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. It’s like the insides Village and toasted a new era of cartoons. History of Nickelodeon’s Golden Age, “It of my brain are on the wall.” She’d gone to her 10-year high school was like somebody had slipped [creator Simensky’s brain, much like her office, reunion the night before, been asked John Kricfalusi] a tab of acid or something.” has been swirling with animated charac- “What do you do?” by former classmates. All three shows connected with audi- ters since toddlerhood. Her baby book She said she worked in animation at ences—mostly kids, but some adults began includes the note that she “loves to watch Nickelodeon. They looked confused. watching, too. Their ratings ballooned. The cartoons!” in the age 3 section. When she Nickelodeon didn’t make cartoons. “If characters showed up on the fronts of learned to read a few years later, it was to you watch tomorrow, you’ll see what I’ve T-shirts and backs of jean jackets. Soon decipher Peanuts strips and conquer TV been working on,” she said. Simensky was developing a fourth Guide. “I knew that if you could read those The next morning, a Sunday, Nick pre- Nicktoon, Rocko’s Modern Life, with cre- two things, that was power,” she says. miered its first original cartoons in a single ator Joe Murray, and working with Craig Growing up in Union, New Jersey, not far “Nicktoons” block: Doug, Rugrats, and The Bartlett on the Hey Arnold! pilot.

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2017 51 “I’ve never dabbled in tasteful,” Simensky says. “I would be very distracted if it were empty in here.”

“We were kind of making it up as we cases to slither down the chute, Simensky wasn’t making its own shows when went along,” she says of those early told him how much she liked his network. Simensky arrived. That meant she got to Nicktoon days. “No one was really mak- Eventually they met up for dinner and “start building again” as she had at Nick. ing stuff like this, so we were just kind talked for five straight hours about car- Again she shepherded new shows from of guessing about what might work.” toons—not Cartoon Network, just cartoons. pitch to pilot to series. By the time she left But as the guesses paid off and the Simensky moved to Atlanta in 1995 and Cartoon as head of original animation, the Nicktoons’ success grew, Simensky felt started working for Lazzo at Cartoon Network. network had produced multiple hits. pulled toward a new cable network that Reminders of that chapter—which lasted Paul Siefken, who worked with Simensky was running cartoons 24 hours a day. until she went to PBS in 2003—are sprinkled at Cartoon Network and PBS, and now over- She bumped into Mike Lazzo, then the across her current office: action figures sees content production and management vice president of programming for Cartoon from Dexter’s Laboratory, a Powerpuff Girls for The Fred Rogers Company, has a simple Network, at an airport baggage carousel skateboard, Samurai Jack mementos. explanation for her track record: “She in New York. As they waited for their suit- Like Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network knows how to get the funny out of people.”

52 JAN | FEB 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE Siefken says TV execs will often make In 2013, the Cinema Studies Program or Pixar or Disney, Simensky’s is “one of suggestions for how something could be asked Simensky to teach Contemporary the most beloved classes,” says Amy funnier, which drives creatives crazy. Issues in Animation. She’s come back Calhoun, DMD’s associate director. “She knows that,” he says, and instead every fall since to unravel the history and Jeremy Newlin EAS’13 GEng’14, now a dishes out feedback that leaves artists current practices of animation for Penn technical director at Pixar, took Simensky’s invigorated rather than frustrated. students. This semester’s course is called class his senior year, and he says it was That’s why Bartlett has followed Simensky The Animation of Disney, and it’s cross- one of the best courses he took at Penn— from job to job, network to network. He says listed as an English, cinema and media partly because it let him think deeply about some executives give notes just for the sake studies, fine arts, or art history course. animation without actively making it, but of saying something. Others look at a script On Monday afternoons, Simensky leaves mostly because of Simensky. or storyboard and “take the edges off of PBS early and takes the train from DC to “Our [DMD] professors in general are ei- it—smooth it out so it’s less weird or what- Philly. She walks over to campus and gets ther computer scientists or artists,” he adds. ever.” But Simensky “gives me a ton of rope,” in front of her class, thick curly hair spill- “Linda’s a producer. There’s something spe- he says. “If she thinks something works, ing down her back, a FitBit strapped to her cial about hearing that perspective.” When she’ll just leave it alone.” Like season two wrist. Her voice is quiet and low, remark- Simensky taught a History of Computer of Dinosaur Train, for instance. She told ably close to Daria from the old eponymous Animation class two years ago, she says the him there were no notes and added, “I’ll get MTV cartoon. It’s distinct enough that class was about half DMD students. out of your way.” several friends, including Beavis and Last fall she brought in some of the old Butthead creator Mike Judge, have asked Nickelodeon pilots that never made it to More than 30 years after she took classes in her to perform characters on their shows air. Next year, she’s planning to teach a Bennett Hall, at the corner of 34th and Walnut over the years. She’s had to turn them all class focused specifically on TV anima- streets, Simensky now stands inside one of down because the acting part doesn’t come tion—and again integrate her past work. its classrooms, facing her own students. as easily as the voice does. She admits that it’s “very trippy” for her Jiminy Cricket is paused on a screen She doesn’t wear a suit. She doesn’t use early work to now be a history lesson. behind her. She warns the class that there PowerPoint and rarely looks down at her As a former student told Simensky, have been some technical difficulties with notes. “I want to make this clear,” Jordan referencing a genre that dates back to the DVD player lately. “But don’t feel bad for says. “It’s not that she doesn’t prepare. She 1900, “You are the history of animation.” me,” she deadpans, “don’t take pity on me.” prepares extensively. It’s just that she needs “I said, ‘I know you mean that as a com- She tells the class that when she was no aids to convey what she wants to convey.” pliment,’” Simensky remembers, “‘so I’m a kid, Disney was for squares. “We were Some of that may be natural teaching going to take it as a compliment.’” groovy eight-year-olds,” she adds. “We talent, but it’s also because Simensky didn’t want to be seen watching Disney.” has been working in animation longer One of PBS’s newest additions, Nature Cat, The class giggles at this, as they do when than her students have been alive. As her opens with an earworm theme song, sung Simensky delivers dry one-liners through- crammed office makes clear, she is a fan at almost-off-the-rails speed: out the three-hour class. (“Pinocchio is like of the art form itself—not just the shows your annoying cousin who you have to keep she’s worked on but Bugs and Snoopy We’re climbing up the trees now. bailing out of jail, and you’re Jiminy and Beaker, too. On LinkedIn, her profile We’re swinging through the breeze now. Cricket” lands especially well.) photo is a cartoon drawing of her face. We’re getting muddy knees now “There’s a lot of laughing in that class,” Bartlett says that’s what makes her so With Nature Cat. Diana Gomez, a College senior who has good at finding hit shows. “She brings taken several courses with Simensky, a really deep awareness of the history of Fred’s an indoor cat who morphs into says a few days later. “And it’s the nice, cartoons and a love of cartoons,” he says. his alter ego, Nature Cat, as soon as his natural kind of laughing—not the forced, “A lot of executives you meet in this busi- humans leave for the day. He goes on out- give-me-an-A kind of laughing.” ness don’t seem to particularly love car- door adventures and gets into more slap- Amy Jordan, the professor and associate toons. They’re just giving notes, trying stick situations than the dignity of a real dean for undergraduate studies at the to make sense of what they’re putting feline would ever permit. (In a single epi- Annenberg School who co-edits the Journal out. Linda’s a fan of the work.” sode he runs smack into a tree and also of Children and Media, remembers inviting Many of her current students grew up gets spritzed by a skunk, stung by a bee, Simensky to her 50-person class, Children watching the shows Simensky developed and chewed up by mosquitoes.) The char- and Media, for a guest lecture in 2012. at Nick and Cartoon Network. Gomez acters’ voices come from Saturday Night Simensky had a broken leg at the time. She says Powerpuff Girls was her favorite Live stars past and present—experts at came anyway to talk about her work at PBS. cartoon as a kid, so knowing that her making people laugh. As Nature Cat co- “I introduce her and she starts talking teacher helped get it on the air “brings creator David Rudman told Channel Guide without a single note, without any PowerPoint a whole different weight” to her lectures. Magazine last winter, “We wanted to do slides, without any audio/visual, and she Among Digital Media Design students, Looney Tunes with a nature curriculum.” had that audience of students captivated,” many of whom continue on to work at high- Between the humor and classic anima- Jordan says. “It’s a gift to be able to do that.” profile animation studios like DreamWorks tion style, the show looks and sounds like

THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE JAN | FEB 2017 53 something Simensky might have put on At the same time, Jordan says Simensky’s “And under Linda’s leadership, [PBS] has Cartoon Network back in the late ’90s, choices at PBS acknowledge how percep- recognized that the landscape has changed. but with science lessons and an underly- tive kids are. “She knows that the content She’s been very cutting-edge with it.” ing message that nature is cool. The show we give children shouldn’t be talking down Simensky sees this multi-media revo- sums up what she has tried to do at PBS to them or pandering to them, but chal- lution as a good thing—“a great way to since she got there: train her eye for enter- lenging them,” Jordan adds. be in a lot of places,” she says. As a kid, tainment on an educational mission. If that Powerpuff moment with Ethan she missed the Brady Bunch episode that When she arrived in 2003, Barney & started the shift, then making educational introduced Cousin Oliver. There was no Friends and Teletubbies and Clifford the TV has fully transformed Simensky into a chance to catch up, so instead she tuned Big Red Dog were among PBS’s top offer- curriculum convert. When friends hand her in the next week and sat there wondering ings for kids. Simensky wondered what their pitches for other networks, she’ll read who this new little kid with glasses was. had happened to funkier shows like The them and think, But what is this about? Now kids can watch anything they want Electric Company, the broadcaster’s sketch “I’ve gotten so used to shows having a pur- any time they want to, and they can keep comedy series that she’d loved in the ’70s. pose that it’s weird to look at ones that are interacting with it between episodes. During her interview at PBS, she sug- just funny,” she says. “Though to me, Odd But even as she puts out wildly varied gested funnier TV that focused on aca- Squad and Nature Cat are just as funny as content—shows with their own apps and demic subjects rather than building anything I’ve worked on in my other jobs.” games, shows with puppets, shows with live social-emotional skills. She got the job. The first new show she brought to PBS came from fellow Nickelodeon alum Mitchell Kriegman, who created the wacky live-action Clarissa Explains It All in the early ’90s. Simensky has brought in more Nick show-makers since then, including Craig Bartlett (Hey Arnold!) and Joe Murray, who created Rocko’s Modern Life at Nick and is now working on a show for PBS called Luna Around the World. Simensky is aware of how her audience has changed since she moved to public television. Many of the kids watching PBS stations come from low-income families. They don’t have cable, or a personal iPad. They can’t tune into Nickelodeon and Disney or watch cartoons on Netflix. They don’t always get to see the newest Pixar blockbuster in theaters. “They end up watching us,” she says, But unlike at those other jobs, Simensky actors—Simensky remains an animation “and they shouldn’t be penalized for that. doesn’t get to make hits anymore. Not junkie at heart. She loves The Simpsons. Everyone should have access to funny because she works for PBS, but because She watches Phineas and Ferb and Gravity programming.” there are so many series out there and Falls. Her kids came home from school one When Nature Cat premiered last Novem- so many places to watch them. day and found her home sick watching an ber, some parents wrote in to say that it “Clearly the definition of ‘hit’ now is that episode of the PBS cartoon Arthur. couldn’t possibly be educational. It was too you’ve made it past the first season,” she “Are you watching that for work?” they focused on laughs. That made Simensky says. “No show gets the amazing ratings that asked. laugh herself. “I’d always dreamed of the something like SpongeBob SquarePants “I said, ‘No,’” Simensky remembers, “I’m day someone would complain that a show got. It’s just not that world anymore.” watching Arthur ’cause it’s funny.” I’d worked on was too funny,” she says. Now Actually, is show even the right word? Having known Simensky for more than Nature Cat is one of PBS’s top five shows. PBS Kids calls itself “an educational 20 years, Siefken says he can’t picture her Cory Allen Gr’00, the associate director media brand.” Series like Nature Cat working in any other field. “It’s not really of research at PBS from 2000 to 2007, aren’t only on TV. They’re apps. They’re a choice for her,” he says. “It’s not what she says Simensky helped reinvigorate the on the PBS website with games and video does. It’s who she is.” nonprofit’s programming. Before she got clips and DIY projects. “We say TV as Just ask the Looney Tunes monster there, “I think there was a sense among shorthand,” Simensky says, “but really and Lisa Simpson figure perched over some people that a PBS show must look we’re making content.” her desk.◆ a certain way or not have humor, not have “It’s a transmedia experience,” adds Molly Petrilla C’06 blogs on arts and culture for an edge,” he says. Jordan, who studies media’s effect on kids. the Gazette and writes frequently for the magazine.

54 JAN | FEB 2017 THE PENNSYLVANIA GAZETTE