“Slime is hot again,” Marc Summers says early in this video about the making of Nickelodeon’s iconic green goo. That might seem an odd sentence to the childless millennial, but anyone who’s been around today’s youth of late might very likely have seen them cradling a wad of viscous slime, much of which is homemade.
Before the trend fades, it’s important that we remind children that we liked slime before it was cool. See, slime’s origins date back to You Can’t Do That On Television, a show that doused its cast with a bucket of the stuff whenever they uttered the words, “I don’t know.”
Though Summers wasn’t on that show, he did interact with slime on a routine basis on shows like Double Dare and What Would You Do?. That makes him uniquely qualified to discuss the slime’s actual mixture, which he reveals in the below interview with Tech Radar.
If set designer Byron Taylor is to be believed, however, the recipe Summers shares here is not the one they used on Double Dare. In our oral history of the show, Taylor said they “didn’t use the recipe from You Can’t Do That On Television,” which, as Summers reveals, included oatmeal. “The oatmeal would dry and harden under the lights,” he told us. “We used a combination of pudding, and I liked applesauce, because it was translucent. You tinted it.”
Whatever the case, it was absolutely disgusting. As is any trend involving slime, homemade or not. Somebody buy these kids some Legos.