Nickelodeon Gak
Mattel's stretchy, squishy neon compound that made a loud fart noise when you squished it back into its star-shaped container. Named after what the Double Dare crew called the show's on-set slime messes, Gak's genius was the noise—which was the entire point for most kids.
Mattel's 1992 collaboration with Nickelodeon produced Gak, a stretchy, neon compound named after the Double Dare crew's term for the on-set slime messes. The genius of Gak wasn't the toy itself but the packaging: a star-shaped 'splat' container that made a loud fart noise when you squished the Gak back in. For most kids, that noise was the entire point. Walmart reportedly moved over 160,000 units in three weeks at $3 each after launch, a phenomenon that spoke to the toy's appeal to a Nickelodeon-obsessed generation.
Variants piled up quickly: glow-in-the-dark Gak-in-the-Dark, color-shifting Solar Gak, scented Smell My Gak, and accessories like the Gak Vac and Gak Inflator. A foam-bead sibling called Floam arrived in 1994. The craze faded in the 2000s and Gak was discontinued in 2004, but it made its inevitable nostalgia-fueled comeback in the 2010s, with the fart noise just as funny as it ever was.
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