all the young girls were coming to the sets all on Twitter over him. That was something we noticed too. Finelli, who played Ellen, told YouTuber Christopher Nosy that Cafn Deekman, one of the creators of the show, was in fact one of her heroes, and she'd been interested in going into directing, but the tale end of high school she happened to take a medical science class. I absolutely fell in love with it, she said, and I sort of started thinking, Hey, maybe I'd like to do something like that. She added. I was applying to colleges and freaking my whole family out, who were like, you've acted your whole life. You wanted to direct, You've been doing musical theater. What in the world are you talking about. It was the hardest thing ever, but I stuck with it, and she's now a pediatric specialist in Philadelphia. Probably the only known case of somebody whose parents are like, wait, you want to give up acting become a doctor? We found him, We found the one. But Hi now we got to talk about the darling of the show.

00:41:01
Speaker 2: God dude, I had such a crush on the shell Tracktenberg, mostly from Harriet the Spy but yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and then Buffy. But man, it's a special place in heaven for redheaded women. She played Nona. She remembers her time on the show fondly, recalling and slimed her parents never forced her into her early acting gigs. That's difference between having stage parents not actually having the choice to be on set, and people like me who absolutely loved it. I would hate going back to the school because I would always want to be on the set. If anything, I would be too excited to be there and have to remember to calm down. She also added adorably at first and then creepily. Danny Tambarelli was probably among my first crushes, the lead singer of New Kids on the Block, Green Day and maybe Danny. So that was fun as a little girl discovering boys. And then the music goes to a minor chord. A lot of growing up happened for me on the Pete and Pete Show. Want to dig into that? That yeah, Tracktenberg, who went on to anchor Nickelodeon's Harriet the Spy adaptation does discrib I want to promost vivid Pete and Pete memories as a legitimate trauma inslimed. There was a scene where a bunch of us were walking to a fence we're supposed to drag because it was the hottest, longest day of the year, and there was a boy who had eighty d and his parents didn't watch him, and he went and had like twenty sugar packets from the craft service table. When action was called, he got really upset because the director told us to go really, really slowly. I was going slowly and he shoved me down and ran to the fence because he was on a sugar high. I happened to fall on my knee and slice it open on a piece of glass that randomly was there. So I've always had a scar on my knee for that. One day, I went to my school trailer, put a bunch of band aids on it, and said, we got to finish the scene. Finally, when we were done with the whole day, when I got into the car to go home at night, I burst into tears. I don't know why I included that that's a real downer. Damn, that's a rare dark cloud in this story.

00:42:55
Speaker 1: That kid, I don't know who he is, but I'll find him. If he made Michelle tracked and very hurt. I kind of guess it was Dandy Tembarelli. You think so well? Here, here to take us out of this this sad diversion is Toby huss who plays ho Hey, the strongest bad in the world. There we go that that wasn't bad. That was that was good. Yeah, it's possible. It's possible. Have you ever seen Michelle Trockenberg and road Trip? No? Have you ever seen road Trip or EU road Trip? Road Trip? Yeah? I was gonna say road Trip I've seen Yeah, No, God I love her. Pretty lady, just a pretty lady.

00:43:39
Speaker 2: After I saw that Harriet the Spy movie, I made a spy backpack and went around my neighborhood spying on people.

00:43:44
Speaker 1: Pretty cool.

00:43:46
Speaker 2: Binoculars, notebook, you find anything? Nope, not a damn thing. Suburbs were boring?

00:43:50
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, what was all in it? Binoculars? Notebook, flashlight obviously multi tool? I multi tool? Yeah, to pick locks? No, No, just like open vents and stuff. I mean, that's that's that's i'd say a step up from picking locks is that you are not even using a door, you are using vents.

00:44:15
Speaker 2: I pleaded the fifth and I had I brought my my game gear too, so that I could be in disguise and like if I was while spying on people, I would pretend to be playing game gear. This occupied weeks of my life one summer.

00:44:31
Speaker 1: Did you get caught. No, no trouble at all.

00:44:33
Speaker 2: No, not a single come up in sever I don't genuinely don't remember seeing anything interesting.

00:44:39
Speaker 1: Would you commit any crimes or anything that would be potentially labeled to crime define crime trespassing, stalking, definitely trespassing.

00:44:47
Speaker 2: No stocking. I didn't steal anything. I only steal from corporations, Jordan. I don't steal from people. I did shoplift so much as a kid, anything good, mostly action figures and stuff, but that's good.

00:45:02
Speaker 1: I just love to steal. The only thing I ever stole one of those little plastic things that were on the top of closing hangars that would say small.

00:45:08
Speaker 2: Medium, or large, so you could organize your closet at home, organizer sweaters.

00:45:14
Speaker 1: I feel real guilty about that. Uh uh.

00:45:19
Speaker 2: Two roads diverged in a wood us as children. I was more of a hardy boys guy. So I of course you were chaotic good, No, just no lawful good. They were fascists, secretly they were authoritarian, they were narks, they were Oh yeah, Harriet just wanted information. She wanted to compromat.

00:45:40
Speaker 1: You know. That's I can get behind that. This is one of our weirder digressions, the slightly unlawful sleuthing of a tween girl. Yeah, this is this is up there on the things that we're gonna get us an FCC warning. We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. But now back to Aartie. I haven't heard that guy's voice probably thirty years, but I hear it in my heart. Tobyhus, who played Arty, was described by guest star Janine Garoffalo to Vulture as the king of downtown Lower east Side. He initially created the character of Already at No Shamee Theater at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In HUSS's original iteration of the character, Artie was a patient in an insane asylum who would declare himself to the strongest man in the world before playing the piano and then screaming. Another actor would then spray him with the hoes, causing him to calm down and repeat the routine. But in a way, I feel like it's an absummation of our show. We alternate who does the spring? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The character was reworked so that his delusions were real in order to make it more child friendly. Kind of reminds me how on Sesame Street, Snuffy was originally an imaginary character for like the I want to say, like the first twenty years until and like I think only big Bird could see him, and then the people who made Sesame Street decided to make invisible to everybody because they just thought it was confusing to kids and they didn't want to basically encourage like delusions. Essentially agreed, that's interesting. The copsume for Arty Hassays came from his University of Iowa days, and the glasses were a pair of women's eyeglasses from a thrift store, which he still owns, bringing us a long delayed return to our It belongs in a museum segment. Despite the comedic origins in the show's world, already has played completely straight faced and received as such, though the town's parents' resentments eventually lead him to depart Wellsville in the heartbreaking season two story Farewell My Little Vikings, in which Artie departs town having finally helped Pete, I imagine little Pete to grow up and stand up for himself. Chris Vascardi noted that Nickelodeon was not happy with them dedicating so much time to Artie. The executives at Nickelodeon, as we've talked about, kind of stayed away and let us do our thing, except on certain occasions. I do remember that they were not happy with the fact that we were making it a two parter. I guess the final episode for ARTI the Farewell lit the Vikings episode was a two parter. Artie to them was a confusing, unsettling character, a guy in underwear running around suburbia with little kids thinking he was a strong man. Certainly, the executives at Nickelodeon, and I'm sure many parents out in the world who were watching the show with their kids probably felt the same way as Pete's dad and all the neighborhood folks did for Artie. They wanted the guy to go away. I liked Artie.

00:48:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's funny because I think I remembered him as like an imaginary friend. And they're going back and rewatching this. I was like, oh, yeah, no, it's just a real dude running around town.

00:49:08
Speaker 1: You ever, like, I mean, I guess we were just talking about this earlier. You remember something you haven't revisited in like, you know, decades, and you think there's no way it looks as weird and bizarre as I remember it being. And then you see it again and you're like, oh, yeah, no, my memory isn't faulty. Yeah, I wasn't just a kid who didn't know the world. It's just as weird as I remember. I just googled Alreadie and yeah, right on the money. It's I mean, it is mind blowing to me that a show like this ever got made, you know, I mean, it really speaks to just the lawlessness of television, television. It's so great.

00:49:46
Speaker 2: Endless Mike Hellstrom, what a great name. Did you know that it was supposed to be because his hatred of Big Pete was endless?

00:49:54
Speaker 3: No?

00:49:55
Speaker 1: I think that was what I read on Wikipedia.

00:49:57
Speaker 2: He wasn't able to get confirmation of that hig Pete's arch nemesis, a classic peaked too early guy with a position of power.

00:50:03
Speaker 1: He lorded over shop class.

00:50:06
Speaker 2: His white leather shoes, which is like the only thing that I remember about his character other than his name, were from Jannie Bryant. He has one of the best quotes about Pete and Pete enslimed, which is Pete and Pete had two fans, ten year old kids and college students who were stoned out of their minds, which is what I was. Rick Gomez has continued to act following the show, and Mike Morana joke to an interview at one point, Yeah, I just saw him in something terrible, that Transformers movie, dressing down Shilah buff But good for him. Though we had a bully at our high school that everyone referred to as massive, Mike.

00:50:44
Speaker 1: Was just pretty good. Did you have any an we didn't know?

00:50:48
Speaker 2: I mean, I had specific enemies, but we didn't have like one dude who was like the capital T B bully.

00:50:54
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know if he. I think he was definitely just the most colorful in terms of his name. There was also a guy and he gave himself this nickname, so I don't feel bad saying it. Sloth. Every telling you about Sloth. So named because he kind of resembled Sloth from the Goonies. That's bad. He bestowed this name on himself. His claim to fame in our neighborhood was his dad. This is a weird thing about Massachusetts. It really straddles the line between being extremely lefty PBS bag granola eating, you know, Subaru driving people, and then survivalists. His dad said that if he lost some amount of weight, he would buy him an AK forty seven, And so I in a very pete and pesque twist, this guy. I think he read a book about the Roman Army and he filled a camping backpack filled with stones and would just run across our neighborhood over again. Yeah that's small backpack full of stones. Yeah, dude, in order to get an AK forty seven. Well maybe not me. It'stop me when the stop becomes normal.

00:52:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean mostly the mostly the you know, the to get an AK forty seven thing, But no, you know you just like, uh, you ever.

00:52:14
Speaker 1: Run around with a bunch of stones. It's for strength training purposes. My house was on on the route that the girls track team ran at my high school and one time I was filming something something embarrassing for like a sketch we were putting together for some like talent shut night, and I was always the MC and I would always have to film dumb video sketches in between acts or whatever. And I'm pretty sure I was standing in my living room in my underwear and the front door was was all glass, and then they were running by, and the captain of the girls track team was my good friend Laura, and she waved and called my name, and the entire girls track team and it was like a Monty Python bit. We're all waving at me, Hi Jordan, and it was like, you know, forty fifty of the hottest girls in school, and I'm standing in my living room in boxer shorts with my friend filming me just out of sight, so it just looks like I'm standing in my living room in my underwear. Yeah it was bad. I mean that's kind of power move, sure, but it wasn't because you've seen me and might actually know you haven't, because even when we were on tour, I would change in the bathroom. Yeah I haven't. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. We didn't see a lot of you. We didn't explore each other's bodies very much on that I didn't even drive on that tour. I can't believe you let me get away with that. Yeah, I shouldn't have. So what was up with Mom's plate? What's the deal?

00:53:47
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:53:48
Speaker 2: That apparently just came from the story of a baseball player and a coach named Don Zimmer, who had to have a metal plate put in his head after receiving a blow to the head by a ball in the nineteen fifties. According to an article, though in Nickelodeon Magazine, it was a specifically a skiing accident that forced Mom's plate to be inserted into her head. It's only mentioned as in the show as like a from a medical procedure or something like they.

00:54:18
Speaker 1: Would hope so, yeah, but they don't.

00:54:19
Speaker 2: They don't specify it. I mean, but I guess in the expanded Nickelodeon Universe, if you got Nickelodeon Magazine, you found out the real juice that was from a skiing art.

00:54:31
Speaker 1: You know that thing I just said.

00:54:34
Speaker 2: I always thought it was a nod to Texas Chainsaw massacre too, where the guy has a metal plate in his head and he keeps holding a lighter over a stretched out coat hanger and scratching his plate skin with it.

00:54:47
Speaker 1: Oh god, Oh it's real gross. I love that movie. Oh and the rest.

00:54:54
Speaker 2: The show is probably the most famous to non obsessive as being that weird Nickelodeon sitcom with a to famous cameos, which is accurate. Michael Stipe pops up in the first full length episode thanks to Deecmon's connection to the band, but he was hardly the only musician to grace the show. Kate Pearson of the B fifty two's Debbie Harry, The Apples and Stereo, The Magnetic Fields, Gordon Gaano of The Violent Femmes, David Johanson, The New York Dolls, and Juliana Hatfield were all guests on the show at one point. Johansson, who was obviously the frontman of The New York Dolls and then also recorded as Buster Poindexter, who you have to thank for Hot Hot, Hot, Hot, Yeah, and the Ghost of Christmas Past and scrooged ah Wow. He was as to come aboard Pete and Pete as the unlikely park ranger Thorson in the episode on Golden Pete. Those kids hung out in the scene, Johanson told Vulture of the creators, it was a good show, very kind of avant garde. It had a nice dream like vibe to it. It was like working on Nindi movie. Low key, very enjoyable, Like being in camp was fun, real people, funky cool. No one was a blowhard. He dated on that and slimed saying that the actors on Pete and Pete were good kids, not like your typical ass kid stars. That was very refreshing. He's hilarious, dude. I interviewed him once and I was like, you know, being very earnest. I was like, yeah, you're one of the like big Manhattan downtown Manhattan icons. But you're like, you know, you've lived in Staten Island your whole life, Like what big up Staten Island for us? Like what do you love about Staten Island? He just there's this long pause on the phone and then he just goes, well, I hear the Fairyes.

00:56:30
Speaker 1: Nice. Uh.

00:56:38
Speaker 2: Juliana Hatfield's her obvious non musical charms will say, Michael Marana told The Ringer. When he was asked by an interview about her specifically, he said, we are men, are we not? We're not made of stone. We are made of flesh and blood and muscle and sinew. Right, we breathe, we live, And I just had to include that. I'm just gonna just saying that. It's my all purpose explanation for anything, mostly when pretty ladies are concerned.

00:57:07
Speaker 1: We are made of flesh and blood and muscle and sinew. We breathe, we live. Have you seen that thing that's been memed all to hell where it was like a woman on like a British kids show talking to a puppet. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, or normal man.

00:57:23
Speaker 2: We're just innocent man. But of course the biggest and most iconic Oh that's your that's you sorry.

00:57:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah yeah. But of course the biggest, most iconic name attached to the show was Iggy Pop. Yes, we played no no, Michelle Trashenberg's dad Christmascardi told the av Club. Because we had Michael Stipe and Kate Pearson and Steve Buscemi and various others in the first season, it started to get a little bit easier for us to at least have the talent folks at Nickelodeon get calls back from the people who represented these rock and rollers. I think it was the Stipe factor for sure. That helped us get Iggy. But I don't think anybody on the show, unless I'm mistaken, had any connection with Iggy. I think they just went through his agents and managers and sent him the script and some episodes, Biscardi continued to Vulture. We just thought who would be the most unexpected choice to be a suburban dad and put a guy in a car to get in khaki pants. Obviously we're all huge Iggy fans, so he reached out to him, and when he said yes, I don't think myself or Will or Catherine had ever been happier. It was just so weird and wonderful. He could not have been sweeter and funnier and more lovely with the kids. He was totally not what you'd expect. It's super eager. He was like, yeah, I'll do whatever you want, and we brought him back a number of times. Yeah.

00:58:37
Speaker 2: Tamberelli has the best story regarding Iggy's time on the show. He told this website called The Pop Break that he had no idea who Iggy Pop was until his dad showed him the Funhouse album, which is one of the greatest rock and roll it's ever made, but not exactly preteen boy listening just ends with La Blues, which is like a horrifying free jazz as a saxophone whaling Iggy whaling workout as a sixth or seventh grader, I was just so psyched and completely immersed myself in all of his records. When Niggy came onto the set, I was like, I know everything you've ever done, and he was like, who's this eleven year old kid talking about TVI and loving the record Funhouse?

00:59:18
Speaker 1: What the hell? This is so weird?

00:59:21
Speaker 2: And their friendship only grew from there. As we mentioned earlier, the episode A Hard Day's Pete concerned Pete forming a band to try and recreate a song that he heard a different garage band playing earlier. Oh yeah, he said. Iggy saw that I was playing bass and that I really fell in love with the bass. He would ask me about it and say, oh man, that is cool, just being curious. I was like, Hey, I'll bring my guitar in and we can jam. He said that would be fun. He and I used to hang out at lunchtime if he was on set. We would have lunch together and chat about everything. He was such a cool dude, and he really treated me like an adult. He had no problem hanging out with a twelve year old kid on set and telling me how he worked at a pet store and that's how he got his name Iggy and all sorts of other stuff, living in the Lower East Side and really gritty, getting that gritty New York City vibe out of him. Do we think he told him about shooting up Heroin or just was kind of obliquely like, kid, I've done a lot.

01:00:15
Speaker 1: Wasn't there that story about him, like getting stranded in Detroit in a tutu.

01:00:19
Speaker 2: There's a couple of stories about him where like getting arrested in women's clothing. I think one of my favorites is their manager came in to bail him out and he saw that he was in a cell and wearing a dress, and he was like just very exasperatedly when he bailed.

01:00:35
Speaker 1: Him out and was like, Iggy, why are you wearing a woman's dress?

01:00:39
Speaker 2: And Iggy goes, I beg your pardon, this is a man's dress, like collects himself and walks past him.

01:00:50
Speaker 1: I thought he got his name Iggy because he had a band in high school called the iguanas which were like a Beatles. Yeah. Yeah, that's another version that I've heard too. I don't know. You know, all many things, two things can be true at the same time. I learned that in therapy lives in all of us. Yeah.

01:01:08
Speaker 2: I do love him so much. Man, He's such a sweet guy, except for all of the horrific stuff he did when he was in waste of a human being.

01:01:17
Speaker 1: Did you ever interview him? No, No, I didn't.

01:01:21
Speaker 2: I would actually be a little intimidated by that. Like him and Nick Cave would be kind of like the ones. I would be like a little bit like cowed by, mostly because Nick is so sad. Now yeah, yeah, I mean the funniest thing about Iggy I think Henry Rawlins said where he's like he's doing his long stand up in and he's like, you know, the thing with Iggy is that there's two There's two guys there.

01:01:41
Speaker 1: You know.

01:01:42
Speaker 2: There's there's Jim Osterberg, who's just a nice guy from IPSIL and t Michigan, like, oh hey, yeah, how are you a man?

01:01:47
Speaker 1: Nice to meet you.

01:01:48
Speaker 2: We're gonna have a good gig together. And then there's Iggy Pop, who's this snarling, feral being of rock and roll incarnate, who's just like.

01:01:59
Speaker 1: I love that he just did and this is this is such a great way of illustrating our differences. I love that you just made those noises and it was so effortless. I watched you do it. I don't know how to contort my mouth to get those sounds out of me. I don't like if I wanted to, which I don't. I had a lot of monster noises as a kid, you know. Yeah, yeah, I am budding folly artists.

01:02:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, No, really, seriously, I also implore everyone to look up that early nineties Rowlin's routine stand up bit about his year's long rivalry with Iggy Pop seemingly one sided because he just had it in his head that he was going to blow Iggy Pop off stage, and over the course of like three concerts with Rowlin's band, realized that that would never happen and was impossible.

01:02:47
Speaker 1: What a fool he really thought that he could blow Iggy Pop out of the water.

01:02:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just like his It was like his personal thing that he had set in his mind, in his weird Henry Rowland's way of being, like I will I must dedicate myself to this tell it very funnily, and that he has this whole like, you know, he tells this whole story about how like the third time there's gonna be this big. You know, they're gonna go harder than they've ever gone before. And he's like gonna he's like singing his ass off, He's gonna die on stage, and like you finish it up. And like then Iggy goes out with the Stooges and just like trashes the stage and like invites the crowd onto the onto the and everything. The whole thing has to be like cleared off before the Cure can come on to close the festival. And and then he's like yeah, and uh, you know, I'm sitting backstage watching this with my jaw on my on the floor and and and Iggy just walks past me and just goes.

01:03:42
Speaker 1: Me telling me that story. I wonder if it ever crossed his mind to trash the Pete and Pete set like an amp.

01:03:50
Speaker 2: They blow up an amp in that episode, right, there's a there's a thing where they Yeah, something happens in the in the Hard Day's Pete episode.

01:03:58
Speaker 1: I love stories of rock and roll legends, giving these moments to kids, especially when the kids grow up, and that's so great. I'm trying to think of others off him.

01:04:09
Speaker 2: Well, you know, actually, Green Day, I always love the Green Day would end their concerts by, you know, asking people to come up and show them a quick and dirty version of an Operation Ivy song, which was the band that Tim Are the guys from Rancid were in before they formed Rancid, and Rancid and Green Day are very close, and so the Green Day's whole act was to come up on stage and teach kids this song and then immediately have them play it on stage, and then they gave all the they gave the guitarist to the kids.

01:04:34
Speaker 1: I was like, that's pretty transformational, you know. Yeah, Dave Girl, Dave Grol's got a bunch of those. Yeah, yeah, what do you think about Dave Growl could see you're not liking him because he's the Tom Hanks of rock. Dude gets a pass because he played drums on that Queen's the Stone Age album, which is one of the best rock and roll albums of the twenty first century, this or any other century. So gonna go with that and not never mind.

01:05:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's more impressive drumming. But Josh Hamis is a yeah. Josh Hammy and Nicoloveri are objectively garbage people, but man, that Songs for the Deaf is like, it's like a top ten album for me, and like, also, seventy five percent of the people I've known in music album smokes.

01:05:19
Speaker 1: It's a perfect record. He was tight with Bourdain. I was just watching the Roadrunner Boordain documentary the other night and Josh Hammy and Boordain were tight. That would make me sad for which one of them. I mean, they probably just did a lot of drugs together. He might have done the theme to parts on the now that I think about it. Anyway, back to Pete and Pete, other prominent guests came from all over. Steve Buscemi was then doing weird performance art as a duo with Mark Boone, you mentioned earlier of Sons of Anarchy fame in the New York City downtown scene of the late eighties, played the father of Big Pete's friend Ellen. That's right, I forgot that he was Ellen's dad. Colic Jini Garoffalo was a teacher at their school, and Larissa Olayinik crossed over from another Nickelodeon hit, the secret role of Alex Mack to play a nurse. Will Adam West was Little Pete's school principal long before Family Guy thought to get him. I forgot These are all like dimly ringing a bell. Wow, I forgot about that. JK. Simmons, Ellen Cleghorn, Selma Blair, Chris Elliott. The list of character actors showing up for brief roles on Pete and Pete goes on and on. Garffalo told Vulture, I was here in New York doing SNL and Pete and Pete was something you would notice if you were flipping through the channels. It's not like it was a buzz about town, but obviously it was something like, hey, did you see that show?

01:06:45
Speaker 2: Will Mcrob has consistently said that Nickelodeon was fairly hands off when it came to Pete and Pete and more or less let his group do their own thing. He told Vulture, nobody had ever told us how to make a one minute short film or how to make a half hour special series.

01:06:57
Speaker 1: We just did what felt right.

01:06:59
Speaker 2: We didn't know anything about the rules of screenwriting and TV writing and how to get to commercial break and anything like that. But the sad part, of course, is once you do it a number of times, you start to understand the rules of the game. You know, you have that liberation a couple of times, then you find yourself fighting your instincts to make it a standard show. It was pretty wild to go through that experience in a very hands on way, but.

01:07:17
Speaker 1: As the network evolved, that strategy changed, and Pete and Pete ultimately came to an end after its third season. The team didn't necessarily know they were making their last episode, but treated it as something of a trial for a slight change in format if the show did return, which obviously it never did. Both Viscarti and mcgrab admitted that after working on the show from nineteen eighty nine to nineteen ninety five, they were feeling the effects of burnout and started thinking of moving on. But Viscarti admitted to the av Club, of course, we had that fateful meeting with the Nickelodeon executives and they told us they weren't bringing it back. It was pretty heartbreaking.

01:07:53
Speaker 2: He went on to talk about the approach to their last show, Saturday, which brings together disparate plots from what five different characters doing on a Saturday in Wellsville was something very different. I don't know if it ever would have worked to do a whole season like that. He does have a fondness for the last show of the episode though. When that episode was over and all the kids were together, they just go outside and they help driver stew push the back of the bus and the camera pulled back. It just said so much about what the series was about, that sense of friendship in suburbia with a bunch of strange characters. Big Pete had his hair lopped off, and Ellen was wearing a beaten up bunny suit and they're eating pizza. Kid had sneakers on that he didn't want to get spotty, and a girl was dressed as a ninja. There was just so much weirdness in that shot. It was cold, it was wintertime. It definitely felt like a fitting end if it was going to be the end, and it turned out that it was Nick Rob chimed in. If we had known that that was the last episode and we tried to write a goodbye episode, I don't think it would have been nearly as good as it was with us not knowing. We would have tried too hard to do more with the goodbye rather than just write a great episode, and he Viscardi goes on to add some additional context to the tale of that interview. He said, that was the time when Nickelodeon started to make the shift making more straight down the middle mainstream programs. Rand and Stimpy was gone. It was the beginning of the Dan Schneider era. Nothing against Dan shows.

01:09:07
Speaker 1: But everything against him because he's a pediass. But they're differently, more mainstream, right down the middle, very funny in their own ways, but very very different than what we were trying to do. You could kind of see the writing on the wall. That was the direction the network wanted to take their programming. Pete and Pete was always a struggle to keep on the air from the beginning, and once the network started making the shift into even more of a straight crowd pleasing show that needed to be for everyone, not just a group of passionate fans, it was going to be a lot harder for us to stay on the air. Pete and Pete nearly got a second chance at life. Though Nickelodeon's two thousand films snow Day was originally intended as a full length Pete and Pete film, scripted by Mcrob and Viscardi. I guess it was presented to Nickelodeon Movies when that imprint launched in nineteen ninety five for Hollywood reasons. Presumably the Pete and Pete ness of it all didn't materialize, and in the intervening time between when it actually was released in two thousand, the original cast aged out of their roles and it was made with I actually don't know. In my mind, I Mandela affected it and thought that Frankie Munas and Man the Binds were in this movie. I think I might be thinking of Big Fat Liar. I actually have no idea who's in this movie. You know, I'm not anyone from Beaten Pete. You know what I remember from this movie? What's that? Hoku? No? Who sang the theme song? Mm hmm? The single another dumb blonde? Nope? She was Hawaiian. See if this rings any bells? Okay? I also had a crush on her. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah. Oh yeah. That's time.

01:10:35
Speaker 3: I suggest let you go, so I'll tell it to your face instead of tell it to you on the phone. I thought that you was special, maybe something unique. I'm come find that you're not really interested.

01:10:59
Speaker 1: In this song sucks.

01:11:04
Speaker 2: She's Don Joe's daughter, King of Italian the king of Hawaiian music, Don Hoe Nepo babied his daughter into that song.

01:11:17
Speaker 1: No.

01:11:17
Speaker 2: Snow Day starred Chris Elliot, Gene Smart, Chevy, Chase Skyler Fisk, Pam Greer, Josh Peck, Emmanuel Schirrikrie. Quite a packed catch or packed stacked cast. If you will gotta hate that song, She's pretty though.

01:11:35
Speaker 1: Snow Day producer I will be hecked, says Enslimed. I thought to make snow Day, which is essentially a Pete and Pete movie based on that whole idea of magic realism that Chris and Will do well will mcrob as. If you look at that movie, you can see a Pete and Pete template. We had a lot more material that made snow Day a lot more Pete and Pete, but eventually it got cut out. If it could have been more like the show, I would have been more proud of it. Yeah.

01:11:59
Speaker 2: I tried to really dig deep into this and find out exactly what happened, but it's eluded my grasp and I couldn't find any in depth interviews that either Mcrob Viscardi or that producer made about it. So I mean, I assume that Pete and Peach is aged out and then it was like, well, yeah, I mean the Unfortunately that kind of happens all the time.

01:12:20
Speaker 1: Man.

01:12:20
Speaker 2: It just gets out of your slush pile, and then somebody has another idea or finds it and it's just like, hey, well we can do this now, and you're like, well, where were you back when?

01:12:32
Speaker 1: He Pop also had a bit part in this. Pam Greer, as you mentioned, that's so weird.

01:12:37
Speaker 2: Very few stones to turn over at this point other than my history of shoplifting, but a couple of great quotes that I wanted to leave you find folks with Mike Big Pete, Marona told the Ringer. When I look back, I think the show is a polemic. It's an angry editorial about growing up and fighting against growing up and cherishing being a kid. Maybe Little Pete's character is in the grief stage and mine is in the acceptance stage. Then Toby Huss who played Artie the Strongest man in the World, says, and slime the most subversive thing about Pete and Pete will always be the people who all got together to make it. We're all a little like that. It's hard to explain, but it was a little shimmering time back then. I think that's beautiful. I hope more people rediscover this show. Yeah, learning more about it made me feel much more indulgent and charitable toward it than I had previously, which is a great thing to feel towards arc. You maybe didn't get as much with when it was of its time.

01:13:39
Speaker 1: Final thought, I'm just still trying to perfect my arty voice, well said.

01:13:43
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening everyone. This has been too much informacy on I am Alex Heigel.

01:13:48
Speaker 1: And I'm Jordan run Todg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

01:14:05
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Heigel.

01:14:09
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.