JOANNA GARCIA: I’ve always said that it’s kind of our duty as young people in a position where we are exposed on a larger scale to a lot of other young people to be a great role model. But now it’s almost frightening how much pressure is put on them. I was a working actor in television but was still able to make my mistakes in private and do stupid things without being under the scrutiny of paparazzi constantly following me. It’s just a different world now.
LARISA OLEYNIK: I wasn’t responsible for selling backpacks. I didn’t have a side career as a pop star. These kids now are doing so much. And I mean, more power to them. I was just not that ambitious. That’s the difference I see, because there’s so much more responsibility now. And so much more publicity. But that’s just the world now. It’s funny to be thirty now, isn’t it? It’s funny that we can actually witness these changes; that we can recognize that we are of an older generation that has passed. That’s something I don’t think I would have been prepared for as a twelve-year-old. Really, hats off to these kids who are doing so much right now. I just showed up to work and that was it.
VANESSA LINDORES: Don’t know. Never really cared much.
KEVIN KUBUSHESKIE: Depending on who worked the props, the recipe varied. I think it was mainly gelatin, food coloring, oatmeal, and eventually some shampoo.
JUSTIN CAMMY: Green slime is made out of Cream of Wheat, green food coloring, and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. And water. It was fun to be there on set the days they were making it, because they had to get the consistency exactly right. Sometimes it was too watery; 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 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 you really 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.
CH
RISTINE 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 they liked. They liked the extra money. They liked that the cameras were focused on them. But on the other hand, the slime was nasty stuff.
GEOFFREY DARBY: I have been “pied” by Ruth Buzzi. When I left the control room, they had arranged that and recorded it. But of course, I knew better than to get slimed.
ROGER PRICE: Are you kidding? Have you ever been slimed? It is horrible.
JOSH MORRIS: I did it as a casual thing to see what it felt like. It’s like taking a bath in mud. If you forget it’s not mud, it’s actually very nice. In a hot studio, though, the cottage cheese became foul if it wasn’t cleaned up efficiently.
JUSTIN CAMMY: It tasted like nothing. Like Cream of Wheat without sugar.
GEOFFREY DARBY: The water was early on. If you said the word, “Water,” you got dumped on.
MARJORIE SILCOFF: The water was initially warm and then cold under the hot lights.
CHRISTINE MCGLADE: Sometimes it was kind of cold. Roger and Geoff might have done a little bit of that on purpose just to get a reaction of shock or surprise. For the most part, it was quite pleasant and we got paid extra.
BRENDA MASON: The bonus payments were introduced to ease the complaints about being slimed and watered. Once the kids knew there was an extra twenty-five or fifty dollars—a lot of money in eighties’ dollars—the complaining miraculously stopped!
GEOFFREY DARBY: Using slime is really a leveler. It was a very simple way to bring them out of the rarified air of being a “TV star.”
SCOTT WEBB: Roger understood that and took it a step further. It was a bonding moment between the kids on the television and the kids at home. “I got shit on at school today when I failed my math test. And look! They’re getting dumped on the same way!”
GEOFFREY DARBY: How slime turned into the Nick thing was the same reason it resonated with the audience of You Can’t Do That on Television. “You think your life is bad? You didn’t have to write six hundred pages out of the dictionary for detention!” We took it to an absurd level to make kids feel that their lives weren’t really that bad. Slime may be vile, but it’s not violent. It’s safe.
GERRY LAYBOURNE: We did get negative reports from George Gerbner’s “violence on television” studies. He would give us a violence rating for slime that would count the same as a decapitation.
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: We wanted to be as disgusting as possible. “Let’s see how far we can push that out in the world before we have to scale back!”
MITCHELL KRIEGMAN: When Ren & Stimpy first started, we were looking at jokes about fart bubbles in the bathtub. That optimized the Nick slime ethic and themes of what we were trying to do.
ROBIN RUSSO: Nothing ever grossed me out.
ANDY BAMBERGER: With early Double Dare, the studio would start stinking by Thursday with all the rotten food on the floor and everything.
HARVEY: We had this Plexiglas tank, and early in the run, we filled it with these postdated baked beans. It took forever to open that many cans; it was a big tank. At the end of the four days under hot lights, those beans were some pretty rancid stuff. How were we gonna get them out of there? We called this honey wagon guy. This is a guy who sucks out septic tanks for a living. After he was done sucking it out with a hose hooked up to his truck, he says to us, “You know what I do for a living, right? And I have never seen anything so disgusting in my entire life!”
MARC SUMMERS: When I walked in the first day in Philadelphia and saw all those obstacles and they were putting whipped cream and food coloring on, the first thing I said to Geoffrey Darby was, “What the hell is that?” And he said, “That’s our obstacle course.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, because when I had done the audition, I had just been asking questions and we had been doing these lame-ass physical challenges. I said, “Do you really think kids would want to do that?” That was my first thing: Do kids want to jump in that crap?
ALAN SILBERBERG: In the beginning of Double Dare, I didn’t get how it was gonna work. How were people going to want to get into the physical challenges and go running through baked beans?
ROBIN RUSSO: I felt the opposite of that. Once I saw the very first group that came in for the very first show of Double Dare, I turned to my stage manager and I said, “This is gonna be a huge hit.”
GERRY LAYBOURNE: The first day that we shot, I’m sitting in the bleachers and the set is so spectacular. The kids have never seen anything like this. The doors open, the kids come in. It was electric. I have never heard so many little kids swear in my life. It was fantastic.
KENAN THOMPSON: Along with Danger Mouse and You Can’t Do That on Television, I was a big Double Dare fan. On Double Dare, they were just having a good time, you know what I’m sayin’? Jumping around in whipped cream just for fun. On You Can’t Do That on Television, they were getting slimed. No other network was sliming people like that. The image of that green stuff coming down—every time I would turn it on, it would stay with me.
ANNETTE LESURE: The type of stuff we did on Wild & Crazy Kids was fun for any kid. At the time, producer Richard Crystal—who is Billy Crystal’s brother and is a clone of him except for being lanky and narrow—did specifically ask me if I was into sports. And I said I didn’t play football or anything like that. But it was very exciting because it was new stuff every week. Stuff I’d never heard of before that they’d just randomly make up. One week we were on donkeys playing basketball, and another we’d be on trampolines or something else.
VENUS DEMILO: The pie fight with Heidi and me was really great. We stayed up so late doing that. Throwing pies, resetting, throwing pies, resetting . . . The next morning, I had to take my entrance exam for high school, and I still had whipped cream in my hair!
HEIDI LUCAS: There was an episode with a celebrity rock star coming to camp, and ZZ and I had to lay on the grass and use parts of our body covered in powder so he could see us from the plane flying overhead. Afterward, I was picking baking dough out of my hair and nails and every part of my body you could possibly imagine that could fit dough—which was disgusting—for days. That probably showed on my face. Could I have been a little high-maintenance? In times like that, yeah.
HARVEY: As I was the “goofy sidekick,” when it was time to try out a new stunt or something, there was a lot of mess and I said it was okay, that I was low-maintenance. But here was my one hard-fast rule: “I’ll do anything, jump into any substance you want . . . as long as the cameras are rolling.” As long as I knew it wasn’t just for somebody making me jump in a big pile of green shit, as long as it was for the narrative thread of the show. Which is a pretty highfalutin phrase to associate with Double Dare.
ROBIN RUSSO: Being the
only female on Double Dare, I always got the brunt of the mess. I didn’t mind the mess itself, and I got messy a lot. The problem was when I’d get really messy. Especially on the road show. I would have to get on a plane twenty minutes later. It’s hard to fly when you’re smelling like eggs and gook.
DONNIE JEFFCOAT: I was the one on Wild & Crazy Kids who got picked on, because I think Omar Gooding was protected by his mom half the time, so she would never let them do half the stuff they did to me to him. Any time there was a stunt or something crazy-messy, it was usually done to me. By the last season, I started complaining. “Really? At ten o’clock in the morning, you’re going to pour this vat of crap on me?”
JOANNA GARCIA: At one point I had been slimed more than anybody for promotional things we had done. I would always blow the challenge or something and would end up getting slimed more than anybody. But I was okay with it.
BOB MITTENTHAL: The problem with the messiness is it became an arms race at that point. How do we top ourselves every time? There was some frustration on that level.
ALAN SILBERBERG: Yeah, it was pretty crazy. What was hard was trying to come up with different ways to make messes. Double Dare got bigger and bigger, and the stunts got bigger and more mechanical. It was a lot of pies in the pants; I mean, how many different ways can you do that?
MIKE KLINGHOFFER: We always used to say at Double Dare that one of the reasons that show was successful was your parents told you not to play with your food and we’re letting you play with your food. It’s as simple as that. You were going against authority. You were going against the convention.
BOB HUGHES: We have no regrets about misleading children. We all grew up in the sixties and seventies, and we were all completely antiauthoritarian. It was just built into our DNA. We had suddenly been given this megaphone and we could turn on authority and say what we wanted to say. And that what you’re going to say isn’t always right.
Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age Page 6