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Nostalgia bomb: Clarissa Explains It All
Hell, yeah - Clarissa was my hands down FAVORITE show from the early 90s, the halcyon days of Nickelodeon. This was the show that started it all, in a lot of ways ~ the first sitcom to feature a young, teenage, female lead, the first to really capture the tween market, and one of the first to keep a girl/boy friendship strictly platonic (well, minus the obligatory do-we-like-each-other-this-way? late-season episode). So freakin' awesome.
And look! Inside Clarissa Explains It All with Creator Mitchell Kriegman
Excerpt:
From where did Clarissa’s memorable sense of fashion and interior design come?
My genius here was going outside of Nickelodeon for my own costume person and that was Lisa Lederer. She was one of these New York folks who brought a downtown scene sensibility and I remember when she first came on set that the people at Nickelodeon were freaking out because she had a nose ring.
At that time, I couldn’t dress Clarissa or think of her clothes to save my life. That was all Lisa and we knew we had done something right because as soon as the show starting airing, girls were dressing that way.
You have to remember that before Clarissa, girls were given outfits to wear. Matching clothes. Girls didn’t pick their own clothes and make their own styles. Now we take it for granted. Annie Hall was a good example for adults. People didn’t create their own styles except in minor ways. Punky Brewster wasn’t fashionable. She was being “quirky, goofy girl.” She was really Pippi Longstocking.
This was something that had the potential of being fashion. Lisa Lederer was so good at what she did. It wasn’t just quirky, it was brilliant. It was fashion.
When we first came to the set to for Clarissa’s room, it was done in all pink and was very frilly — like most girls’ bedrooms at the time on these kinds of shows — but I had the set designers literally take black car paint and make checkered walls on top of the pink wallpaper. One of the camera guys came on the set and said, “She’s possessed by the devil!”
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