Do you remember the golden age of Nickelodeon? When you were a kid catching up on the slime station while running in and out of your house playing. Yeah, that was good stuff. And I thought to myself I thought "Evan, maybe it would be cool to talk about some of those shows" So here I go.
Double Dare - Yeah, you remember it. The game show where two teams would battle in both trivia and the infamous physical challenge for a chance to make it to the Double Dare obstacle course. Now for the life of me I couldn't understand why you would ever answer the questions during the trivia portion of the show. Dare, double dare, take the physical challenge! All hosted by Marc Summers before he produced everything on the Food network.
Oh and what spectacular challenges they were. Where else, as a child, would you learn the skill involved in shooting four pies into your partners pants or soaking a cookie shaped sponge in a "milk like substance" and wringing it out into a bucket on your partners head all within thirty seconds? Nowhere, that's where! Then, if you won all that it was on to the obstacle course.
Devilishly designed, the obstacle course was an eight obstacle combination of doom and dispair. You would have to run through all these obstacles with your partner (and in later incarnations your family which I can only assume led to divorces and family splits) and after each station had a flag you needed to grab. Some favorites in the course where the one ton human hamster wheel where you would have to run in....well, a really big hamster wheel, lighting up numbers and lowering an arm with the coveted flag and The Tank which was.....a really big tank filled with packing peanuts or ball pit balls or whatever I think they could steal from the garbage of the local Chuck E Cheese.
Yeah, Double Dare really blazed the trail for all the other game shows to follow.
Legends of the Hidden Temple - Red Jaguars, Blue Barracudas, Green Monkeys, Orange Iguanas, Purple Parrots and Silver Snakes. No, it's not the worst bowl of Lucky Charms ever, it's my favorite old school kids game show. Showing the reoccurring theme of education and physical activity, LotHT kept me entertained every week. I mean, between a temple of craziness and a talking Olmec head how could you go wrong?
The show always started of with the Moat which the teams had to traverse weather it was via inflatable raft or rope bridge. This process weeded out two teams. Then on to the Steps of Knowledge! Olmec, the giant talking head, would tell you some story about some weird ass object of historical importance like "Lawrence of Arabia's Headdress," "The Levitating Dog Leash of Nostradamus" or "The Adonis DNA of Charlie Sheen". Ok, so the last one was bunk, but the other two are real. Then you had to answer questions about the story. Again, two teams were removed.Then on to the Temple Games. A series of physical activities would ensue. Then the final team standing had proved themselves worthy of entering the hidden temple.
So now after all that you can go into the temple to try and find the artifact Olmec had told you about. Seems easy? NO! You had to go through the rooms but every room had a challenge. In the shrine of the silver monkey you had to re assemble the titular statue. Another room was the haunted forest room where you had to jam your hand into creepy trees looking for the switch to open the door of the room. All this and temple guards.
In the previous parts of the show you could win pendants of life. These were used to bribe the temple guards to leave you alone. The freakin temple guards would bust in on you in any room like they were the police, scare the crap out of you and if you didn't have a pendant of life drag you ass away to what I can only assume was a blacked out van.
Again this show really holds up for me having watched it recently.
GUTS - A few years ago me and some friends were hungover like champs and looking to do as little as possible. We all sat there and watched GUTS for three hours and would have watched it for twenty hours. What a fun show. Later on someone (Not me this time) did some Facebook stalking of one of the winners we watched. I'm not proud of that person but it happened, whatev.
GUTS, oddly hosted by Mike O'Malley, was almost like a children's version of American Gladiators. Three contestants would compete in a series of events, most utilizing the fantastic bungee harnesses Nick must have bought wholesale, in a mad dash to earn points. These points would determine the winner. But after all the regular events there was the monstrous mountain, the Aggro Crag.
The Aggro Crag was the grand finale to the game of GUTS. Each player had a identical side of the mountain to rush up, hitting actuators on the way up. The Crag would drop fake rocks on you, blast crazy confetti loads at you and force you to climb climb climb. The first to the top won and the winner of the whole shebang won what might be the greatest prize ever. A piece of the Aggro Crag.
Now if you have never looked on Ebay for a glowing piece of the radical rock, don't bother. I do on a regular basis and would be more than happy to miss a mortgage payment to own one of those things. There wasn't a kid I knew then or a late twenty something I know now who didn't want that thing. To hoist it high above your head and proclaim yourself champion.
Yeah, TV back then was awesome. Now I'm old and wondering what the hell a Fredburger is or why Charlie wants to go to candy mountain. SSSSIIIIIGGGGHHHH
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