It's Slime Time! Celebrities Preparing To Get Slimed At The Nickelodeon 2012 Kids' Choice Awards

From The New York Post:

Slime time!

Celebs score cool points by getting drenched at Kids’ Choice Awards

Forget the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys. In Hollywood there’s no greater honor than getting walloped with a slimy green substance of suspicious origin on the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.

Nick Cannon stands by as Heidi Klum is slimed in 2011. Nickelodeon 2011 Kids' Choice Awards photograph credit: Getty Images
The show has blasted dozens of stars — and countless audience members — with more than 230,000 gallons of Day-Glo-colored goo since 1987.

“I’ve seen it become more prestigious and I’m able to book absolutely anybody,” says Marjorie Cohn, executive producer of the event, which marks its 25th anniversary on Saturday.

“What’s evolved over the years is celebrities’ willingness to be slimed. People call and ask to be,” says Cohn.

“Project Runway” host Heidi Klum, a presenter at last year’s show, treasures her moment in the, well, green. “I really love that I was chosen to be slimed,” she says. “I see it as an honor to be among all the great people slimed in the past!”

That list includes Johnny Depp, Tina Fey, Tom Cruise, Sandra Bullock, Justin Timberlake, Usher — even Donald Trump.

Potential targets are culled from award nominees and presenters. Celebrities know in advance that they at least could be hit, but never when. Whether streamed from hidden hoses or dumped from overhead, the actual sliming is glorious TV viewing.

“The shock and awe you see on peoples’ faces is very genuine,” says Cohn. “You haven’t experienced life until you’ve had that stuff running down into every pore of your body and in places where it shouldn’t be at all,” she jokes.

Klum agrees. “It’s a bit unexpected. I thought to myself: No way. I can’t believe this is happening, especially because you sit in hair and makeup for two hours before,” she says. “And when you walk off-stage, you’re covered in green.”

Fortunately, the slime is water-soluble and there are showers backstage so performers can wash it off. (The show also has towels for the hundreds of audience members who brave a stage-front “mosh pit.”)

But the goo has been known to resurface, so to speak.

“Some celebrities who have been totally doused have said it keeps emerging, days later, and in places they didn’t know it was,” says Cohn, laughing.

The show has recorded many memorable moments over the years, including Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen clutching each other in shock in 2004 and Pink getting a one-time-only dousing with — you guessed it — pink slime in 2002.

But one memorable spectacle was Katy Perry’s 2010 appearance, when a fast and furious blast of slime to the face sent her stumbling backwards, falling to her knees — and then triumphantly raising her arms.

“She was expecting it, but I think the force of it surprised her,” Cohn says. “She was such a good sport.” (Both [Katy] Perry and UK boy band One Direction will be among the musical performers on this year’s show.)

The slime's chemical makeup is a closely guarded secret. Insiders say the formula has changed over the years, admitting it’s much different today than in 1994 when James Earl Jones was slimed by a green liquid that was a cross between oatmeal and cement.

But don’t ask for specific details. “There’s only five guys that know the formula in the last 20 years, and I’m one of ’em,” says Scott Heger, president of Los Angeles-based Blair Adhesive Products, which makes special effects materials, including the 8,000-15,000 gallons of slime used by the show each year.

“It’s the Coke recipe of Nickelodeon, I guess,” says Heger, the show’s unofficial “slime-meister.”

Heger says slime has no odor; Cohn describes it as only having a “kind of cold smell.”

However, one point that remains debatable is slime’s flavor.

In 2007 Nicole Kidman said it tasted “like applesauce,” but Heger says it “has no real taste to it; it’s just a cold liquid.”

Yet that’s not the impression left by a bug-eyed Klum last year when she licked her lips, raised her eyebrows and frowned after a deluge hit her mouth.

Reflecting back a year later, Klum offers a suitably child-like assessment of the flavor.

“The slime takes like slime,” she says. “Yucky slime. Yuck!”

25TH ANNUAL KIDS’ CHOICE AWARDS

Saturday, 8 p.m., Nickelodeon