Bukkake and Bondage for Beginners?

How children’s media and marketing created an entire generation of slime fetishists

By: Toxicka Shock

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If you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, odds are, you LOVED playing with slime.

I mean, mass-marketed goop and gunk was practically ubiquitous back then. It seemed like every major toy line worth its salt had at least some slime-themed tie-in product.

“Ghostbusters” had its pastel-colored barrels of gooey “Ecto-Plazm,” which came in a delightful menagerie of Day-glo hues like Highlighter yellow and bubblegum pink.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’” was practically anchored around “mutagen,” the syrupy green glop that gave life to our heroes in a half-shell.

“Masters of the Universe” had one of the most lusted after play sets of the Reagan era - The Evil Horde’s Slime Pit, this grandiose plastic death metal album cover come to life that allowed children to douse He-Man and pals in showers of booger-green slime over and over again.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. “Power Rangers,” “Men in Black,” “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter” and “Captain Planet” all had slime and gunk themed toy tie-ins, and that’s to say nothing of the practical cottage industry created by Nickelodeon, a brand whose “Gak,” “Floam” and “Smud” were essentially standard issue for every elementary schooler in the United States in the mid-1990s. And failing that, it was never too difficult to find a capsule toy vending machine offering goop, gunk and glop of every shade of the rainbow for just 25 cents at seemingly every grocery store, department store or restaurant in the country.

Yes, such consumer products existed before the 1980s, but it wasn’t until Gen X and Gen Y came along that “slime” became such a pronounced a fixture in the toy industry. And that same slime motif was definitely reflected in the juvenile television programming of the day.

The entire Nickelodeon branding revolved around “slime,” a carryover from the Canadian variety show “You Can’t Do That On Television.” On the same network, it wasn’t uncommon to see families rooting and rolling around in giant pools of the icky stuff on the game show “Double Dare.” The network’s self-congratulatory awards program - the Kids’ Choice Awards - traditionally ended with a celebrity being doused in a deluge of the trademark goop, a sort of ritualistic “green shower.”

“The Real Ghostbusters” cartoon was another slime-soaked program. Virtually every episode included at least one scene where a cast member was coated in some sort of supernatural ooze or experimental gunk - indeed, the official mascot of the show was a sentient ball of snot-green slime.

The same holds true for the original “TMNT” cartoon. Scores of characters were turned into weird chimerical beings thanks to the bio-transformative properties of that aforementioned “mutagen.” Arch-villain Shredder made it his life goal to douse our heroes in a half-shell in a “retro-mutagen,” which would turn the titular characters back into regular reptiles. The slime is so integral to the TMNT mythos that the second live-action movie was subtitled “Secret of the Ooze.”

Transformative slime is about as ubiquitous as a kids’ television trope got in the 1990s. In “Batman: The Animated Series,” villain Ra’s Al Ghul gained eternal youth by bathing in a pool of glowing green goop. Another Batman villain, Clayface, was literally a giant wad of slime come to life. One episode of “G.I. Joe” saw a villain transform the good guys into hideous insect-like creatures by lowering them into a vat of mutative chemicals. In “Swamp Thing,” the primary antagonist had a penchant for mutating his henchmen into horrific chimeras by means of a chemical-pumping “transducer” device. The main character in “Toxic Crusaders” was transformed into a hulking, deformed brute after falling into a vat of chemical waste. And taking a page out of He-Man’s book, the obscure, short-lived cartoon “King Arthur and the Knights of Justice” featured a villainess who sought to kidnap our heroes and mutate them into evildoers by means of a involuntary slime bath.

At this point, can you even call it Freudian Subtext?

Nor was it uncommon to see slime being used as a restraint device in 1980s and 1990s cartoons. Such was a preferred tactic of Mr. Sinister in “X-Men." In “Extreme Ghostbusters,” one insect-like villain had a predilection for cocooning his adversaries in goopy traps. The original “Ghostbusters” toon, similarly, had its “People Busters," interdimesional ghouls that liked to immobilize human prey by squirting them with great green gobs of ghost gunk.

That peculiar combination of bondage and slime fetishism also found its way in MANY toy lines from the era. The “Aliens” queen hive play set allowed children to strap in their action figures and marinate them in a thick, neon green dollop of xenomorph jelly. Numerous “Ghostbusters” toys gave kids an opportunity to trap figurines inside plastic monsters with names such as “the Gooper Ghost Squisher” and “Sludge Bucket” and envelope victims in streams of slime over and over again.

Sometimes, the scatalogical subtext might as well have been actual text. Take, for example, the TMNT “Flushomatic High-Tech Toilet Torture Trap” - a playset that asked kids to subdue their Turtles toys with a plastic strap and slowly drizzle “retro-mutagen” on them through a device that does indeed closely resemble a commode. The “Mini-Boglins” toys were somehow even less subtle, featuring slime-coated playthings that literally came shipped in a replica of a toilet bowl.

And for all the junior emetophiles out there, TMNT had you covered with such delightful figures as “Muckman,” a horrifically mutated sewer worker who could vomit ooze all over your other toys. One particularly brazen “Star Wars” toy released in conjunction with”The Phantom Menace” was the infamous “Jabba Glob” figure - which, true to its namesake, allowed the lecherous, frog-like villain to puke, barf and blow chunks of glowing green faux-phlegm all over the place.

Of course, at the time, nobody really noticed this bizarre intersectionality of bondage and bukkake in children’s toys and media. But looking back on toys such as the “Captain Planet Toxic Sludge Dump” and TV programs like “Ghost Writer” - which featured a story arc revolving around a slime-spewing antagonist named, rather aptly “Gooey Gus” - it becomes rather apparent that *something* had to have been going on behind the scenes. Marketers, after all, are by nature brilliant consumer psychologists, and that SO many products targeted towards children had the exact same overlapping kinks can hardly be considered coincidental.

Reflecting on the “TMNT” and “Ghostbusters” properties, one thing that especially strikes me today is how the slime was almost always used in the context of a “life-giving” dynamic. The goo and gunk never outright killed anybody, it simply transformed them into something different - and usually, a form that made them totally submissive to whoever dunked them in the goop in the first place.

It’s especially pertinent in “TMNT” and “Ghostbusters,” where mutagen and ecto-plazm are both seen as “birthing” agents, of sorts. In the case of the Turtles, the ooze *literally* created them while in “Ghostbusters,” the ecto-plazm is essentially depicted as the last vestiges of the “life force” of poltergeists and the living dead.

Now, kids, can you think of any *other* gooey, viscous, sludgy substances that can be considered a life-creating substance? Go ahead, feel free to ask your parents if you’re feeling stumped.

Yes, it may be a very large stretch of the imagination to assume that all of the slime-related content in youth-centric entertainment in the 1980s and 1990s was multimedia “grooming” to create a generation of cum addicts. But considering how children’s media has been used to push everything from environmentalist alarmism to unwavering allegiance to the United States military-industrial complex, perhaps it’s not *that* insane of a theorization.

And let’s face it, it’s not like plenty of big-name producers and creators haven’t been accused of doing some horrific things in the past. The creator of “Ren and Stimpy” - a program about as influential as any cartoon of the 1990s - has long been accused of “grooming” underage girls and possessing illegal pornography, while long-time Nickelodeon producer Dan Schneider was ousted from the network amidst allegations of misconduct involving minors. Yet another Nickelodeon producer - Brian Peck - actually WAS convicted of sex offenses against children, while numerous Disney Channel mainstays, including actors Kyle Massey and Stoney Westmoreland, have likewise been arrested on child exploitation charges.

Which Begs The Question: What color is the official HArry Potter "TERF SLIME" going to be?

How many scholarly articles have been written about the negative impacts of Barbie on the budding female psyche over the last four or five decades? Along those same lines, how many parents groups and developmental psychologists have written articles and screeds condemning toy lines like Bratz and Monster High for sexualizing young children? If those arguments and criticisms of the mass marketing approach behind juvenile entertainment hold any merit, then it certainly stands to reason that *my* thesis on the whole “bukkake and bondage” indoctrination has just as much weight and gravity to it - it has enough empirical evidence supporting it, for sure.

Of course, it’s impossible to show the cause and effect in play here. To the best of my knowledge there are no reliable, academic studies out there longitudinally examining generational interests in bondage or slime fetishism, so that little bellwether is already out of the question. Anecdotally there seems to be more bondage and slime/cum bath fetishism content making the internet rounds nowadays compared to 10 years ago, but I suppose you could say the same thing about any other subgenre of kink that comes to mind.

The biggest piece of evidence I’ve encountered so far comes via very brief conversations with anonymous fetishists on sites like DeviantArt and Pornhub. When it comes to *where* their fascination with bondage and slime fetishism stems from, virtually every user I’ve engaged in digital discourse with has said the same thing - there was this episode of this cartoon I watched when I was a kid, or this specific scene from this specific manga. The fact that “slime girls” went from being a virtually unrecognized kink 15 years ago to inspiring its own fetishistic cottage industry today speaks to the power of media priming as a catalyst for god knows how many oddly specific turn-ons.

A rather illuminating series of comments on Reddit also confirmed what I’ve suspected for years now. You’ll see thread after thread of 30- and 40-somethings recounting their *very* intimate experiences with slime in their youths; in hindsight, considering the packaging artwork for such products almost always included portraits of kids with nearly orgastic expressions on their faces as they let the gunge and gunk sift through their hands, almost as if the brightly-colored ooze was *meant* to symbolize a hardly subtle metaphor for ejaculation.

Perhaps one could perceive such as something of a children’s toy to adult’s toy pipeline. One of the most popular gimmicks in sex toys today are marital aides that don’t just spin, twist and vibrate to provide inner orifice pleasure, but dildos and dildo derivatives that actually baste users in thick globs of artificial sponge. Indeed, the same individuals who grew up on “Retro-mutagen” and “Ecto-plazm” in their toy chests now have sex boxes filled to the brim with adult “slime” products like Bad Dragon’s Cumlube, Master Series’ Jizz water-based lube and Spunk’s lube hybrid - of which a 128-ounce jug will run you about $150 in 2021 U.S. dollars.

Right now “slime fetishism” remains a fairly niche thing, mostly limited to the periphery of pop-up ad-glutted hentai sites and the occasional “Asian lotion” masturbatory fodder periodically uploaded to XHamster and its ilk. But it’s bound to grow in popularity, especially once people figure out how to properly SEO the term for social media. Remember, at one point analingus and foot fetishism were considered beyond the pale, too - sooner or later, “wallowing around in goop” sex is going to be every bit as mainstream and quasi-acceptable in the public consciousness.

One stroll down the toy section of any big box department store foretells that. Kids today just don’t have a bounty of slime-like products at their disposal, thanks to the power of the internet they can have their prepubescent kink stimulated nonstop. The search term “how to make slime” doesn’t just return thousands of videos on YouTube, it returns hundreds of thousands, with the top clips viewed more than 100 million times.

With that in mind, forget calling them Gen Z - perhaps we ought to call them “Generation Goo” instead.

XOXO, TOXICKA