48 JAN | FEB 2017 the PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE WHAT KIDS WANT (To Watch)

48 JAN | FEB 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE WHAT KIDS WANT (to watch) Twenty-five years after she helped launch the original Nicktoons, Linda Simensky is still deciding what millions of kids watch on TV—and teaching Penn students who grew up loving the shows she developed. By Molly Petrilla he Powerpuff Girls were fighting again. at Cartoon Network since 1995. Rather Guided by gut instinct and personal Voices squeaking and cartoon eyes than sketching characters or writing taste, she’s made a career out of divining Tbulging, Buttercup, Bubbles, and scripts, as an executive she helped creators what kids want to watch. Her work at Nick Blossom flew at a bad guy, throwing out refine their ideas, test out their pilots, and and Cartoon in the ’90s helped coax teens kicks and punches. ultimately put their shows on TV. and adults back to cartoons and made ani- Linda Simensky C’85 and her two-year- Simensky loved making kids laugh, but mation zeitgeisty again. At PBS, she’s man- old son, Ethan, watched from the couch. she hadn’t thought much about how else aged to keep kids’ attention despite the The superhero sisters weren’t just on cartoons might affect them. How a kid siren calls of Netflix and iPads and XBox. the family TV back then. They were all who hears Ren call Stimpy a stupid idiot She also has a pretty cool office. over the house—splashed across posters, enough times might think that’s a good printed on T-shirts, molded into action nickname for a friend. How a toddler Where should you look first inside Simensky’s figures, even on a cookie jar. Simensky watching superhero sisters fight a bad stuffed, technicolor room at the PBS headquar- had fought to get Powerpuff on the air guy might try landing his own punch. ters in Arlington, Virginia? Maybe at the bowl as an executive at Cartoon Network. Sitting with her son that day, “I started of marbles or the Wallace and Gromit fig- Ethan didn’t know that, but he could tell looking at TV through the eyes of a moth- ures. The miniature globe collection or the from all those mementos that the sisters er rather than just a cartoon-maker,” she succulents on the window. The Roz Chast were important. says. “I remember thinking, ‘If I’m going originals or the doodle a coworker made As the girls sparred with an enemy on to make shows, I need to make something in a meeting, now hanging framed on the screen, Ethan turned to Simensky and that’s impactful and important.’” wall. The photo of her last office, in which punched her shoulder. He smiled up at her. So she went to PBS, where she’s been there’s a photo of the office before that, “I was like, ‘Huh, he just learned that in charge of children’s programming and on and on in a decades-long, Escher- from watching them,’” Simensky remem- since 2003. esque joke with herself. bers. “That’s not good.” The move shocked many in the industry, Maybe at the glass bowl of Legos, which It was 2002, and she’d been working in but it wasn’t the first time Simensky, who occupy her hands during meetings. She’s animation for well over a decade. She had now teaches animation-history classes at had them for decades and recommends helped build Nickelodeon’s cartoon depart- Penn, grooved to the strum of her own sitar. it: “Your productivity will go way up.” ment in the early ’90s (the Doug, Rugrats, (No, really, she used to play one of the Indian “Over here we’ve got some Pez,” Simensky and Rocko’s Modern Life era) and worked lutes on College Green sometimes.) says, pointing out a jumbo size Snoopy dis- ILLUSTRATION BY ROMAN KLONEK | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JUSTIN TSUCALAS THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2017 49 50 JAN | FEB 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE penser. “There’s Beaker from The Muppets, from the Newark airport, Simensky would Ren and Stimpy Show. Simensky watched and Bugs Bunny, and some Beatles. Astro hustle home to watch old Bugs Bunny car- the broadcast in New York with Nick execu- Boy. And I have a whole collection of the toons after school. In eighth grade, she tives and the Doug creative team. Fisher-Price Little People from the ’60s started telling people that she wanted to She had been out of Penn for four years and ’70s.” write scripts for Bugs someday. “Then I and working in scheduling at Nickelodeon— Reminders of her current work are learned Bugs Bunny had not been in pro- making shows start on time using a tucked in, too. At PBS she decides which duction for quite some time,” she says. computer that backed up via tape deck— shows will make it to air and works with While animation experts call the when the network formed an animation the people who create them. There’s also 1930s, ’40s, and early ’50s a golden era department. Simensky had been clear some lurking behind one-way mirrors for cartoons, many write off the next about her cartoon obsession since she during focus groups involved in the job. three decades, including the years when started at Nick. “Other than being really On a recent weekday, almost every show Simensky was a kid. That’s when car- interested in animation, I didn’t really that aired between 6:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. toons stopped having broad appeal. They have any of the skills needed” to develop on Philadelphia’s PBS member station ran on TV at times only kids were watch- shows, she says. “But I was there, I knew WHYY arrived during Simensky’s tenure. ing, with few traces of the carefully the Nick brand, and I knew what I liked.” Her office marks some of those shows with crafted, high-budget artistry that people She became employee number two on a parade of Dinosaur Train characters in of all ages had loved in movie theaters. the new two-person Nicktoons team. front of a framed picture from Daniel “Nobody really cared about animation, Cartoons hadn’t improved much by the Tiger’s Neighborhood. Across the room, a nobody really talked about it,” Simensky time she left Penn in 1985. Popular shows stuffed animal from The Cat in the Hat remembers. “By the time I was in my late like The Transformers, The Care Bears Knows a Lot About That tops a shelf. teens, there was a real sense that anima- and G.I. Joe were often, as Simensky wrote It’s a massive display, impossible to tion was for little kids. Watching car- in an essay for the book Nickelodeon digest all at once. A swirl of colors and toons after I was past my teens seemed Nation, “merely half-hour commercials characters that’s somehow neatly orga- like a big act of rebellion at that point.” for the properties they featured”—and nized and chaotic at the same time. Craig But Simensky liked what she liked. At adults still weren’t watching them. Bartlett, the creator of Hey Arnold!, Penn she’d unwind with old Bugs Bunny She points to three developments in the Dinosaur Train, and Ready Jet Go, took shorts. A favorite, “Little Red Riding late ’80s that began reviving animation a panoramic shot of it all with his phone Rabbit,” sends Little Red off to grandma’s and clearing a path for the Nicktoons. the last time he visited Simensky. house with a familiar rabbit to stew. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? became a hit “Going to her office is like going to this She majored in communications and took movie in 1988; the Simpsons got their hilarious shrine of weird animation col- a sitar class for five semesters. “Sometimes own show in 1989; and The Little Mermaid lectibles and cool animation art,” he says. we’d go outside and play and everyone would was nominated for a Best Picture Golden “When she has to move out of there some look at us kind of weirdly,” she remembers. Globe in 1990. “It suddenly seemed that day, she’ll have a huge job packing out.” She didn’t care. She loved learning the animation was ‘hot’ again,” Simensky “I’ve never dabbled in tasteful,” Simensky instrument and meeting other students wrote in her Nickelodeon Nation essay. says midway through a tour of her work- who were as Beatles-obsessed as she was. With their brand-new characters, gender- space. Taste aside, it must be distracting Simensky told classmates she wanted to neutral appeal, and focus on “kid empow- to have so many things clamoring for make cartoons someday. When someone erment,” the Nicktoons promised some- her attention all the time. “Not at all,” asked what she was doing at Penn, a school thing fresh. Most ’80s cartoons followed she says. “I would be very distracted if with no animation department, she shot the Hanna-Barbera art style, but the it were empty in here.” back: “Developing a sense of humor.” Nicktoons were recognizable even from a She says it’s not unusual for people in single background frame. There were animation to have offices filled with On August 11, 1991, exactly 25 years ago this Doug’s soft curvy lines, Rugrats’ purple- stuff. “We’re all visually oriented and it’s past summer, Simensky lifted her glass heavy palette, and Ren and Stimpy’s—well, sort of how we communicate,” she adds. inside a Mexican restaurant in Greenwich as an animator says in Slimed!: An Oral “It’s how we think.

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