Synthetic goo

Most toys were no use to an only child. There’s not much mileage in playing Monopoly alone. Even games with no format, no rules and no board, the kind that challenged the imagination – “playing Action Man” for example – were more fun with two or more people involved. Precious few halcyon era toys were not only aimed squarely at the solitary child but also made absolutely no sense in company. Mattel’s Slime was one of ‘em.

Dreamed up by some genius marketeer (and we’d put our last dollar on that being one of those American dreams we hear about) presumably after watching too many ‘50s B-movies, this viscous mixture of latex, wallpaper paste and food colouring (the actual ingredients may have differed slightly, but that’s what we’re guessing) hit the shops at roughly the same time the TISWAS gang were chucking buckets of water and foam flans at each other and basically making a right old mess on telly every week. And, whilst no parent would normally leave his or her offspring unsupervised with just any old gunge, the restrained anarchy of Slime (water-based, non-staining on wipe-clean surfaces such as the kitchen lino) was perfectly suited to out-of-the-way play.

Disappointingly, once the contents were emptied from the Oscar the Grouch-type green “trash can” container (Slime came in different colours, some with plastic eyeballs, some with rubber worms), there was precious little play to be had. Sure, it could slowly ooze and bubble (a satisfying trick was to trap some air in a glop of the stuff and slowly force it out with a farty sound¹) but any toy primarily exploited purely for its tactile qualities was always destined to hold only a transitory allure for kids. Nothing, however, could match the misfortune of finding an accidentally-left-open pot of the stuff, dried to a husk and rendered useless to man or beast. Slime was but a fleeting pleasure, and therefore all the better for it.