When ‘Nick Takes Over Your School’ Let Kids Rule

During the last week of April 1995, Jennifer Lange, 13, woke up and got ready for classes at Pine Ridge Middle School in Naples, Florida. But the day was far from typical. For one thing, she had a make-up artist. For another, the school bus that picked her up promptly at 8:45 a.m. was full of familiar faces from Nickelodeon shows like Kenan & Kel, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and others.

“They took us to school, where everyone was outside with lime green shirts,” Lange tells Mental Floss. “I came off the bus with the orange Nickelodeon flag. I feel like the rest of the day was a whirlwind.”

Lange, a seventh grader, was chosen at random out of 100,000 entrants as the winner of Nick Takes Over Your School, a surreal contest in which a viewer’s school would be overrun for one day by the channel. There were celebrities, musical acts, Double Dare obstacle courses, faculty sliming, and other delirium, much of it immortalized in commercials advertising the event for the following year.

It's easy to understand why Lange and other kids would relish the opportunity to thumb their nose at authority. But why would any school agree to be part of a cable channel’s marketing push? Or get drenched in the brand’s signature green slime?

1. Cutting Class
2. Slime Time
3. Nicked

Cutting Class

Nickelodeon had emerged from the cable clutter of the 1980s, offering itself up as an irreverent alternative to conventional kid’s programming. Shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and You Can’t Do That on Television captured something few kid-TV line-ups understood: the insecurity of being young, which was exemplified in You Can’t Do That’s ritualistic punishment of pouring slime on top of the cast.

“When kids at home see kids on TV getting slime dumped on them, they go, ‘Oh, that’s just like me. I feel like I’m getting s**t on all the time,‘ ” Scott Webb, a Nick producer for on-air promotion from 1983 to 2000, tells Mental Floss. “ ‘I’ve got to listen to anybody who’s older than me. I don’t get to have my way. And life is tough. And now I’m seeing kids on TV. They’re dealing with the same s**t sandwich I’m dealing with.’ So there’s that part of slime.”

To treat that existential slime crisis, Nick promoted a kind of wish fulfillment. Contests like the Super Toy Run, which permitted winners to sprint through a Toys ’R Us and grab whatever they could in five minutes, was every kid’s dream. And so was the notion that a student might be able to show up to class one day and find their school overrun by their favorite television channel, making schoolwork all but impossible.

It was an easy enough premise to market. Actually doing it, however, was a logistical challenge. “This was well-prepped,” Alan Kaufman, a production manager for Nickelodeon who helped orchestrate several on-location events from 1988 to 2001, tells Mental Floss. “Parents knew that on the day that Nickelodeon was there, your kid is not going to be learning anything. They’re going to be playing in slime and getting gifts and, you know, going nuts.”

Once a winner was selected at random from entrants, Nick would begin negotiating with the school. The channel’s biggest bargaining chip was in donations. If a school agreed to the takeover, Nick would donate $5000 to $10,000 in audio and video equipment or other supplies. (At least one school, St. Athanasius in Louisville, received a $5000 check.) Getting the necessary permissions might take a month or so, at which point Kaufman would begin scouting the site. Touring sets from Nick shows like Double Dare would be transported via an 18-wheeler; VHS tapes of past events would be given to the school to set expectations; local camera and production crews would be hired to gather footage for the network to air at a later date.

“An area to stage the sliming was always a big deal,” Kaufman says. “Can we climb up on the roof of the school and dump the slime off the side? Do we go up on the ladder? Will they allow us to do it in the building? The custodians freak out if we make a mess. Some of it was silly, but some of it was like safety issues. The kids all in one place. The school bus is pulling up and the celebrities are coming off. Where would the local camera crews go? Who would get in the way? And you worried about the safety of small kids. You know, these were elementary schools, so there was always the element of, OK, are all these kids gonna be able to participate, enjoy it, understand what’s going on?”

While there was some variation over the years—a Double Dare obstacle course eventually morphed into one for another game show, Guts—the basic template of Nick Takes Over Your School was worked out well in advance. “Maybe one of the celebrities would go to the winner’s house,” Kaufman says. “We’d be shooting all this. They’d ring the doorbell. Marc Summers says, ‘hey, come on out, come on. It’s Nick Takes Over Your School.’ So we would document the school ride with all the celebrities on the bus with the winner. And then it would always be the big entrance. The bus is pulling up, and the excitement of the celebrities coming off and waving. It was like Oscar night, like on a Tuesday morning.”

From there, one of the Nick personalities—like Mr. Lippman (Mike Speller) from Welcome Freshmen—might get on the public address system and announce that a three-hour math test was scheduled, eliciting groans before Double Dare host Summers announced school was being canceled for the day. Don Herbert, also known as Mr. Wizard, might perform a science experiment; kids could go through an obstacle course or encounter a costumed character from an animated show like Rugrats or Doug.

To Kaufman’s recollection, some components were more popular than others: “I think Double Dare was the big deal. We had the traveling Double Dare obstacle course that went from city to city, shopping mall to shopping mall. And in those days, Double Dare was huge. The obstacle course was set up in the gym or out on the playground, and all the kids lined up for that.”

Less exciting? Anything that vaguely resembled learning. “I think my own personal recollection is maybe the science stuff wasn’t as enjoyable,” he says, “but Mr. Wizard came. Don Herbert at the time, you know, had the show, and I think the science experiments were less popular.”

By day’s end, the kids would congregate inside of the school auditorium for a musical act like New Kids on the Block or Britney Spears and then watch as the hapless faculty was marched toward a sliming platform.

Not all schools were amenable to the mayhem. At least one felt the need to post guards from the sheriff's office around the school to prevent non-students from crashing the event. Others were what Kaufman describes as a tougher audience. “I can tell you we worked at a girls’ Catholic school in Kentucky, and that was kind of a hard sell,” he says. “And there was a very dour principal in a school in Portland, Oregon.”

Most school boards, however, recognized the value in allowing Nick to subvert their lesson plans for the day. In addition to the equipment donation, it had a demonstrably positive effect on student morale. When Nick hit Pinecrest Elementary in Tampa in May 2001, the school noted that a typical day might have 30 to 35 absentee students. For Nick Takes Over Your School, only eight kids missed class.

Slime Time

Jennifer Lange was 13 when she and her family visited Universal Studios in Orlando. At the end of the tour, she dropped an entry form into a giant blue bin. Most entrants sent in a postcard. “The commercial said to mail in a postcard,” Lange recalls. “Well, we didn’t do that, even though I had to say it for the commercial.”

That was in fall 1994. A short time later, Lange’s mother got a phone call from Nickelodeon with some good news. Lange had won the contest, which also came with a $1000 cash prize. “Back then we had a house phone, and when they called, they told her I had won but they had to get permission from the school principal and all sorts of legal things,” she says. “They told her not to tell us until that had been all vetted out, but she told us anyway.”

Suddenly, Lange—who describes herself as having been shy at the time—was among the most popular kids in school. “I had a little group of friends. It got out and then you get very popular. People want to talk to you, in a good way. Everyone was very nice.”

When Lange was dropped off, she was greeted by peers wearing lime green Nickelodeon shirts. Because it had been raining, most activities were relegated indoors, which could only accommodate one full grade—Lange’s.

According to Lange, the day unfolded a little differently for the actual winner than the student body. “My story was a little different than the students,” she says. “The cast would come and interrupt class, and I’d be doing things in the cafeteria. I could come and go wherever. I didn’t need a hall pass. I could cut in line for the obstacle course.” Technically, school was supposed to be in session for half of the day, but little work actually got done.

Lange doesn’t recall interacting with any actors aside from the bus ride. “There was a show called Kenan & Kel, and they had Kenan [Thompson] there. Some of the cast went to the beach and got sunburned. I think little Pete [Danny Tamborelli] from The Adventures of Pete & Pete got sunburned. Marc Summers, I’m not sure if he was there. There was a little interaction with them on the bus, but that was the most I was with them. I was off doing things and mostly with family or the media.”

While the contest helped drive viewer engagement, it was also an opportunity to get plenty of free press exposure. Area newspapers would usually send reporters and news crews to the school, where Nick would encourage winners to do interviews. For a 1994 trip to Marley Middle School in Baltimore, Nick even beamed a live broadcast of the takeover to a room full of sponsors in New York.

Faculty would often be photographed as they were getting slimed, though not everyone was game. Lange doesn’t recall the school principal getting the treatment, though he oversaw the muck getting dumped on the vice-principal. (He did agree to mimic some hip-hop dance steps on stage.)

There was a musical performance by All 4 One (“I Swear,” “I Can Love You Like That”), which Lange found embarrassing. “They brought me on stage and sang to me. It’s strange looking back. All the guys were really old.” (Lange would have preferred Green Day, but says “the school probably shot it down.”)

Once everyone had left, Nick arranged for the grand finale: Making sure they had footage of Lange for the next promotional commercial. “At the very end, with everyone gone, they recorded some video and then slimed me with chunky cold oatmeal slime,” she says.

Nicked

Life largely went back to normal for Lange afterward. “People went back to doing their thing,” she says. “I was relieved and just hanging out with friends. I didn’t have to do the small talk thing. I recently moved back to my hometown, and when people find out, it’s funny. It’s a big deal to other people.”

Nick Takes Over Your School continued on through 2002, at which point it morphed into Nick Cannon (Wild ’n Out) making a personal appearance at the winning school. In 2007, Nick offered Nick Takes Over Your Class Trip, which sent a winning school to Orlando. A contest similar to the original, Nick Rocks Your School, with actors from iCarly and Big Time Rush, took place at a San Luis Obispo school in 2011.

As online culture matured and Nick’s programming block evolved, the need for contests declined. But there remains nostalgia for the idea of Nick gently challenging authority in an effort to empower kids.

“I think that the life of kids that we were talking to were in this in between stage from loving being a kid, because we also believe that being a kid is the greatest thing in the world ... but also that it’s tough, and kids are aspiring to understand this adult world,” Webb explains. “And so the other thing about slime was getting to do something you’re not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to get dirty, and I’m really getting dirty. And so in the ways that we talked about slime, it was never a punishment. You know, sliming the principal is not a punishment of the principal. He’s saying, ‘I’m like you. I’m a kid too, and this is great.’ So, you know, getting slimed is an honor, and it’s special, and we always treated it that way.”

Today, an event like Nick Takes Over Your School would be chronicled on Instagram or TikTok. Back then, it was largely restricted to local media. “There are YouTube videos now that I’ve found from like the 1996 Toy Run, and Nick Takes Over Your School that people post,” Kaufman says. ”But in those days, either you saw it on the news or saw it in the paper, and that was that. And you know, there’d be lots of pictures taken at the school, but a lot of the stuff I feel like is lost to history.”

Lange may not mind that so much. The only downside to the event, she says, was that “I forgot to take my retainer out for the newspaper pictures.”

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