The goo, roughly the consistency of an egg white, was being squirted repeatedly on the teen actor Jaime Lynn Spears’ face.

Spears was shooting an episode of Nickelodeon’s “Zoey 101” in which a costar accidentally sprays her with a yellowish-green liquid candy called a “goo pop.”

But Dan Schneider, the show’s meticulous creator, found problems with every take, Spears’ costar Alexa Nikolas recalled, making a crew member squirt the syringe of goo at Spears over and over again.

Then, in one take, the slime hit Spears squarely on her forehead, dripping down her face and mouth.

Schneider started laughing hysterically, Nikolas said. Others laughed as well, including Spears’ mother, who was on set at the time. Nikolas said she heard one of her male teenage castmates say, “It’s like a cum shot.”

That was the shot that made it into the show.

“We’re talking about a minor,” Nikolas said. “I think Jamie was 13, and they’re squirting stuff on her face to make it look a certain way.”

(Russell Hicks, Nickelodeon’s former president of content and production, said that a standards-and-practices group read every script for Schneider’s shows, that programming executives watched every episode, and that parents and caregivers were always on set. “Every single thing that Dan ever did on any of his shows was carefully scrutinized and approved,” Hicks wrote in a statement to Insider.)

(A person close to Schneider said that “the ‘goo’ was green, just like Nickelodeon’s famous slime,” adding: “This episode aired and was seen by millions of people and (to our knowledge) not one viewer ever had a concern.”)

At the time, around 2004, Schneider was on his way to becoming one of the most powerful people at Nickelodeon. Schneider joined the network in 1993 as a writer on “All That.” His first series, “The Amanda Show,” starring Amanda Bynes, established his brand of kid-friendly slapstick comedy. Subsequent hits like “Zoey 101,” “iCarly,” and “Victorious” helped turn Nickelodeon into a $10 billion-plus powerhouse, leading The New York Times to crown Schneider “the Norman Lear of children’s television.”

A heavyset former child star with a round face and rumpled button-downs, Schneider was obsessively hands-on as the creator, executive producer, and writer on his shows, according to his cast and crew. He maintained a constant presence on the set, chatting with teenage casts for hours after filming ended. Winning Schneider over could be a career-making move; he was known to craft bigger roles and even new series for his favorites.

“He was what every kid star wanted,” said Nikolas, who played Nicole Bristow on “Zoey 101.” “They wanted to be on his show.”

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 years ago

    Nikolas said she heard one of her male teenage castmates say, “It’s like a cum shot.”

    This kind of sexual based bullying took me back to a really shitty time growing up as a teenage girl. No one ever talks about how teenage girls are bullied by teenage boys in this way. IIt’s a really shitty kind of othering that makes girls grow up associating sex with being humiliated.

    This kind of teasing is what makes it hard for me as an adult to trust men when dating because I always imagine that when I’m not around they’re laughing with their friends about me behind my back.

    Fuck these pedo ass companies that allow this shit. Poor kid.

    • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 years ago

      Sexual based bullying is a good way to put it. I remember when i was 14-16, it was pretty common for the boys in the class to just smack the ass of most girls in the class if they walked by. Something i’m sort of proud of is the fact that I never joined in on the harassment, even if my reasoning for it was the most Incel-shit imaginable. For the record, i don’t think most grown adults do the whole “mocking your partner behind their back”, but obviously that depends quite heavily on the type of person you’re with. There might be a boomer-tier joke about “the wife only got to pick the color of the car” or “the husband only got to choose where the TV is located in the house” (both are jokes told to me by my coworkers within the past week)