Where has All the Green Slime Gone? Remembering the Iconic Goo of The ’80s

Where has All the Green Slime Gone? Remembering the Iconic Goo of The ’80s

The slime must flow!

Certain questions keep you up at night. Some have easy answers, while others rise from the dark recesses of the mind like primordial ooze. Mysterious. Almost mystical.

Like slime. Why did slime become a pop-culture mainstay in the 1980s? And why did it slink back into the cracks of the collective unconscious once the ’90s rolled around? Is Todd, from the Atari Lynx classic Todd’s Adventures in Slime World, to blame for its fall from grace? And could Gooigi, Luigi’s slime simulacrum from Luigi’s Mansion 3, be the one to bring back the golden-greenish age mucus-like delights for all the world to imbibe?

If we wish to get to the bottom of these questions, we have to go back to the bucket of slop that started it all.

Toy company Mattel began selling slime as a toy all the way back in 1976, but it didn’t have much of a multi-media footprint until 1979. That was the year that the ironically named TV show You Can’t Do That On Television, premiered in Canada. The sketch comedy show, which can best be described as “a Canadian Monty Python’s Flying Circus with a lower budget and everyone is a child.” But they worked with the main assets they had: both a willingness to take creative risks and a wanton lack of concern for child safety.

In their very first episode, the show runners dumped a pail of congealed, moldy food on a child’s head. As the story goes, they had originally planned to use fresh food for the scene. However, due to child labor laws, they had to wait a week to finish the shoot. Due to pure sloppiness, they let the food sit, unrefrigerated, for the entire week. When it was time to roll cameras again, they just ran with the same rotting bucket of food instead of getting something less potentially toxic.

The fact that they were more worried about violating the rule that children can’t work overtime than they were exposing a kid to rotten meat tells you a lot about the ’70s and ’80s in general. Instead of getting sued or taken off the air, You Can’t Do That On Television’s accidental slime moment became a crowd favorite, leading the producers to intentionally start dumping (less toxic) slime on people’s heads on every episode.

From there, the show moved to the Nickelodeon cable network, where it became an international hit. A few years after that, Ghostbusters (which may or may not have been influenced by You Can’t Do That On Television) took slime to the silver screen. Soon, another Nick show, Double Dare, added slime to its formula as well. Then of course came the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who owe their entire careers to being coated in a slime-like ooze, became the biggest cartoon and toy line in the world. A much cuter, blue slime became the unofficial mascot of the budding Dragon Warrior series on the NES. And that’s not even getting into all the slime that sold like hotcakes in stores, leaking out of the Madballs Slime Lab, dribbling out He-Man Slime Pit playset, forming the bodies of the Mini Boglin Slime Tribe, and globbed on to the designs of many a Garbage Pail Kid.

In 1990, the tide started to turn for slime’s place in our world. Ghostbusters II, released in late 1989, which showed us that slime can both bring the world together in the spirit of empathy and bring the Statue of Liberty to life, was considered a critical and box office failure. The 1988 The Blob film remake bombed even worse. The Toxic Avenger took a stab at becoming a kid-friendly superhero in 1990, but his radioactive slime-drenched TV show failed to stay alive for long. That same year, an intrepid space explorer named Todd tried to make a splash with his Atari Lynx exclusive, but he was unable to bring life to the failing handheld. Todd spread his jade cascade of icky residue to other places like the Turbografx-16 and Sega Genesis, but even on more popular consoles, he was unable to become a superstar.

And it’s not because the game wasn’t fun! It was great, taking pieces of Metroid’s alien feel and fusing it with an innovative “stay clean to live” health mechanic. The issue was most likely that slime simply wasn’t cool anymore. Maybe the whole slime craze was fueled by a mix of America’s fear of nuclear contaminants leaking into our lives, mixed with the urge to push back against the enforcement of wholesomeness during the Reagan era?

Slime couldn’t hold a candle to the coolness of grunge (music, that is). To say nothing of Tarantino films and the M-rated games that came in the ’90s. It seemed that the loveable sludge would remain relegated to ’80s nostalgia, until ’80s nostalgia came roaring back to the forefront in the mid-2010s. Garbage Pail Kids: Slime Time TV series cards went on sale. New slime-coated Ghostbusters films were released in 2016 and 2019, complete with the relaunch of Hi-C’s slime-themed “Ecto-Cooler” drink boxes. And new Ghostbusters games have continued to dribble down the pipe with some regularity all along, keeping the slime flowing for whoever might want a sip.

Then in 2018 and 2019, Gooigi, the slimeboy doppelganger of Luigi Mario, guest-starred in Luigi’s Mansion (3DS) and Luigi’s Mansion 3, respectively. The latter went on to sell 14 million units. By all accounts, that’s better than every Paper Mario game combined. So, next time you’re playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with a friend and they try to hit you with paper, blow your nose on their hand and let them know that “slime beats paper, every time”.

Actually, no. Please don’t do that.

Anyway, here’s the question to keep you up at night: Does slime have a better-than-slim chance of regaining its former hold on culture at large? Probably not. Unlike in the ’80s, there’s no longer just a handful of TV channels that most people watch and a limited selection of movies available at any given time. No single TV sitcom will ever have as many average viewers as The Cosby Show did ever again. No band will ever be as big as The Beatles. And slime will never again coat every crack and crevasse of society like it did for a few yucky years four decades ago. But Gooigi, and other green-guck outliers, will continue to find their way into our hearts all the same. So maybe give your cardiologist a heads-up.