As you read this, Nickelodeon is probably whipping up thousands of gallons of its trademark green slime in some top-secret laboratory ahead of the 2023 Kids’ Choice Awards, which airs on Saturday, March 4 at the child-friendly hour of 7/6c.
In fact, the KCAs is one of the few Nickelodeon shows where the green stuff still flows freely, and no celebrity is safe from the neon-colored goop. (Just ask Katy Perry, who took a high-powered jet of slime to the face at the 2010 edition of the awards show.)
As Vox recaps, slime made its first appearance on Nickelodeon in 1981 when the show rebroadcast the Canadian sketch comedy series You Can’t Do That on Television. But it really took off in 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 green stuff firsthand in 2018, as she took a turn in the Slime Booth at Nickelodeon’s offices. “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 a regular presence on Figure It Out in the 1990s, told Vice that slime would “stain your bras and underwear forever.” Eventually, Denberg figured out how to take slime like a champ. “Sit straight up or lean back a little bit,” she said. “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 much as there’s a science to getting slimed, there’s “definitely a science to sliming,” former Kids’ Choice Awards executive producer Jay Schmalholz told Aslanian and other 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 hassle to distribute and clean up, what’s the appeal? Why do we like slime so much? “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,” school psychiatrist Heather Lappi told 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 also cited schadenfreude and the superiority theory of humor, explaining, “We laugh about misfortunes of others … because these misfortunes assert our superiority over their shortcomings.”
The appeal extends to adults, too. Schmalholz said that celebrities even volunteer to be slimed at the Kids’ Choice awards.
“Slime embodies everything it means to be a kid,” he said. “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