The 7 Best Slime Toys

?Slime may be the most perfect toy ever created. It serves absolutely no purpose, is completely wasteful, and ruins almost everything it touches, whether that be clothes, action figures or wallpaper. Of all playthings, slime is probably the one virtually all adults can agree that they want nothing to do with, and they sincerely don’t understand why children do. It’s simple, really. Gross is good.

Because all children of a certain age inherently love messes, slime hasn’t really left the market since Mattel first made and marketed it  in 1978 (ironically, a time when shag carpeting and fuzzy wallpaper were in vogue). Toy manufacturers have put it to good use in a variety of products, all of which were as awesome as they were messy and disgusting, and they were pretty messy and disgusting. Here are some of the greatest.

8) Slime

?Simple, perfect and neon green, the original Slime deserves its fame. It was cheap enough that you really didn’t need your parent’s permission to buy it, which is a good thing as most of them would rather you played with a wild bear than bring a can of it into your home. The slime craze was so strong that you could actually buy “snack-size” samples of it in vending machines for a quarter, just in case you needed a fix at Safeway that you could hide in your pocket.

7) The Real Ghostbusters Ecto-Plazm/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Retro Mutagen Ooze (tie)

?The original plus a few beloved cartoon characters on the side? Not bad at at all. The reason these licensed versions of the original slime edge out their gooey forebear is because Ecto-Plazm and Ooze are both inherently important to both the Ghostbusters and TMNT mythology, considering that both of their origins revolve so heavily around it. This added a play value the original Slime didn’t have, since few of us were likely smart enough to pretend our slime was a ghost pal or a benign mutator. We just threw it at things.

6) Nickelodeon Slime and Launcher

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Nickelodeon is truly a network built on a foundation of green slime. Beginning with You Can’t Do That on Television, the network has been pouring shit on children’s heads since the late 1970s, causing a whole generation to look fearfully to the sky when uttering the words “I don’t know.” Being able to shoot slime at will makes you the vengeful, slime-dispensing god of your household… until your little brother or sister ran screaming to mom because you slimed them.

5) Marvel Super Heroes Venom

?Early Toy Biz Marvel figures are best forgotten, as most of them sacrificed design for a rather poorly engineered action feature that often didn’t really work. But not so with the first ever action figure of spider-Man’s nemesis Venom, which oozed black slime through a hole in his chest. This was absolutely perfect for having Venom dangle what was essentially a large booger over Spider-Man’s face, which pretty much sums up Spidey and Venom’s relationship.

4) Slime It’s Alive

?Like peanut butter and chocolate, adding cheap rubber crap to slime creates a sum much greater than their individual parts. Doubling the “gross out” factor is the true recipe of awesome.

3) Ooze It

?A weird and pointless toy in the vein of Stretch Armstrong, Ooze It is a strange, cucumber-ish creature whose body is filled with ooze. Children are then encouraged to violently strangle him until a gooey crimson substance pours out of his every orifice. The end result is somewhat jarring, awfully messy, and serves as a tiny glimpse into the world of a serial killer.

2) Mad Scientist Dissect-an-Alien

?The entire 1986 Mattel Mad Scientist line is highly underrated; where else could you boil the flesh off creatures or have them puke “alien blood” (which coincidentally was also slime) from their noses and eyes? However, the true king of the line had to be Dissect-an-Alien, a gory playset that had you playing vivisectionist to a helpless, captured extra-terrestrial. Now if only they’d release a Dr. Zoidberg version of this thing.

1) Masters of the Universe Horde Slime Pit

Oh, hells yes. It took Mattel — the creators of slime — years to realize that children were pouring the green goop all over their action figures and that they could capitalize on their destructive behavior. With the creation of the Slime Pit, it was almost like adults finally understood children perfectly for one brief, shining moment. Complete with a warning to not placing Moss Man in the Slime Pit (thus practically demanding children to do that very thing), the Slime Pit still ruined most figures unless they were immediately washed, as slime would get in the joints, dry and crack, or leave discolored stains. This required children to buy news figures, which surely Mattel didn’t realize at all. Mattel rereleased the set for their Harry Potter figures, in case you’ve wanted to cover that smug wizard in goo. Or even slime him.