Read Online Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age by Mathew Klickstein - Free Book Online Page A

sometimes it was a little too thick. They had to get the right blend.
    JOSH MORRIS: The first mixture was loose oatmeal with green dye. By the end, they just shoved green dye into a big bucket of cottage cheese. The original green slime was much nicer. In later seasons, it didn’t look nearly as good.
    ALASDAIR GILLIS: There were numerous incarnations. Ours was oatmeal, liquid dish soap, a lot of water to thicken it. Sometimes green Jell-O.
    BRENDA MASON: The Jell-O version was short-lived. Too chunky. I don’t know when the liquid latex started being added.
    SCOTT WEBB: In our tenure of using it, it was basically oatmeal, shampoo, and green food coloring. It was the “No More Tears” shampoo, so you could eat it if you wanted to, but you wouldn’t want to.
    ROGER PRICE: To make cleanup easier, slime did contain baby shampoo. But too much and it could sting the eyes, which had to remain open for the humor to work. Imagine that! The courage it takes . . .
    KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: The slime did sometimes burn my eyes.
    BOB BLACK: There was a number of different formulas for green slime. When I was there, it was Cream of Wheat and cold water with green food coloring. We would have to blow-dry the kids’ hair, then brush it out. And even then, several days later, the kids would be walking around with green bits in their hair.
    ROGER PRICE: We always sent the kids home a lot cleaner than they came. Even if they weren’t getting slimed, they would likely have their hair washed and trimmed.
    JUSTIN CAMMY: I had to pick the slime out of my hair. It’d stay in there for a couple of days.
    ALASDAIR GILLIS: It was pretty innocuous, actually. Slime wasn’t very gross. But the idea came from something that was pretty noxious.
    SCOTT WEBB: In the earliest days, it was actually a bucket of shit, according to Geoffrey.
    GEOFFREY DARBY: The slime was an accident. Honestly. We had this joke on the dungeon set: “Don’t any of you kids pull this chain!” We ended up going to the cafeteria, gave the prop guy a bucket, and said, “We want you to take all the stuff that was left on the plates the whole day. We’ll add water to it and dump it on the kid.” The kid’s name was Tim Douglas. When he pulled the chain, we wanted it to look like sewage was coming out. That was the idea. We didn’t get around to shooting the scene, because we couldn’t go overtime with children. It’s against the law. We put the set up again the following week to shoot that one scene, and the prop man came to me—this is a true story—and said, “We have a problem.” The problem was that he didn’t get a new bucket of slop. He just kept the old one. He had kept it backstage, and there were eight inches of green crud growing over the top of the bucket. It was really evil. God, did it smell! We had to get the scene
.
We couldn’t get more slop . . . So we said, “Dump it on the kid anyway.”
    ROGER PRICE: Down came
not
the simulated contents of a toilet, but
green slime
. Evil-smelling green slime, which had everyone in the studio gagging. It was probably luminous. Green slime was not invented by anybody. It fermented itself into life. And it
was
alive!
    BRENDA MASON: We could see the shock on the kid’s face when the stuff hit him. We thought he was going to be sick, just from the smell alone. Roger was furious. It was to
look
disgusting, not
be
disgusting.
    ROGER PRICE: If I had known at the time, I would not have done it. I was a professional producer! I was horrified when I found out and maybe a bit angry. We all felt sorry when we buried the kid afterward. Especially later on when we realized he was not actually dead.
    GEOFFREY DARBY: Tim was fine afterward. He just took a shower. It got such a positive response from the audience that we wrote an entire show about slime.
    ROGER PRICE: It was a gift, and the potential was immediately evident. There was no doubt we would do that again.
    BRENDA MASON: We had nowhere to go but up with the recipe