Nickelodeon Gak

If there's one thing we know, it's that nothing entices a child like mysterious scientific compounds. If it's been whipped up in a beaker or heated over a Bunsen burner, I assure you, they would like a part of it. In fact, if you could just package any potentially toxic experimental remnants in your lab and ship them to Mattel and TYCO distribution centers nationwide, that would probably be easiest.

Gak was one of those inexplicable phenomenons that only children could understand. It served no direct purpose outside of our general distractability and bemusement. Gak was a perfect blend of slime and silly putty with whoopie-cushion-style talents. Suddenly, you had in your possession a messy, slimy, hyper-colored, fart-producing goo. As a child, what's not to love?

"Playing with" Gak could potentially pose an issue. There was nothing you could really do with Gak. It wouldn't maintain a shape like play-doh or silly putty, and it dried out easily if not tended to properly. Not to mention it made your hands smell terrible. Really, just awful. I don't know what they made that stuff out of, but it was remarkably potent. And God forbid you played with Gak within a 10 mile radius of carpeting. The consistency of Gak was rather drizzly and hence prone to all sorts of droppage. Many of us child Gak enthusiasts were forced to incur the wrath of livid parents upon the realization that we had just smushed a tubful of purple mystery goo into their padded berber.


The Nickelodeon/Mattel team was smart enough to realize that despite the obvious mesmerizing qualities of Gak, it would only hold a child's attention for so long on its own. Sure, the clever transparent plastic star-shaped containers (known as "Gak Splats") made it entertaining to re-squish the Gak back into its packaging, but squishy fart sounds alone can only take a toy so far. Luckily, they had conceived of a few other brilliant Gak-related devices from which to accelerate the franchise:

Observe, a commercial for the original Nickelodeon Gak:



As a service to all of you, I will forgo my limited sense of propriety and just come right out with it: I owned an inordinate number of these Gak splatting devices. They were incredibly simplistic in their design, and despite their giving use to the Gak substance, they still served no practical purpose. Let us explore, if you will, a few of the marvelous Gak tools by which we were endlessly entertained:

The Gak Inflator
This was an incredibly mechanical-looking device for its absolutely unnecessary existence. The major aim behind inflating Gak was to shove air into a thin pocker of Gak to produce a chewing-gum style bubble. You would simply insert the Gak, pump the device, and inflate a Gak bubble until it burst. This product deftly circumvented the question of "Why?" and went directly to the "Why not?" Why not inflate a bubble of flatulent goo? In fact, why not create a colorful plastic device with the specific intention of bubbling Gak? As an adult, you may see through this faulty (read: lack of) logic, but as a child it all made perfect, satifyingly-poppable sense.

The Gak Vac
A sort of inverse to the Gak inflator, this piece of toy equipment served the sole purpose of vacuuming up Gak into a chamber and subsequently spitting it back out with the press of a button. The more sadistic amon us would employ action figures on which to splat the aforementioned Gak. This was sort of an at-home version of Nickelodeon's classic sliming action. As a result, my Barbie's hair has yet to recover from it's green Gak deep-conditioning treatment.

The Gak Copier
Whenever I'm scribbling away on an etch-a-sketch or a Magnadoodle, I often think to myself, "You know what would be really super? If I could imprint this image temporarily onto a sticky rubbery substance." Luckily Mattel's telepathy department was hard at work that day and devised a device, so it seemed, to meet my specific doodling needs. The Gak copier allowed children to draw an image, close the device with a fresh coating of Gak on one side and the drawing on the other, and transfer the image onto the Gak. While the device was more of a glorified heavy-book-to-close-it-in, I would not recommend using a book from your own home by which to complete this copying. I know my parents certainly would not, after I ruined the M volume of our Encyclopedia Britannica. I just wanted to see if I could transfer the image of a manatee onto a wad of Gak. FYI, you can not.

Gak came in all sorts of other varieties; glow-in-the-dark, scented, multi-packs...the possibilities were truly endless. One key thing these Gak products all shared was the ubiquitous Gak-specific warning label:


I don't know if you were aware, but Gak is a trademarked product. I probably shouldn't even be using the word Gak, considering the amount of mini-TMs they have plastered on this thing. I can only imagine I'm infringing on their copyright by thinking about the product at all.

They certainly made good use of their bold, all-caps lettering capabilities. GAK IS NOT A FOOD PRODUCT. You have to sort of respect the way they put this directly after the phrase "Gak is non-toxic." It's like telling Gak-crazed childen, "Sure, this stuff may not kill you on contact, but please refrain from eating an entire Splat of it."

It's also very kind of them to include directions for how to re-moisturize your disgusting, stringy, dried-up cornhusk-esque Gak. Simply "work in" some water! Perhaps it's just me, but the phrase "work in" seems unnecessarily gross and potentially graphic. Why can't we just add a teaspoon of water? Mix with a teaspoon of water? No, that will not do; it's preferable to massage in that water gently and tenderly.

Oh, and by the way, don't even THINK about playing with Gak on, well, anything. I can understand the carpeting part, but varnished and unvarnished surfaces? Isn't that, um, everything? I may be mistaken here, but I assume that if it's not varnished, it's unvarnished. In what sort of an environment is it safe to play with Gak? An anti-gravity simulator? I suppose the cleanup would be simple. Just use the Gak Vac!

Also, dry cleaning will not remove Gak. Don't even try it, buster. All hope is lost. We warned you about playing with Gak on surfaces, didn't we?

Despite all of these warnings, we still craved Gak splats with a near-religious fervor. Sure, those warnings could be a bit ominous to adults, but hey, we were kids. All we cared about was sliming GI Joes and producing endlessly hilarious Gak flatulence.

But never, ever on the carpet.


Check it out:
How to make your own Gak

Singled Out

How did people ever find true love before the handy advent of at-home internet dating? Lonely hearts once were forced to brave the cold wide world in desperate search of a potentially suitable mate, singles were relegated to the awkward shame attempting small talk over a cup of coffee, and blind daters eagerly anticipated meeting their mysterious dining partner.

And for the lazy ones, well, there was always Singled Out.

Singled Out proved that adolescents would gladly watch a game show so long as all educational elements had been sufficiently eliminated and the double-entendre reference count was somewhere in the high 20s per episode. It was around this time that market researchers discovered that young people would tune in for game shows if they were generally valueless and smutty--in a lighthearted way, that is. If their parents were mildly to moderately offended by it, that didn't hurt either.

In days of television past, when networks sought to produce cheap TV shows they didn't necessarily go straight to the default reality series angle that floods our current television marketplace. Though MTV was certainly pioneering in the reality show arena (namely through their once-edgy Real World), they also recognized that unscripted game shows were equally cost-effective and quick to produce. To make make production exceedingly expedient, the show's producers formulated mainly 50/50 multiple choice answers from which the majority of contestants could be eliminated. This was certainly not a game of skill we were dealing with here; the show had already conveniently broken down potential contestant responses to bite-size lifeline-esque proportions.

In all honesty, Singled Out was more of hormone-rampant free-for-all of eye candy and sexual innuendos than an actual game. Imagine an entire season of The Bachelor sped up into two 15-minute segments with an old-school 1970s episode of The Dating Game spliced into it intermittently. The show was fluffy and substance-free, but MTV had enough know-how in dealing with 90s teenagers to make this a profitable and attention-worthy enterprise.


The show was originally hosted by then rising-star Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy and otherwise unexceptional television personality Chris Hardwick. I had a fairly serious crush on Chris Hardwick circa 1995 in all his floppy-haired glory, but looking back on 90s video footage of him it seems my taste as a 10-year old was somewhat questionable. While Jenny McCarthy went on to fabulous fame, Jim Carrey, and dispersion of questionable anti-inoculation propaganda, Chris Hardwick certainly took a quieter route in performing near-unknown stand up comedy and maintaining his blog The Nerdist. His current picture is notably more studly and I actually consider his blog fairly entertaining, but I find it difficult to read more than a few sentences without stopping myself and thinking, "Wait, the guy from Singled Out is writing this?" But I digress. Let's get back to the game show at hand (/screen).

The premise of the show involved 50 preselected young men and 50 preselected young women respectively vying for a date with single female and male contestants. Prior to the show, these 100 guys and gals each filled out questionaires, the answers from which would either propel them to last-round fame or banish them to early-elimination obscurity. The initial categorical round was followed up by what I like to call the "humiliate yourself to win the affection of another"/"reply to any questions in a determinedly sexual manner" round (more officially known as the "keep 'em or dump 'em round). The "picker" would force the remnants of his or her dating pool to a) performing an outlandishly ridiculous challenge such as dancing sexily while donning a rubber rooster mask or b)answer a sexually-laced question a la The Dating Game, such as "If I were an ice cream cone, what would you do to me?" Subtle, I know, but somehow we managed to break through these ironclad metaphors.


Unfortunately for the Dumpees, they were then draped in dumpee finery: toilet seats, sandwich boards displaying the word "loser", a "dumped" sash, or some other equally embarrassing article. If that shame was not quite enough, the dumpees were paraded past the Picker in hopes of being redeemed. If an expelled contestant was remarkably attractive or particularly scantily clad, occasionally the Picker would bestow unto him or her the coveted Golden Ticket, redeeming them for further play.

In the third and final round (what I like to think of as Singled Out's answer to Legend of the Hidden Temple's Steps of Knowledge) contestants would again answer 50/50 questions and with each correct answer progress a step closer to their potential dating prize. Whichever contestant was the first to reach their coveted date was the winner, and the two were physically arranged back-to-back to create a needlessly longer suspenseful 3/8th of a second before the big reveal. Once revealed, the show awarded the new couple with some semi-lame but admittedly free prize date package, and the potential young lovebirds were sent on their way.

To illustrate, I was planning to present a clip from the original show but was then struck by a far superior idea. For any of you who grew up as fans of ABC's Friday night TGIF programming block, this one's for you. In a late episode of Boy Meets World, Eric actually appeared as a somewhat dishonest contestant on a college edition MTV's Singled Out. The clip even features the real Chris Hardwick, who makes a few cracks about his and Eric's ubiquitous 90s parted haircuts.



The actual show pulled in some major guest stars as well. Okay, so maybe not so major, but they were certainly guest stars--my favorite of whom was Salute Your Shorts's Michael Bower, a.k.a. Donkey Lips. I've had a soft spot for Bower ever since Dina tried to give D-Lips the major brush-off at Camp Anawanna's big dance. I'm not saying I'd want to be Singled Out by him, but he was certainly a guest star of interest.

As the growing fame of Singled Out's hosts quickly outstripped the growth of the show, Jenny McCarthy expressed her desire to move on to greener pastures. Okay, so the pastures were still located at MTV studios and involved her performing in some form of eponymous sketch comedy series, but they were greener nonetheless. Jenny was swiftly replaced with a new Playmate model, Carmen Electra, for the short remaining duration of the series. While Carmen was undeniably in the same attractiveness realm as her Playmate predecessor, she lacked some of Jenny's flair for shameless respect-compromising comedy.


Irrespective of the host switcheroo, this show was boastfully successful thorughout the duration of its three year run. Though the games live on for a brief few days annually at seedy Spring Break destinations, it's a bit sad to consider that today's generation of young people will grow up never once having had their mind contaminated by this entertaining garbage. Sure, they've got The Hills and Real World season 21, but it's just not the same. Never will they know the thrilling rush of waiting for two people to suspensefully whip around and face one another, meeting their dating fate.

Then again, this is a generation that un-ironically watches MTV's current dating debacle Next, so it may not be worth putting up a fight for reinstatement.

Check it out:
MTV Singled Out's Guide to Dating Book
Singled Out: The Dirt on the Dates on VHS
A creative professor's Singled Out math problem

Children of the Nineties' Favorite Things

We don't usually do this sort of thing over here, but out of love for Miss Gidget's blog, I'm willing to make an exception. With a 90s twist, that is.

Fidgeting Gidget tagged me in this meme today, with the following rules:

1. Mention the person who nominated you (above).

2. List six unimportant things that make you happy (I've chosen to supplement the "you" in this piece of the instructions with "children of the 90s,' but you get the general idea).

So without further ado, I present to you 6 things that make children of the 90s happy today:

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1. Reruns

Sure, it's a bit troubling that the network block that aired black-and-white sitcoms in our youth is now showing Home Improvement and The Fresh Prince, but obviously they've adjusted their retro-meter a bit.

2. Pandora

Perfect for listening at work, Pandora is a free online radio service. 90s children can plug in their favorite old groups and Pandora will do the work in recovering similar songs and artists. Just be warned that you may end up with a station embarrassingly entitled something like "Backstreet Boys radio."

3. 90s Throwback t-shirts

I dare you to take one look at this image and not immediately picture yourself sporting a shirt with the above while watching the Full House episode where DJ mistakenly is caught with a beer. Tempting, I know.


4. Oregon Trail iPhone App

What better way to be notified you've died of dysentery than on a 2'' x 3'' screen?

5. DVD Releases

Your favorite childhood shows, now available at a retailer/website near you. If your favorites aren't out there, there are petitions galore on the internet imploring the good people at Nickelodeon and MTV to give us our DVDs.

6. Return of Union Jack Fashion

Okay, so maybe Paris Hilton doesn't specifically embody the fashion sense many of us would like to emulate, but she is wearing that hat. For all of us who saw Spice World multiple times in theaters, this is certainly a promising development.

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3. Tag six blogs, state the rules & notify them with a teeny comment on their blog.

A Daily Dose of Dani
Magchunk
Curiosity
Trying to Make it all Work
Buried the Lead
My Life in a Blog