'Nickelodeon Weinerville,' Inside a Cardboard-Box World

 

 

By Shira Dicker

• Dec. 26, 1993

THE Building and Design Center on Route 202 is a tribute to suburban consumerism. Featuring everything to furnish or decorate one's home under one roof, the mall is suitable for one-stop shopping. During store hours, a steady stream of shoppers shuttle from store to store, caught up in that most suburban of activities -- home improvement.

But behind a heavy metal door marked "Employees Only," one's preconceptions are likely to peel away like paint beneath a heat gun. Contained within the cavernous confines of what used to be a wallpaper emporium is the antidote to that which is mass-produced and predictable: Marc Weiner's Weinerville Studios.

With its scores of neon-colored puppet sets littering the floor amid the neo-Gothic pink arches and columns built by the previous tenant, Weinerville Studios has a distinctly surrealistic appearance. The fun-house feeling is enhanced by the Pop Deco style of the sets and by the locales they evoke: the inside of a diner, the office of a washed-up movie agent, a Manhattan newspaper kiosk -- miniature stages that are urbane and sophisticated yet playful and reminiscent of childhood. Individualistic and likable 

In the former wallpaper shop, Mr. Weiner creates the cardboard-box world that has brought him success as the hyperkinetic star and host of "Nickelodeon Weinerville," a half-hour comedy and game show, broadcast Mondays through Fridays from 3 to 3:30 P.M. and on Sundays from 2 to 4 P.M. (when four half-hour shows can be seen back to back) on the Nickelodeon cable television channel.

Having premiered in July, with 28 pretaped episodes running initially in two-hour blocks on Sunday afternoons, the show went into reruns within a matter of weeks and has proved so popular with its audience of children 2 through 11 that Nickelodeon ordered 40 more episodes.

Like his sets and stable of puppet personalities, which include Dottie, the frazzled yet kind-hearted Mayor of Weinerville; Boney, the cantankerous dinosaur skeleton; Joey Deluxe, a Hollywood agent gone to seed, and Cocktail Frank, an ultra-hip rock-and-roll musician, Mr. Weiner is off-beat, individualistic, instantly likable.

Yet he does not project his personality when not performing, and the initial impression one receives is of a shy, deceptively nondescript man. Of medium stature with brown hair, dressed in jeans and a neat, button-down shirt, Mr. Weiner looked one day recently like any number of husbands being dragged by their wives through the Building and Design Center on a Sunday afternoon.

But if Mr. Weiner's manner and dress pronounce him normal, it is his eyes that give him away. They bulge slightly and broadcast wise-guy wackiness and the guilty gaze of a compulsive mischief maker. It is the eyes that undoubtedly aroused suspicion in the hearts of his elementary school teachers. It is the eyes that now command the attention of young cable television viewers and their parents every afternoon but Saturday. Comedic Alchemy 

Literally, Mr. Weiner lends his eyes -- and his head -- to his puppets. Bearing the disproportionate dimensions of caricature sketches -- tiny bodies and oversize heads -- the Weinerville puppets are fashioned out of foam rubber, glue, Magic Marker, Barbie Doll clothes and Mr. Weiner's actual face.

To accomplish this comedic alchemy, Mr. Weiner carves a half-moon shape out of each elaborately decorated set to accommodate his head. Mr. Weiner, donning either dark glasses or any number of guises, slips into his characters as he slides his head into his sets, positioning his chin above their stationary bodies while manipulating their arms from behind the set with wires. 

The sheer weirdness of Mr. Weiner's concept accounts for much of its charm. The inimitable art form, perfected over the course of nearly two decades, has been greatly aided by his wife, Sandy, an artist and comedy writer who is, Mr. Weiner said, "an integral part of the whole process."

The unstated yet explicit gag of "Nickelodeon Weinerville" is Marc Weiner's name, which he exploits to the fullest. Hot dogs are constantly mentioned, as prizes that contestants win (the Silver Weiner and the Golden Hot Dog), as names of puppets (Cocktail Frank and the Weenies) and even as the decor (pictures of hot dogs). Mr. Weiner has managed to turn what might have been a great liability into his greatest asset and marketing tool.'Tent-Show Behavior' 

The recent rise to fame comes on the heels of nearly a decade of relative obscurity for Mr. Weiner, who is 41 and a resident of Katonah. As he sat behind his desk in his private office at the Viacom Conference Center in midtown Manhattan (Viacom owns Nickelodeon, a division of MTV Networks), he spoke about his artistic development.

A self-described former "class clown," Mr. Weiner said that as a young child he was "an obnoxious person who didn't have many friends."

Recounting the futile efforts of his second-grade teacher to get him to behave, Mr. Weiner recalled a note the teacher had written on his report card. "She wrote, 'If Marc's tent- show behavior is not checked, he will end up in a circus or side show,' " he said with a poker face.

Mr. Weiner's unremarkable school career led him to Monmouth College in New Jersey, where, as a major in history and sociology, he dropped out after two years. "When college didn't work out, that's when I started painting," he said. "I ran a coffeehouse on campus and started making candles. This artistic feeling happened after I left school."

Afternoon With Robin Williams 

Saying he was interested in "doing something helpful to society," Mr. Weiner joined Clearwater Sloop, an environmental boat, and worked as a vegetarian cook. After a few years on the boat, he took a clown course in Boston and started working there as a street performer. In 1976, he traveled with the Bicentennial Barge as a deckhand, entertaining people as they came aboard.

After that, Mr. Weiner began working as a street performer in Manhattan and started going to comedy clubs with his act. An oft-told tale is how, performing for a crowd on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was joined by Robin Williams. The synergy was instantaneous, and the two performed improvisational comedy for the enthusiastic onlookers all afternoon.

Finding a niche for his puppets and his stand-up style at such clubs as the Improv, the Comedy Cellar and Stand-Up New York, Mr. Weiner also found a rapt audience in college students. Soon, he was opening for acts like Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and the singer Debbie Harry. His comic style and puppetry eventually caught the attention of the producers of "Saturday Night Live," who hired him to do regular segments for the show, featuring "Rocko," a hand puppet, during the late 1970's.

Mr. Weiner's star continued to rise until the mid-80's, when he decided to take a break from performing to devote more time to his family. A few years spent out of the limelight, however, is severely handicaping to a comic's career, he found.Executives Saw a Prototype 

There were years of nominal recognition as Mr. Weiner played clubs and the college circuit, his elaborate puppet sets all but gathering dust in his former Mount Kisco studio. His stand-up work was still fetching laughs, but the heady early success he had enjoyed became elusive.

A pilot show he taped for Comedy Central in the early 90's called "That's Not Fair" failed to make it onto the air, but the prototype caught the attention of Nickelodeon executives.

Herb Scannel, senior vice president of programming for Nickelodeon, recalled: "I saw the pilot Marc had done and thought that it was very funny. Marc is very physical; his comedy is very slapstick, and the program tested well with kids. We asked him if he would be interested in developing the idea further. What we had in mind was a Soupy Sales for the 90's, a character comedian who could entertain, a likable one-man show."

Mr. Scannel is enthusiastic about "Nickelodeon Weinerville," calling it the type of television that "kids haven't seen for 30 years."Laced With Cartoons 

Indeed, "Nickelodeon Weinerville" is a show with a format unlike any other. Featuring Mr. Weiner as the star and host, the show combines his puppetry -- both live and prerecorded -- with his gags and audience participation. A highlight of each episode is watching children from the audience get "Weinerized," or placed within a large rumbling machine only to emerge as puppets in a Weinerville set. Parents might scream at the sight of their children's heads appearing over tiny puppet bodies, but the young audience loves the transformation.

Divided into short segments, the program also offers vintage cartoons, like Honey Half-Witch, Gerald McBoing Boing, Sir Blur and Mr. Magoo, which were retrieved from Paramount and Columbia video archives. While the cartoons are well received, the aim is to devote more time to "Weinerville".

On Nov. 29, Mr. Weiner flew to Florida to work on the 40 shows being taped over the next three months. Before leaving New York -- which entailed packing the puppet sets in crates, closing his Katonah home, taking his 5-year-old daughter, Rebecca, out of kindergarten and his 3-year-old son, Max, out of preschool -- Mr. Weiner, his wife and his writing staff worked at a feverish pitch.

At the Nickelodeon studios in Orlando, they are editing and reworking scripts, pretaping puppet segments, building sets and rehearsing routines. Celebrities at School 

Mr. Weiner concedes that his children enjoy star status among schoolmates. Teachers and parents at Max's preschool in Mount Kisco have requested autographed photographs, and Sandy Weiner recalls how the butcher recently predicted that her husband will make $20 million and offered to serve as the couple's financial adviser.

So well known is "Nickelodeon Weinerville" among schoolchildren that the Weiner offspring are sometimes accused of padding their resumes.

"Recently, Rebecca came off the school bus, highly upset because some older kids did not believe that Marc was her father," Sandy Weiner said. "We had to send her with a picture the following day to prove that she was telling the truth -- and now she is a star."