Free Slimed!: An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Golden Age by Mathew Klickstein

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