Frankenfamily
Nickelodeon Television Productions
1983-1984

Created as a quick response to the growing monsterism fad of the early eighties, Nickelodeon's Frankenfamily was doomed from the start. Infighting between Nickelodeon's top executives, lawsuits from creators of both The Addams Family and The Munsters, and a brief love affair between costars Jason Jett Lynn and Marion Runnywhite which left relations so intolerable that, with the exception of Sicherman, the entire cast was changed, were only the tip of the massive iceberg that would eventually sink the ship that was to be Frankenfamily.

After the decline and fall of the first family, which left the show almost irredeemably unsalvageable, the young Sicherman went on the first of what was to be a string of his famous "lost weekends."

While their working relationship lasted only a few months, first generation youngest son, Timothy "Buck" Wilder, became fast friends with Sicherman and remembers the first torrid excursion into Bacchanalia that the two of them entered into headlong.

"Dave was crushed after the show was canceled." He told a reporter from the Sun in a 1987 interview. " The pills and cheap girls, and all the coloring. Always with the coloring. I guess I should have seen it for what it was, a sign of things to come. I was so blind."

But no one could have seen what was about to happen. Dr. F.N. Ministry, who had directed David in Angels Run, Little Boys Work, came calling on his favorite pint-sized actor after hearing rumors of his self destruction.

"Sure I was worried." Ministry said in the Sun in 1987. "The kid just seemed too young to be hitting it this hard. He was living in squalor. In a split-level ranch house in Encino. When I finally got to see him, the place was filled with coloring books and word searches. He went through a three week period in which no one was allowed to speak to him unless they could come up with a better word for 'cornflower blue.' There were Flintstones vitamin bottles everywhere, though he'd eaten all the red ones because he said they gave him strength. I was concerned, so I decided to help him."

The help Ministry gave him was the leg up that Sicherman needed to get back on his feet and may have saved his life so that future generations could enjoy his gifts. Ministry, whose respect as a director of children's films has only grown in recent years, (his most recent credits include Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen's Basement Mardi Gras) contacted the bigs at Nickelodeon and convinced them to pull Frankenfamily back off the shelf and give it another go.

The return of Frankenfamily quickly pulled David out of his funk and set him back to work. Ministry was made producer of the show, and as a result, a groundbreaking moment in television came to be. On March 4, 1984, David Sicherman became the first person in history to use the word "nigger" on children's television. While a critical success, something in the shows new format made audiences uncomfortable. Still, the final bullet was yet to come.

New mom Linda Oldenfeld took an immediate shine to David. In a recent interview she explained: "I told you before. I will not talk to you about this. Now buy a cookie or get out."

At the time, that shine grew into a passionate love affair that took up so much of the time and concentration of the two actors that the bedeviled producers soon had no choice but to hang up the skates for a second time. This time, however, the damage was much less severe. "It wasn't until April '92 that I even realized there had been a second show." David said. "Is that fat kid still alive? He can't be."

©2002

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