In the nineties, Nickelodeon reigned supreme. And with its prominence came a network-wide obsession with slime. Our parents lived the Atomic Era; ours, the Atomic Green. Like many, I found myself captivated by the competitive kids game show Double Dare hosted by Marc Summers, and based on its Canadian predecessor You Can’t Do That on Television.
A blend of trivia questions and physical challenges, some of Double Dare’s signature stunts included: catching a giant "meatball" in a human-sized bowl of "spaghetti," army-crawling up an oversized prosthetic nose to retrieve the flag, and “Pies in the Pants” in which contestants “had to catch a set number of pies in a pair of oversized clown pants within the specified time limit, while their teammate launches the pies from a foot-operated catapult at the opposite end of the stage.” This is to say nothing of the obstacle course with its ice cream sundae slingshot slide.
To read about the history of the substance on the show, is not un-terrifying. According to sources, i.e. the propmasters who prepared large quantities of the stuff, the original Slime was a mix of green latex paint and “something else.” Left alone for a few days, the smell would turn foul. The slime was iterated on. Not only to mitigate the odor, but to make the stuff a bit more safe in case it got in eyes and nose. That is to say, less toxic. And thus, different variations were born - some using cream of wheat, or green Jell-o. Yet there was by no means a proprietary blend. According to sources, the challenge producers often used “whatever was lying around.” It was the nineties after all.
As a brief aside, it is also be worth noting that, throughout his tenure, our host, Marc Summers, suffered from and lived with OCD. In 1999 he wrote a book entitled Everything In Its Place (and a friend of mine was enamored with it). I’m all the more incredulous by this fact, given that the show boldy trafficked in exploratory, messy moments.
Indeed, the aesthetic of Double Dare’s slime and its subsequent spin-offs like Guts, plus the genre of onomatopoeia packaged goods it spawned such as Gak, (that’s not even to mention, at its zenith, Gak Splat Balls, Floam, Smud, Skweez, Smatter, Sqand, Zzand and the least creatively named: Zyrofoamand)
These squishy substances, reflected our childhood fascination with our own bodies and served as a cartoonized manifestation of what could come out of them.
While at once intensely personal and of the body, this shade of alien green also speaks to the unknown, to outer space, the shapeless. Ergo, this color is a projection of infinite possibilities. It’s Marvin the Martian in front of a green screen, scrolling through Travis Scott on Spotify.
Aside from the duality of physical introspection vs limitless projection, this is the color of the disgust, designed to repel, but by nature, impossible to look away from. I had personally resisted this trend, but the sticky tentacles of #slimewatch2k19 have sunk into my imagination (this color might as well be called Billie Eilish green! )