Slimed

In 2016’s Ghostbusters reboot, slime was unavoidable. In the film’s opening scene, a tour guide discovers that the floor of the eerie Aldridge Mansion has turned into a yawning chasm of neon green glop. Soon after, the doubtful Dr. Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) relinquishes her skepticism of paranormal activity when she nearly slips on a chartreuse wad of ectoplasm.

In nearly every important scene, there it is: slime dripping from ceilings or churning in fissures. At one point, Slimer steals the Ghostbusters’ ride, the Ecto-1, and joyrides around Manhattan, picking up slime-babes.

Slime is, suddenly, more pervasive than it’s been in decades. “Slime” has had an eightfold rise in Google queries since late 2015. The New York Times reports, “There’s a thriving nationwide market for slime...The hashtag #slime appears on 3.5 million Instagram posts, and slime searches on Etsy have increased 9,000 percent since October, according to the company.” Homemade slime projects have become the de rigueur DIY children’s diversion of the day. Requiring just Borax, dye, and school glue, it’s a simple science project for kids of any age. Homemade slime is colorful, feels weird, and can also make fart noises. No wonder it’s popular.

A YouTube search for “slime ASMR” returns more than 50 videos with over a million views, all of them uploaded within the last year. Adam Vandergrift, a 38-year-old father of three, recently put his carpentry business on hold so that he and his family can focus on what is now their largest income stream: a YouTube channel called Will It Slime? Between researching, testing recipes, shooting, editing, and social media stuff, Vandergrift estimates he spends about 30 hours a week on the channel, which boasts more than 650,000 subscribers.

The resurgence is a nostalgic throwback to the ‘80s and ‘90s, slime’s golden era. From The Toxic Avenger and Ghostbusters franchises to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Nickelodeon, slime was a dominant visual trope 20 years ago. So, what’s behind its return?

Defining slime is a slippery task. After all, its fundamental traits are its amorphous shape and ambiguous implications.

In a 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Skin of Evil,” the Enterprise forges a rescue mission to a seemingly uninhabited planet. Upon arrival, the crew is terrorized by Armus, a shape-shifting puddle of unidentifiable black slime, the byproduct of a process by which an alien race had cleansed itself of evil. The malicious, tar-like substance — created by the show’s prop designers by mixing black printers’ ink and Metamucil — nearly kills the ship’s entire crew.

In Jurassic Park, slime is the mucus spat defensively by a dilophosaurus. In the Zantar video game from Wayne’s World’s Noah’s Arcade, it’s a gelatinous cube that eats medieval warriors. In Capri Sun commercials, kids transubstantiate into especially viscous puddles of Capri Sun, in search of more Capri Sun.

Slime is generally green — often a bright or phosphorescent green, maybe a little translucent — but not always. It occupies a state of matter somewhere between liquid and solid (known as a non-Newtonian substance), but it can vary in viscosity. It can be organic or synthetic, sticky or slick, intelligent or not. In any particular work of fiction that features slime, its origins and composition are usually unknown, at least at first. Basically, “slime” is any kind of mysterious goo. There’s room in the vat for slimes of all kinds.

The term itself traces back to the mid-19th century, but the substance first found prominence in American pop culture in the 1950s and ‘60s as a manifestation of Atomic Age anxieties. Though a few films portrayed slime as something relatively benign, most films of the era used the enigmatic sludge as a symbol of something far more ominous — most notably as the titular antagonist in The Blob but also in countless B-movies like The Slime People and The Green Slime.

As a cultural trope, slime was a particularly salient symbolic entry point to a collective uneasiness and concern about nuclear disaster after World War II. “In terms of culture, it’s a postwar phenomenon,” says Mark Floegel, who has worked with Greenpeace since 1989 and is currently the organization’s research director. “We use 1945 as a stepping-off point in the world of toxics, because that’s when industrial chemistry went crazy.” In the wake of 1979’s Three Mile Island meltdown and Ronald Reagan’s full-throated escalation of Cold War tension, a more robust anti-nuclear movement was coalescing in the early 1980s. Previously theoretical concerns about nuclear technology were actualizing as undeniable threats to humanity. At the movies, slime became a recurring aesthetic theme. From the mucousy milieux of Alien’s xenomorphs to the synthetic, sentient puddle of Terminator 2’s T-1000, there was something especially slimy running straight through the 1980s.

In The Toxic Avenger, Toxie, the film’s hero, undergoes his superhuman transformation after falling face-first into a drum of bubbling green stuff, left in open drums by a careless, coke-addled waste disposal crew deployed by a vaguely evil industrial company. Writer and director Lloyd Kaufman got the idea while continuously stumbling over trash during a hike with his wife. “I thought that might be an interesting theme,” Kaufman told Indiewire last year. “The environment.”

In Ghostbusters II, an underground river of pink slime wreaks havoc on New York City, fed by the negative energy of the city’s habitants. The Ghostbusters cannot defeat it themselves, and the slime’s reign of ghostly terror ends only when positively charged mood slime brings the Statue of Liberty to life and a chorus of New Yorkers sings “Auld Lang Syne” together. As Harold Ramis told The New York Times in 1988, “Slime is our metaphor for the human condition.”

By the ‘90s, slime was changing once again — from something to be feared, to a substance to be embraced. The origin story of the titular heroes in a half-shell of the 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series portended the shift. Dropped into a sewer full of luminous mauve ooze, four turtles mutate into sarcastic, fun-having, pizza-loving turtle-human hybrids — the world’s most fearsome fighting team!

But no single company transformed Slime’s reputation more than a TV channel aimed at kids: Nickelodeon.

As chronicled in Slimed!, an oral history of the network, Nickelodeon stumbled onto slime almost by accident. A scene from You Can’t Do That on Television, one of the network’s earliest shows, featured a young actor who was supposed to pull a chain and get a bucket of what looked like sewage dumped on his head. The producer stopped short of using actual human waste, but not by much. To create the illusion, a prop guy went to the cafeteria and emptied all the food that had been left on plates into a bucket, which they would then pour onto the unsuspecting actor. But they ran out of time that day and couldn’t shoot the scene until a week later. However, when they resumed filming, they used the same bucket. The food was now that much older, rotting, and covered in “eight inches of green crud.”

They dumped it on the kid anyway.

The young actor looked like he was going to be sick. The producer was furious. Pretty much everyone within olfactory range was disgusted to some extent or another. But basic cable package viewers at home were immune to the smell, and the response from people who saw the sliming was overwhelmingly positive. So, it had to happen again… and again and again and again.

Producers began to develop their own slime from a more palatable formula of green food coloring, Cream of Wheat, baby shampoo, and vegetable oil. Other Nickelodeon shows followed suit. The recipe seems to have varied from show to show, but it was typically made from some combination of the You Can’t ingredients, vanilla pudding, oatmeal, applesauce, and other pantry staples.

Regardless of the exact composition, the green slime proved immensely popular with kids. Bronwen O’Keefe is Nickelodeon’s senior vice president of Live Action and TV Movies and has been with the network for 20 years. O’Keefe says slime is a naturally kid-friendly device.

“It feels like something kids have willed into being, rather than it being something that preexisted them,” O’Keefe says. “If you asked a kid who has never seen slime anywhere for their first impression, ‘menacing’ and ‘threatening’ would probably be the last place they would go to. It’s fun. It’s playful. You want to put your fingers in it. You want to be sticky and messy. That’s just part of being a kid.”

Slime quickly became the foundation of Nickelodeon’s brand. On game shows and awards ceremonies, not to mention toys, other merchandise, and virtually all of its advertising materials, slime was what differentiated the network from its competitors.

“My theory was always that Disney was this squishy clean, everybody looked perfect, blonde hair, blue eyes situation,” says Marc Summers, host of slime-heavy shows like Double Dare and What Would You Do? and a longtime face of the network. “The reason Nick took off is we only put real kids on the show. Kids who had acne and did not speak the Queen and King’s English and were just real kids. The kids identified with what was going on there.”

Figure It Out host Summer Sanders says that given the choice between watching someone get slimed and being slimed themselves, kids would choose the latter every single time. It was an honor and a privilege to be slimed, and so slime fit well with Nickelodeon’s overall “kids first” brand. “Walking through the offices,” Sanders says, “the worst word you could ever hear from a kid is ‘boring.’ Weird, disgusting, all those words were awesome words for Nickelodeon.”

But by the early 2000s, slime’s appeal was waning. In movies and television, slime was phased out as practical effects gave way to CGI. Believable slime is easy enough for a kid to make, but it’s laborious to render digitally. Its translucence makes a real chore of rendering light convincingly and requires an obscene amount of computing power. “You see refracted backgrounds and light coming through it as well as bouncing off it,” Tom Bertino, Industrial Light & Magic’s animation director told Creative Planet Network about the production of Flubber.

And for the next decade, slime went largely dormant.

Then, about a year ago, slime reentered the public consciousness, largely through Instagram and YouTube. Meanwhile, studios keep plumbing the depths of ‘80s and ‘90s nostalgia for reboot material, and slime continues to gain popularity with children. The Associated Press is calling 2017 “The Summer of Slime.” In just a few months, Elmer’s has gotten upwards of 200,000 mentions of “slime” on its social media platforms. One teenage “slime-trepreneur” has amassed more than 650,000 followers on Instagram and has a book on the way. DIY slime kits are framed as a means of getting kids interested in science.

“It’s a way for them to get involved,” says Vandergrift of the Will It Slime? YouTube channel. “It’s basic science, and it’s exciting for them. We get requests from companies that want to get kids more involved with STEM activities. They’re realizing that this is a great doorway to that.”

Slime can teach kids basic lessons about cross-linking molecules, like sodium borate, the active ingredient in Borax that ties the long, molecular chains of glue together to create the slimy consistency. The process also offers a few different variables kids can change to see the effects on the finished product. More important than the specifics of the science lesson, though, it gives kids a sense of agency — from the teenagers pulling in book deals and major advertising revenue from their slime projects to any kid making a little blob of it in their bedroom. All that’s needed is a few minutes and a couple items you can find at a grocery store.

“It’s not often that a kid gets to synthesize a molecule,” says Steve Spangler, a national figure for science education and a sought after public speaker. Spangler says that the recent spike in interest is likely driven by social media. It’s bringing kids together and empowering them to make and share their own creations. Spangler believes the real potential here lies in channeling that energy and excitement into getting young scientists interested in STEM-based careers maybe even entrepreneurship.

Vandergrift recognizes that slime won’t be popular forever, but he believes it has at least a few more years before the fervor dies down again.

“Right now, it shows not too many signs of slowing down,” he says. “You can look at a tech channel [on YouTube], and they’re doing slime because they recognize the trend and will do anything to bring more people in. Everybody does slime now.”

Correction: A previous version of this article misquoted Adam Vandergriftas as referring to slime’s popularity on the social platform Kek. Vandergriftas was in fact referring to YouTube tech channels. The copy has also been amended to better reflect Steve Spangler’s sentiment on getting youth involved in science.