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

from there.
    BOB MITTENTHAL: In terms of the recipe, there was some mystique about it. People wanted to know what was in it. If we told them, they wouldn’t want to know anymore. Somebody figured out, “Hey, let’s pretend it’s a secret!”
    MARJORIE SILCOFF: I’m sorry, I was sworn to secrecy at age eleven and have never divulged it. I think Geoffrey Darby was the one who swore me to secrecy.
    GEOFFREY DARBY: We made it out of Cream of Wheat and baby shampoo and green food coloring and a little bit of vegetable oil. That’s basically all slime was.
    ABBY HAGYARD: There’s something innately delicious about something that disgusting and messy. I don’t think they expected it to be that hugely popular. Roger came up with the slime and the water because he was frustrated by the kids at home always saying, “I don’t know . . .” He said there should be a punishment for the “I don’t know,” and he found one! And it was a
hit
!
    JUSTIN CAMMY: I was only slimed once and I fucked it up. It was the “Marketing” episode, and you can see the fuck-up on screen.
    ALBIE HECHT: If you really want to get into it, you talk as you feel the slime, which slowly comes down on your head. Then your eyes look up as if—
what the hell’s happening?
—and then youreally look up right into it. And that’s when they dump the big slime on you. Then you face forward because that’s when we see it all over you.
    JUSTIN CAMMY: They told me, “It’s easy. When you say, ‘I don’t know,’ look up a little bit so the slime hits your face. You want it over your face.” So I said the trigger phrase, “I don’t know,” and looked up. But I closed my eyes before the slime hit, and you can see I was anticipating it. Why they didn’t reshoot it . . . I don’t know!
    VANESSA LINDORES: My first one was the legendary multicolored slime scene in my first episode. I wasn’t actually supposed to get slimed in that scene. It was meant for Christine. Often they would take the other actors off the set and do a single shot of the kid getting slimed, but because of the dialogue in that scene, they did a two-shot, so I stayed beside Christine the whole time. Since it wasn’t me getting slimed, no one thought to give me the slime directions; hence, out of instinct I did everything you aren’t supposed to do when getting slimed. I flinched and cowered. Even so, I still nailed my line: “Boy, must be tough being a TV star!” Geoff Darby came out of the control room after that, laughing his head off and telling me I earned the slime bonus for that one. At nine, you don’t know enough to realize how weird your life has just become.
    CHRISTINE MCGLADE: As an actor or host or performer, it was a nice challenge because we had to get it right. It was at the end of the day, and there was a big setup involved, whether it was slime or water. They’d have to get everyone off set, lay down plastic, shoot it so you wouldn’t see the ladder and the plastic, and all with the five people standing around us. It was gross, but it was kind of a fun thing to do.
    BOB BLACK: By the time I got there, Christine had veto power over getting slimed. Which was most of the time. She
hated
getting slimed. In the “Movies” episode,
everybody
was going to get slimed, because that was Roger’s response to Nickelodeon saying, “We want more sliming!” The sketch was originally written where Christine was going to get slimed twice, but she changed it to where she got slimed once and then watered on top of that.
    ALASDAIR GILLIS: When I think of getting slimed, I think of the end of the day—it’d usually be on weekends, lots of people around. Lots of crew. That sense of generally a really friendly bunch of people working together to make this show.
    GEOFFREY DARBY: They all hated it. The parents didn’t really care one way or another, but one of the kids described it as standing under the rear of a cow when it lifts its tail.
    BOB BLACK: Getting slimed