Nickelodeon pours it on

THE 20th anniversary of the Kids’ Choice Awards was, as advertised, an affair completely drenched in great green goo. Slime gurgled out of the walls and gushed out of the ground. “Surprised” celebrities were doused in it and one nutty stuntman even risked life and limb by bungee-jumping into a vat of it. How on earth will the franchise top itself next year? Well, the show will be 21, so maybe they’ll just start legally drinking the stuff.

The only thing that oozed out of the show more than the lime-colored slime was pure Hollywood hype juice: The Kids’ Choice Awards, staged Saturday at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, was one long and loud advertisement for the next film, album, tour or television show angling for America’s allowance money.

Justin Timberlake, the show’s host, did a smooth job balancing the dual goals of gross-out and movie grosses, even if it did lead to jarring monologues such as this: “Wait till you see the gazillion tons of slime we have here, but in the meantime, please welcome from the upcoming movie ‘Hairspray,’ Queen Latifah and Zac Efron!”

Pretty much everyone was introduced with a painfully indelicate movie promo -- the best might have been when Timberlake was “surprised” to see a celebrity wander out on stage and said with a gasp: “Hey, it’s Vince Vaughn, from the upcoming holiday movie ‘Fred Claus’!”

The people at Nickelodeon are the ones who brought the world SpongeBob SquarePants, and when it comes to squishy entertainment, they know exactly how to pull a belly laugh out of a 12-year-old. So the show included a massive burping contest, a slime-spewing elephant and, instead of boring envelopes, the names of the winners came encased in giant props such as a hot dog, a fortune cookie or, most memorably, a 4-foot, bulging booger extracted from an acne-covered nose the size of a tuba. Actress Hayden Panettiere of “Heroes” had the honor of picking that winner, a fate only her agent could have saved the cheerleader from.

Oh, and who won awards on Saturday? That doesn’t matter, no one really remembers. That’s not the point of the show. Branding is, by its nature, a forward-looking exercise.

Orlando Bloom, the square-jawed British actor, accepted the Kids’ Choice blimp-shaped trophy for best movie on behalf of the second “Pirates of the Caribbean” film, but he kept on message.

“I hope,” he shouted, “you like the third movie!”

The show doesn’t lend itself to deep inspection for cultural meaning, but that’s part of its charm. (Maybe the Oscars, now an annual exercise in over-inflation, should be the one handing out blimps or staging burping contests.) But for all the zany fun and the squeals of 10,000-plus kids in attendance, there was some pretty serious business underway if you looked closely.

Grammy-winning group Maroon 5, for instance, chose the show as the place to premiere its new single for the American television audience, and Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman flew in to pick up the award won by “Happy Feet.” The graceful actress climbed up the stage steps to be handed the trophy by Tobey Maguire, who happened to be grinning and dripping with green slime. She stopped, peeled off her designer jacket, then gave him a gooey hug. She said the Blimp award would travel back to Australia and sit on the mantel of “Happy Feet” director George Miller, who will put it “next to his Academy Award.... That shows you how important it is.” It wasn’t clear if this was a commentary on the Blimp or on the Oscar.

Maroon 5 wasn’t the only music act looking for a showcase moment. Gwen Stefani, who is relaunching her career after a brief hiatus to start a family, appeared on “American Idol” last week, and that, along with her performance Saturday on the KCAs, is part of her push to reestablish herself.

Her manager, Jim Guerinot, accompanied her to the Nickelodeon show and called her peppy duet with Akon a priority booking.

“I have wanted Gwen to do this for years. It’s one of the most important shows on the planet,” he said without a trace of irony.

The KCAs are increasingly important for the simple reason that the youngest fans of pop culture are the most fervent and this is an age of lean audience loyalty. Hollywood is finding it harder to coax adults to the theaters, and the nation’s album charts are a weekly reminder of what isn’t selling. Last year’s audience for the live broadcast of the KCAs was its biggest, at 6 million, and this year’s looked to be on track to top that. The Nickelodeon website also took in 40 million votes this year from fans, up sharply from 27 million in 2006.

Nickelodeon needed a big boost from the KCAs after watching the Disney Channel make a series of power moves into the center of youth pop culture over the last year. “High School Musical” not only became a flagship on television, it also stunned the music industry with a soundtrack that was the nation’s bestselling album of 2006. There was also “Hannah Montana” and “The Cheetah Girls,” which produced cross-marketing magic with brisk-selling CDs and a concert tour.

Nickelodeon is part of MTV Networks, and the group as a whole seems to be searching for its next-big-thing identity. One hope at the kids’ channel is “The Naked Brothers Band,” which began as an independent 2005 mockumentary but caught the eye of Nickelodeon and was launched as a series in February. The show is saucy (but not as saucy as its title suggests), which fits the ethos of Nickelodeon. The channel has always been the kid who talks back to his parents, and its shows often have a touch of snarky Eddie Haskell or trippy Tex Avery to them.

Polly Draper, director of “The Naked Brothers Band” and mother of its stars, Nate and Alex Wolff, said that edge made the channel the ideal home for the show. But without the recent success of the Disney franchises, she doubted that Nickelodeon would have taken the plunge.

“Disney would never have touched a show like ours, and I don’t think even Nickelodeon would have taken our show if those Disney successes hadn’t showed them the audience that there was for this,” Draper said. “That showed us our audience too, although we’re going to take it different places.”

Viewers of the Saturday awards show saw the Naked Brothers walk on stage with Hilary Duff and then present an award to the Black Eyed Peas, two acts that are virtually iconic if you live in America and still have a school locker. The bundling and co-branding wasn’t lost on Draper.

“Absolutely,” she said, “Nickelodeon is hoping for big things, and they’ve put a lot behind this.”

One thing Nickelodeon has on its side at this moment in pop culture is the explosion in man-boy stars and a renaissance of potty humor. There was a parade of it Saturday with Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller mugging for the audience on stage and flashing on the overhead screens in clips from their movies, many of them involving silly voices and testicular mayhem.

And then there’s always all that slime.

The slime will be back next year. Nickelodeon should try to get the game Timberlake back as well. The singer was raised in the Disney machine (he was on the 1990s version of “The Mickey Mouse Club”) and describes himself as a world-class fan of “The Muppets,” and all of that showed Saturday with his gentle but never condescending approach to the hosting gig. He can also belch like a sailor on Sprite, as he proved, before smiling and telling the tykes, “In your little faces.”

Oh, and did we mention he is one of the stars of the upcoming film “Shrek 3”?

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geoff.boucher@latimes.com