As you learn this, Nickelodeon might be whipping up 1000’s of gallons of its trademark inexperienced slime in some top-secret laboratory forward of the 2023 Kids’ Choice Awards, which airs on Saturday, March 4 on the child-friendly hour of seven/6c.
In reality, the KCAs is likely one of the few Nickelodeon exhibits the place the inexperienced stuff nonetheless flows freely, and no superstar is secure from the neon-colored goop. (Just ask Katy Perry, who took a high-powered jet of slime to the face on the 2010 version of the awards present.)
As Vox recaps, slime made its first look on Nickelodeon in 1981 when the present rebroadcast the Canadian sketch comedy sequence You Can’t Do That on Television. But it actually took off within the ‘90s, thanks to Nickelodeon game shows like Double Dare and Figure It Out.
Recipes for slime vary, with green jello, food dye, and baby shampoo commonly listed as ingredients. In a 2011 interview with Gourmet, former Double Dare host Marc Summers said the slime base vanilla pudding, applesauce, oatmeal, green food coloring. “Was it edible? For the first hour or so,” he added.
TV Insider’s Emily Aslanian experienced the inexperienced stuff firsthand in 2018, as she took a flip within the Slime Booth at Nickelodeon’s places of work. “It’s cold, but I was ready for that,” she recounted. “It’s also dense — much heavier than expected for a syrupy, lime-green concoction. The moment the chilly, semi-viscous liquid hit the top of my head, my mind went blank.”
Lori Beth Denberg, who was an everyday presence on Figure It Out within the Nineties, advised Vice that slime would “stain your bras and underwear forever.” Eventually, Denberg discovered find out how to take slime like a champ. “Sit straight up or lean back a little bit,” she mentioned. “If you’re gonna get slimed, get slimed. Don’t curl up in a ball and let it run down your back [and] into your butt crack.”
And as a lot as there’s a science to getting slimed, there’s “definitely a science to sliming,” former Kids’ Choice Awards government producer Jay Schmalholz advised Aslanian and different reporters in 2018. “There’s a science to how we make it, and there’s a science to how we distribute it. The first thing we do when we design our sets is start with the plumbing. So, there’s been technical difficulties when you cue the slime and it doesn’t go on cue. We’ve had storage containers that heavily leaked and all of the sudden backstage like, ‘Where is all the slime coming from?!’”
So, if it’s such a problem to distribute and clear up, what’s the attraction? Why will we like slime a lot? “In school and at home, children are accustomed to structure. From the moment they wake until bedtime each night, their day is planned down to the minute,” college psychiatrist Heather Lappi advised Vice. “Watching another child get slimed or messy and knowing that the child is not going to get grounded or have to clean up the mess is very alluring.”
Lappi additionally cited schadenfreude and the prevalence concept of humor, explaining, “We laugh about misfortunes of others … because these misfortunes assert our superiority over their shortcomings.”
The attraction extends to adults, too. Schmalholz mentioned that celebrities even volunteer to be slimed on the Kids’ Choice awards.
“Slime embodies everything it means to be a kid,” he mentioned. “I relate it to this: When a kid sees a puddle, their first instinct is to jump into it. When an adult sees a puddle, their instinct is to walk around it. But the kid in all of us really wants to jump into it. It became this rite of passage for any kid growing up back then and even today — everybody wants to be slimed.”
2023 Kids’ Choice Awards, Saturday, March 4, 7/6c, Nickelodeon