Covered in Gunge



"Host: What do we do?

Audience: CRANK 'EM UP!"

- Get Your Own Back

Does this need any explanation? People get covered in gunge (also known as slime). Another variant involves a large cake and comedies: it is inevitable in such shows that someone will end up with their face in the cake. If the cake is big enough (as many wedding cakes are), they'll do a full-body dive into it.

Often a result of a Food Fight or Bucket Booby Trap. Edible gunge can lead to I Taste Delicious if the person covered in gunge tries to eat his way out.

A trope of the Saturday Morning Kids Show genre or anything else aimed at kids. This trope is also popular in a number of programs aimed at adults. The game show use of gunge was particularly ubiquitous during the late 80s and early 90s, but it seems to have died down now as health and safety and general dignity take increasing hold.

Britain started all this in the 1960s with Not Only But Also and the festival of anarchy that was Tiswas. Slightly later on, America got into it as well thanks to the Canadians with the sketch show You Can't Do That On Television. In general, American game shows tended to use slime as an obstacle or even reward, while the British, with their typical mastery of villainy, treated it more as a sort of ritual punishment with various elaborate and spectacular gungings being dealt out to celebrities or the general public courtesy of the BBC.

Check The Pig Pen for someone who is always like this. When it's blood that somebody is covered with, it's Blood-Splattered Innocents; if they did it intentionally and like it, it's Blood Is the New Black. If it's mud they're covered in, it's... well... Covered in Mud. An Older Than Television version is Pie in The Face.

Often an essential ingredient in a good Humiliation Conga.

Also notable for the Rule 34 version -- WAM (Wet And Messy) fetishism. Technically (at least borderline) Rule 34 but arguably less gross, are depictions of characters covered in chocolate, especially if the chocolate is actively being poured on top of them. Common in Japanese Valentine's Day Fan Service.

Not to be confused with something being Covered in Grunge.

Game Shows

 * Nickelodeon's Double Dare set the standard for gungy game shows in the US with their branded green slime "Gak." Raised up to 11 when it became Super Sloppy Double Dare and the show never looked back. Double Dare 2000 introduced "Goooze".
 * Other Nickelodeon game shows from the same era that followed suit:
 * Finders Keepers, to an extent - mainly if the Pastry Shop was one of the rooms in the house, or if they hid the clue or object in a bucket of slime; otherwise contestants merely got sprayed with or fell into water at most.
 * Think Fast.
 * What Would You Do? - Various challenges given to studio audience members, usually involving giant pies. Also hosted by Marc "OCD" Summers.
 * Wild and Crazy Kids - featured random teams of kids competing in various games, many of which involved gunge of some sort, especially toward the end of the series.
 * Non-Nick shows from the same time period:
 * Fun House, arguably the most successful, both in the US and the UK. Whole lot of fun, Prizes to be won. While gunge is chucked about liberally.
 * The most blatant Double Dare ripoff, Slime Time, and its sister show Treasure Mall.
 * The first version of Pictionary. The Bonus Round that made it to air involved kids simply getting wet in the "Water Works", although clips of the pilot shown on the commercials showed them playing a game with pies.
 * Hanna-Barbera produced one called Skedaddle, basically a "hot potato"-style game played in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer. This was the standard penalty for wrong answers, throwing the object out of bounds, running out of time, etc.
 * Crackerjack!. In the later era, hosted by Stu Francis, the original finale game of "Double or Drop" was dropped in favour of a new game called "Take A Chance". Here the two celebrities would compete against Stu for extra points for the child contestant by picking a "Joker" colour. Two slats above two booths would appear stating the points available and what the tank above them contained, "The Points to be won, or the penalties to pay". The celeb would sit in one and Stu in the other. One of the assistants would ask a question and the winner received the points for their child contestant. The loser received the contents of the tank above. The ladies (not always) usually got away with it but the male celebrities were always gunged along with Francis, who copped it every week.
 * Noel's House Party, a UK Saturday evening entertainment show from the 90s, is probably the biggest example of this for shows aimed at adults (as much as you could describe it as 'grown-up' at all). Gunge was a staple of the programme, and it featured throughout its lifetime:
 * Gunge Tank: Simply, a clear booth with a seat and a reservoir of gunge on the top. In its first form, on a precursor to House Party called Noel Edmonds Saturday Roadshow, a member of the audience would play a word game, with Noel and the celebrity of the week assisting them. The answers to separate clues would combine loosely to form a larger phrase, and the contestant would have to bet on how many of these phrases they could get in 90 seconds - if they failed to reach their number, the gunge was released.
 * The gunge tank was carried over into Noels House Party, where it would be used to deal justice to a member of the public who had been nominated by their friends for some grudge between them. Later on in the show's life, its use changed to gunging celebrities, who would be put against each other in a phone vote each week to decide who had to go inside. Two foam pumps were also added at the bottom of the tank, which would fill the booth with colored foam around the victim while they were gunged from above.
 * The third style of tank was more conveyor-like, with the victim being carried on a chair through a set of carwash-style brushes to the center before they were covered by the main tank.
 * Finally, the tank was replaced by the Trip Around the Great House, a ghost-train-like ride around the manor-themed studio. The riders (usually a celebrity and an unfortunate audience member) were covered in foam and various other mess at every turn before finally ending up behind the large fireplace, where the main flood of gunge would be spewed from the ceiling.
 * Number Cruncher: This was another gunge booth, disguised as a phone box, that would be left on a random street corner each week. Watchers would be shown a picture of where the box was located and then, if they recognized its location, race the country to be the first one inside. Once they had got in, unknown at first to them (although everyone must have realized after the first couple of weeks) the tank would then lock them inside and the only way to escape was to play the game. Four numbers would be shown to the contestant via an LCD screen on the tank's phone, after which they had 45 seconds to put them in order by process of trial and error to find the combination to unlock the door and get out before the gunge tank started up. Each button press on the phone would add to the prize money, leading some people to frantically dial in 9s for as long as they dared before attempting to then escape.
 * Later shows turned this into a versus game, with twin booths and two contenders trying to find the combination and gunge the other first.
 * Panel Beaters: As if the final iteration of the gunge tank just wasn't severe enough, this game put a team of three celebrities against a panel of three people with unusual occupations, and if they failed to guess their jobs after interrogating them, the celebrity team's entire desk was dragged backwards into a large alcove in the studio wall where they were covered in a positively ludicrous amount of foam and gunge. (If they succeeded, the panel got it instead.)
 * Tiswas: There's an interesting example vis buckets of water. One time, the band Rainbow were in the cage (along with some other people). One of them- Tarrant still refuses to say who- lit up a joint live on national TV. Tarrant threw a bucket of water over him (and the spliff) pretty much immediately.
 * The cage itself is an example of beautiful simplicity: It served no purpose except to house the unfortunates condemned to it, who themselves had no role beyond being drenched at regular intervals.
 * The same show gave us The Phantom Flan-Flinger! (*musical sting*), a 'mysterious' masked and caped figure who would leap out of the shadows at random moments and hurl cream pies at presenters, the audience, the cameramen etc...
 * Run the Risk was created in the UK as a sequel of sorts to Double Dare, with the physical challenges usually involving a large knee-deep moat of the stuff. The final part of the show, as the last part of a race where you'd already be quite slippery from other obstacles, was to attempt to climb an inflatable ramp out of the moat while having even more of the stuff poured down on you from the ceiling - naturally this was completely bloody impossible.
 * Get Your Own Back is a show that had kids compete to dunk an authority figure into the "Gunk Dunk", an enormous vat of gunge. One of the most memorable episodes started off as usual only for one of the contestants to reveal their real target... the show's host.
 * The finale and main attraction of the show went through a number of different forms with games tied to them. In the first series, the 'winning' team (child with the most points and their nominated adult) were both seated poised above a cauldron-like container of watery slime, and had to race to be the first to answer five questions correctly to dunk the other one in. However, if the child ever went in first, they made sure the adult always got it in the end because of the rule that "all children must be accompanied by a grown-up". Hooray.
 * The second form had a Halloween-style setting, with the adult of the team still poised above the vat but the child now standing inside a gunge booth to the side. In this game, the adult's objective was still to answer five questions correctly and light five pumpkin lights next to them, but they would instantly lose if they ever answered with a word that began with a certain letter announced at the beginning of the game. The questions were usually deliberately set to lead them into doing this (if the letter was B, for example, a question might be "What is the opposite of 'forwards'?" - the adult avoided this one by answering "Reverse"). If they made a mistake or ran out of time, they were plunged into the vat - if they managed to get five correct within the time then their nominator was gunged instead. The rule above still applied, though, even if it made rather less sense in context.
 * The third series used a much lighter 'fairground' setup, and the child's danger of being gunged was removed entirely (it was replaced very briefly by the Forfeit Furnace, in which the host would 'burn' a forfeit that the child had taken with them if they were on the losing team - thankfully this was dropped very quickly after complaints from viewers, though the host reassured in an interview that no possessions were really destroyed). Instead, the losing adult had to answer three multiple choice questions, where answering wrongly would allow their nominator to pull a lever and cover them in one of three colors of gunge. All this was naturally irrelevant, because in the end they always got to send them into the vat below anyway. Again.
 * After this, the next few series seemed to settle on a reasonably standard ritualistic format for the Gunk Dunk, an industrial/futuristic set with a chair mounted on a ramp leading down and towards the vat of gunge. The adult was still asked three questions, but this time answering wrongly would, after a rabid call of "Crank 'em up!" from the audience (shown in the page quote), raise them one notch away from the vat ensuring that they would be thrown into it more violently when they were inevitably dunked. For a while, the danger to the child of the team was also reintroduced, with a choice of two levers before the big moment - one of the identical levers would award them an extra prize, the other would release the tank of gunge above their own head.
 * The last series of the show completely changed the style of the end game, with both teams now taking part, each adult seated on a ramp, and the kids answering questions to slide them up a level - the one who reached the fifth notch first was then thrown in. The team that had accumulated the most points during the game being given a slight head start, but it didn't really shake the feeling that it made the rest of the games slightly pointless.
 * Live And Kicking had the inevitable Saturday Morning Kids Show gunge tank built into its set in its last series in about 2000. Members of the studio audience were selected as victims, often apparently as a complete surprise to them. The game played varied throughout the series' unusually long lifetime:
 * The Kid Gets It: A kid from the audience, usually nominated in secret by a friend, would be called down to sit inside the booth, and had to pick one of the celebrity guests on the show that week to attempt the challenge. The chosen player would have to speak for one minute about themselves (often with prompting from the hosts) without saying a certain "trigger word" that had been shown to everyone else via the low-tech medium of a bit of paper waved around at the audience beforehand. Naturally they always said the forbidden word in the end and the Kid very much Got It.
 * The second variant was also called The Kid Gets It, but completely changed the idea to a courtroom-type setup where one contestant would plead the case for gunging one of their friends to a panel of celebrity judges (common crimes included borrowing stuff and not giving it back, or being obsessed with a band the other one couldn't stand). If successful, the friend would be led into the tank and gunged - if not, the nominator would be gunged instead for "wasting the court's time".
 * Next, the game changed into The Leakiest Sink, a fairly poor take-off of The Weakest Link, where two players would have to take turns sitting inside the booth while a celebrity guest pulled one of six plugs apparently attached to it somehow. One of these plugs would start up the gunge tank, so the danger increased as the game went on and the chance of picking the 'right' (wrong?) one got higher.
 * Stop the Snot was the last variant, where the show added a whopping great model nose to the front of the tank. This was similar to the very first game, except a celebrity was quizzed for a minute with the rule that they could never say "Yes" or "No", with results that should be obvious by now should they ever do so.
 * Canadian game show Uh Oh!, which is played with teams of two. There were a few mini-games chosen by a wheel. The titular Uh Oh! space challenged the player who landed on it with a question. If the player got it right, the team got points, but getting it wrong results in slime being dumped... on their partner.
 * During the final round, there was a category called "Double Uh Oh!" which (as you can guess) resulted in double points, or double sliming.
 * And then, there was the premium option of "Uh Oh! Deluxe", which was the same. Except it was worth more points, or your partner got metallic coloured gunge dropped on them.
 * Not even the audience was safe in this show. The Punisher would dunk a kid in a kiddie pool, or spray the audience with a water gun during the opening, some games had the contestants tossing slime-filled water balloons at some kind of target or bucket (held by audience members)
 * And the last-place team always got slimed at the end of the show.
 * Hangar 17 was a children's magazine-type show that had a couple of sections of this - the first was a talent/variety show section where three acts were judged by a panel of kids while seated underneath giant prop ice cream cones - only the highest scorer was let off. The second section was called Teacher on the Hotseat, where a teacher nominated by some of the audience had to sit inside a futuristic cockpit-like booth and answer three questions on the subject they taught, only being told if they had got the answers right (and therefore escaped) at the end. Only one teacher ever escaped the gunging, which was fairly vicious even by British standards, with the stuff being sprayed from all sides of the device before they were finished off with a torrent from above - when this happened, they let him out and put the girl who had nominated him in instead.
 * There was something similar in the Italian show "Disney Club", where the last segment was the aptly-titled "Teacher torture". If that episode's teacher wasn't able to answer the question... well, do the math.
 * Eyespy, a UK show from the 80s, featured gunge cubicles as part of its final obstacle course round. After answering a question correctly to be allowed to start, contestants would have to find pieces of a code by picking from a row of ten cubicles, only finding out if they had picked one of the four safe ones once they had shut themselves inside.
 * Clockwise was another children's show where the contestants risked their cleanliness - it often featured games in which one member of a team would have to save the other. Two memorable examples were the "steady hand" game where one team member would have to guide a loop along a twisted wire, with the addition that the buzzer was also wired up to a gunge tank with their team-mate inside, and a similar one where the teams had to shoot six targets with catapult-like contraptions before time expired. The final round was called the Tunnel of Time, where the winning team would ride a roller coaster car-like thing through a tunnel, having to answer questions while being covered by various devices throughout.
 * Pump It Up, another UK game show, used gunge as its entire scoring system - winning any of the games before the final would allow a team to turn off one of the "gunge zones" on the giant inflatable obstacle course at the end. If a zone wasn't turned off when a team reached it, a load of gunge would be spewed down on to them from the ceiling, making progress difficult at best, and if it happened to be on an uphill ramp, hilariously impossible.
 * The British loved this, didn't they? Twister was a game show in 2001 that wasn't often messy, but occasionally had games that involved contestants being fastened in place under huge industrial hoppers and being covered in ridiculous amounts of gunge throughout. One of them was set up so that their team-mates had to avoid hitting "triggers" on the floor - the resultant carnage can be viewed here.
 * Beginning in Season 3, Wipeout began using more gunge in its obstacles, the most prominent examples in the qualification course being the "paint sprayer" Sucker Punch (which added exactly that to its usual content of boxing gloves on sticks), and one that is usually a kitchen-based setting but has a different theme every time in season 4.
 * On the Israeli game show Crime and Punishment, participants who made it to the final stage (after beating two others, so it was one finalist per episode) had to sit on a chair above a huge tank of slime while connected to a polygraph. They were told to answer five embarrassing questions truthfully: if they did, they’d get all the money they’d earned (usually around 2,000 NIS); if they failed, they’d fall into the slime and get nothing.
 * Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow lived for gunge; all the contestants tended to get mushy peas, tomatoes, rice pudding, and other substances including the sinister Dirty Norris thrown over them during the show, and then the loser would have to sit under a gunge tank for good measure. Possibly the only show to buy custard powder by the tonne.
 * The Legend of Dick and Dom, their follow-up show, has lots of gunge-covered Shout Outs to Da Bungalow, like the heroes being put in the stocks and having tomatoes flung at them.
 * I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here gets celebrities to stick their faces into tanks of slime, get it poured over them or swim in it. Oh, and often there's worms and insects. All this to win food for themselves and their competitors.
 * Nickelodeon's Figure It Out: Any panelist who triggered the "Secret Slime Action" got to see why that weird pipe was hanging ominously over his or her head.
 * The current Nickelodeon Game Show Brain Surge: Either lose at any point and get sent down the "Brain Drain", a slide filled with "earwax" foam, or win the game and the Bonus Round and be subjected to the standard Nick green slime treatment.
 * A recent Canadian talent show on YTV, Zoink'd!, is pretty much what Americas Got Talent (though, it plays more like The Gong Show) would be like if it were judged by kids, and pressing their button dropped something on the performers, which progressed up to gunge of course.
 * Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck had this in the form of the "Double Whammy," where, in addition to losing all your current winnings, you also got covered in gunge related to the Whammy Animation shown.

Anime & Manga

 * A ghoul splatters the students with what seems to be it's body fluids in episode 8 of Blue Exorcist...
 * In the sci-fi Hentai Alien From the Darkness, the crew of a derelict ship are all found dead, with the women stripped naked and covered from head to toe in a thick, green, gooey substance. This is later revealed to be a byproduct of the titular alien's (nearly always fatal) mating technique.
 * Happens in the Eiken OVA, in the infamous huge yogurt-slide... and then chocolate.

Comics

 * Max Und Moritz by Wilhelm Busch are covered by dough after they break in a bakery. Their fault.

Film

 * Carrie "They're all gonna laugh at you."
 * "....he slimed me."
 * Don't forget what happens after Stay Puft explodes... (Bill Murray actually stays completely dry at that point -- he'd got it earlier and it was felt not fair to do it to him twice.)
 * There's that and the fact that he was the male lead, and would be kissing the girl soon. Not very romantic kissing a man with as much marshmallow as the other Ghostbusters had on them.
 * And in the sequel, after being hosed with the 'good vibrations' pink spooge, "Vy am I drippings vith goo?"
 * Also regularly invoked in The Real Ghostbusters.
 * In The Great Race, due to a Prisoner Of Zenda-like case of assumed identity, all of the main characters end up in a bakery throwing pies at each other. Throughout, the Great Leslie remains completely immaculate until the Action Girl feminist, blinded by the pie on her face, is spinning around with a pie in her hand and Leslie ducks a little too late.
 * In Blazing Saddles, the big fight scene at the end spills out of its set into another soundstage, then spreads into the studio commissary and escalates into a food fight. Hedley tries to evade it by ducking into a restroom, then emerges a second later with a faceful of pie.
 * In the film version of Godspell, Robin (as the Rich Man in "Lazarus and the Rich Man") is sent to Hades and tormented by demons who present her with scrummy looking strawberry-and-cream pies -- which they then drizzle ketchup on. And then pie her with.
 * The Lost Boys of Hook are fond of this -- Peter, when he first tries to fly, lands in a vat of gunge; some of their weapons are designed to leave pirates covered too; and there's a Food Fight.
 * In Starship Troopers 3, cute Bridge Bunny Holly Little gets alien bug-goo splashed across her, prior to a giant penile-claw erupting from the ground between her splayed legs and almost being devoured by a ginormous Vagina Dentata with delusions of grandeur.
 * Men in Black: The troopers at the beginning, J after getting puked on by the squidbaby, K after, and finally both of them after  In every occasion the gungee has to spit out some gunge before they can talk about how gross the experience was.
 * In Singin in The Rain, grunge-covered stuntman Don Lockwood meets the Friendly Corporate Executive.

Literature

 * At the climax of Daniel Pinkwater's Young Adult Novel, the Wild Dada Ducks are assaulted in the Himmler High lunchroom by the other students with one thousand portions of extra soggy Grape-Nuts cereal.

Live-Action TV
"Cordy to Doyle: "Do you think that tentacle spew comes out with dry cleaning?""
 * You Can't Do That On Television had the habit of dousing the kids with water whenever they said the word, with green slime whenever they said "I don't know" (check the picture). Other colors of slime were used occasionally, for example a blue sliming once when they "ran out" of green slime. Red slimings for saying "free" on an episode that had been "taken over" by the Russians.
 * The show was a big hit when it aired on Nickelodeon, which adopted the slime part into... well, everything. Especially in The Nineties. To this day, various in-studio shows and events take joy in dumping green stuff on people.
 * I Carly: Nevel, with "guacamole" that resembles good ol' Nickelodeon green slime.
 * An episode of Fawlty Towers has Basil taking revenge on a man who he believed to have been a hotel inspector throughout the episode by hitting him with custard pies and pouring cream into his briefcase.
 * Mighty Morphin Power Rangers did this to Bulk and Skull REPEATEDLY. Cakes, usually, but just about anything could land on those two to end an episode...
 * Bulk seems to have returned to his role as gunge magnet in Power Rangers Samurai.
 * In an episode of Cheers, the gang get into a Food Fight, and as we're going to actually get to see Norm's wife Vera -- who has remained unseen throughout the show -- she gets hit in the face with a bowl of mashed potatoes!
 * The "Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards" has this done to extreme lengths -- most of the time it happens to celebrity guests, as part of the big stunt near the end, and to a surprise celebrity guest such as Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp or Robin Williams.
 * Doctor Who "The Sontaran Stratagem": Naked evil clone of Martha.
 * Happens a lot in general to people fighting the Slitheen . One splash of vinegar and pop.
 * This became something of a running joke in The Sarah Jane Adventures with Clyde always seeming to get Raxacoricofalapatorian gunge all over him. Or any other kind of gunge, actually.
 * More or less the entire Idea behind the Discovery Kids show Grossology.
 * All That, being a Nickelodeon comedy, embraced this repeatedly, but particularly memorable was a combined Lampshade/ double subversion: A baker has sent the cast a roomful of cream pies, far more than they could possibly eat, in appreciation of the show. Several cast members ask pointedly what to do with the excess pies, when their Butt Monkey stage manager walks in. Someone decides to bring the extra pies to the zoo for the zebras. Stage manager calls them on it, and one explains that the baker had also sent over a large cake explicitly for throwing at him.
 * The "Helping Hands" game on Whose Line Is It Anyway (player A is the straight player; player B (Ryan) has his arms behind his back and player C (Colin) substitutes his own arms for Player B) would often ends with Ryan covered in whatever foodstuffs were being used as props, usually as a result of Colin's blind attempts to feed him.
 * A special mention for whoever decided to give them champagne.
 * What of the time Colin is holding a cream pie Ryan is dressed as a clown and Drew slams the pie in Ryan's face during the game.
 * Jim Cramer of Mad Money throws banana cream pies at company CEOs. Or so I heard.
 * This tended to happen to people a lot on Maid Marian and Her Merry Men.
 * In Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe, in the course of doing the job, usually gets filthy by the end of it. Sometimes the filth is wet. Are the fangirls pleased by this? Yes they are.
 * "His head burst..."
 * In an episode of Hannah Montana after representing Lily in teen court (and proving to everyone's satisfaction that she was to blame for Lily's current predicament), Miley gets "served" some justice, and ends up covered in pasta and sauce.
 * The Day of the Triffids (2009). The bodies of those killed by the Man Eating Plants are covered in triffid venom.
 * Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has Models and Buckets. It's basically a Nickelodeon show with Models and Buckets. Occasionally leads to I Taste Delicious.
 * Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow lived for gunge; all the contestants tended to get mushy peas, tomatoes, rice pudding, and other substances including the sinister Dirty Norris thrown over them during the show, and then the loser would have to sit under a gunge tank for good measure. Possibly the only show to buy custard powder by the tonne.
 * Plenty of ShoutOuts to this in The Legend of Dick and Dom, too: whenever the leads can be made to fall into the mud or fight in a tub of custard, they are.
 * Angel did this a few times, covering several characters in demon slime. And Angel's car keys in one ep.


 * Thirty Rock - Jenna is at a 'Kid's Choice' awards show, where Best Actress winner Helen Mirren (or at least someone playing her) gets slimed at the podium. She chuckles "Ohh, you got me!"
 * In a Monty Python sketch at an Army Recruiting office, an applicant (Eric Idle) protests that he hasn't gotten any funny lines - the recruiting officer (Graham Chapman) offers to start a new sketch to let him be funny - where the officer becomes a fast-talking music hall burlesque comic who gets all the funny lines again. The sketch further degenerates into a circus setting where the officer is a clown, dumping water on Idle, dropping a large fish down his trousers, upending a bucket of whitewash on him, and shoving a pie into his face, all the time telling him "It's your laugh, mate, not mine!"
 * I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here is mostly made of opportunities to do this to celebrities.
 * In the Frasier episode "Are you being served?" Niles is in the restroom when Martin's Hot&Foamy shaving lather heater explodes. He comes out covered from head to toe and says "I'm all right, just a little hot. And foamy."

Sports

 * A recent tradition in Major League Baseball is to give a shaving cream pie-in-the-face to someone who made a walk-off hit while they are being interviewed after the game.

Theatre

 * Traditional British pantomimes often feature a slosh scene at the end of the first act, in which two or more comic relief characters start a completely innocent activity such as baking a cake or putting up wallpaper, and inevitably end up covered in whatever messy stuff they're using.
 * Usles pantomimes, while done on shoestring budgets, still include slosh scenes, although water, talcum powder and shaving foam tend to be substituted for gunge, being both cheap and easy to clean up. Often leads to characters lampshading the inevitable mess with lines like, "Better put down this handy tarpaulin just to be on the safe side!"
 * Martin McDonagh is fond of getting messy: he's got raw eggs to the head in The Cripple Of Inishmaan, bone chips/dust in A Skull in Connemara, torture with hot oil in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and Gorn that drenches the innocent and not-so-innocent alike in The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It's like he does it just to torment the stage management team!

Video Games
"Cave Johnson: Oh, in case you get covered in that repulsion gel, here's some advice the lab boys gave me: do not get covered in the repulsion gel. We haven't entirely nailed down what element it is yet, but I'll tell you this: it's a lively one, and it does not like the human skeleton."
 * A powerup like this will appear in Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers.
 * An item called Sticky Juice in Water Warfare will fill your water gun up with, well, sticky juice, which will temporarily cover an enemy in yellow goo that slows them down (and changes your water's splashing animation and sound effects to huge, gloppy splats). The instruction manual calls this Standard Status Effect "soaked," but we know better.
 * This is your entire means of combat in the obscure platformer SP Ray: Spirited Prince Ray.
 * In PS 3 game ''Folklore there are certain enemies, such as Impets, that can immobilize the player this way.
 * Can you say Portal 2? Three varieties of colored gel involved in numerous puzzles... Unless a player is really careful, they're bound to get covered in the stuff at some point.
 * Which is something of a worry given this recorded announcement:

Webcomics

 * This is a Running Gag in Dominic Deegan, though it hasn't been seen as much as of late. Whenever Dejah, a living Slime, uses his "Slime Geyser" teleport spell, one of the teleported always, always, gets covered in slime. It's always, always Luna (and she always, always has an exasperated look on her face when it happens).
 * Ugghhh... Too many chocolates.
 * Lloyd and Radic from Murphy's Law get covered in Giant Spider innards.
 * You Shouldn't Do That In Comics. Written/"drawn" by a WAM fetishist, and inspired by "You Can't Do That on Television"

Web Original

 * Industrial Zone at FurAffinity is a fictional game show series featuring this in vast quantities. Experience the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing whether you're reading porn or not.
 * From The Onion: "Ex-Nickelodeon Stars Relate Horrors Of Green Slime Syndrome".

Western Animation

 * Almost every episode of World of Quest features the Prince being covered in something. Usually three or more times.
 * "Mmmm. Free goo."
 * Metalocalypse -- already upset at believing he's not getting the respect his bandmates get, Toki is slimed while getting a kids-choice award, turning him dark and angry, especially toward kids.
 * Robot Chicken had this as the end of the first season and opening of the second.
 * Dexter in Dexters Laboratory wound up repeatedly covered in mud, pies, whipped cream, etc. while competing against Dee Dee on a game show. Somehow his Nerd Glasses always remained clear so he could register his displeasure.
 * In an episode of Batman the Animated Series, Harley Quinn bakes a gigantic cream pie for the Joker...and lies in it waiting for him, presumably naked. Delicious.
 * Fanboy and Chum Chum characters are prone to this, but especially Fanboy. He has been sneezed on, covered with Frosty Freezy Freeze, gotten a Pie in The Face several times, been assaulted with eggs, had the school cafeteria food all over him and once his costume got so dirty it actually came to life.
 * In the Generator Rex episode "Breach", when Rex started destroying everything around him to cause Breach to create portals so that he could try to escape, all while Breach is throwing out the junk into different parts of the world, a portal appeared right over some Evo scorpions that Six and Bobo were fighting, dropping some junk and squishing the bugs. What came next was white goop (ice cream) covering both Six and Bobo. Bobo comments, "I'm not complaining."
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender:
 * In the first episode, Sokka is instantly established as the local Butt Monkey when he gets covered in flying bison snot.
 * Which closely resembles good ol' green slime (it is a Nickelodeon program, after all).
 * Tunnel boring machines often mix the excavated soil with water to ease removal. No prizes for guessing where two thirds of Ozai's Angels and three fourth of the Gaang end up at the end of the episode "The Drill."
 * ...Neither of which compare to what was waiting for in "The Firebending Masters."
 * In a Venture Bros episode where he tried to bring Hank and Dean back from the dead, resident wizard Dr. Orpheus ends up covered in ectoplasm.