- Joined
- Sep 26, 2019
I started typing this to post in the General Thread on General Discussion but this post turned out so long I figured I'd just make it a thread about game shows.
Welcome to the Game Show thread.
So last night I watched an episode of the new version of Double Dare. That's right, they revived Double Dare, the classic children's game show where people throw shit at each other and answer trivia questions. Last year they filmed a season and aired it with a whole new host, new obstacles, and everything pretty much followed the old formula but with some modern upgrades. The host, Liza Koshy, is pretty much whom you'd expect to host a modern Nickelodeon game show: a racially ambiguous spunky girl who comes off like a G-rated discount version of Nicki Minaj. She has some corny lines and comes off as a bit of an attention whore, but what do you expect from a YouTuber born in 1996 hosting a game show that first aired a whole decade before she was born? She's not particularly bad, she's not particularly great, I probably wouldn't have minded her as a kid, but she does come off as sort of "how do you do fellow kids" with how she acts. Marc Summers is on as the side announcer, he makes on-screen appearances and basically does Harvey's job, but Harvey's nowhere to be found.
If you don't remember, Harvey is this guy:
and here's a video of him from a few years ago:
I didn't see Robin, either, go figure.
Other than that, the show is pretty much Double Dare. The physical challenges and obstacles were appropriate, nothing cringeworthy to wedge the fact that it's a modern version like having the contestants dive into a giant cake that looks like a smartphone or something, and even the prizes surprised me. I was ready to make a drinking game out of how many prizes would use a smartphone in some way, and in the episode I watched, only one of them did - a Crosley turntable that has Bluetooth. The grand prize wasn't anything spectacular like a vacation or a car, it was a 3D Printer. Nice, but not exactly a vacation. Also one of the prizes was a 6-month subscription box thing to some kind of mechanical toy kit, because it wouldn't be the 2010s if one of the prizes wasn't some sort of subscription box.
The most surprising difference was how the contestants acted. If you haven't seen Double Dare in a long time, there are a few episodes up on YouTube and DailyMotion you can watch, and you can see just what the contestants were like. Earlier episodes were taped in (I think) Philadelphia, PA, and later in Orlando, FL. The ones I grew up with were the Family Double Dare ones taped in Orlando, FL, so the contestants were all nuclear families on vacation, most of them being from around the south. So you'd get a lot of down-to-earth contestants that didn't seem to care much about being on TV, and treated it like a fun activity to do on their trip. And just so you know, Double Dare = 2 kids per team; Family Double Dare = 2 kids, 2 parents; Double Dare 2018 = 1 kid, 1 parent (presumably so they could have black contestants, lmao).
But it's the future and every kid's dream is to be a YouTube star, and the parents are all 30-somethings who grew up watching Double Dare as kids, so the parents give off a "hoooooooooooly shit I can't believe I'm here, doing this" vibe and the kids are lively and wanna make everyone laugh. It's pretty cool to see, though doesn't have that sort of classic Americana feeling the old contestants had, if that makes sense. Hell, my favorite part of the new show was seeing the look on the mom contestant's face right before her obstacle course run. That look of her just taking it all in, not believing what's about to happen, and her kid just getting amped up, knowing it's his moment and he's about to fuckin' do it.
The team that lost had a guy who was dumb as shit, though. There was a question that went like "Whom's't has a cat named "Kitty Purry"?" and his answer was "Paula Abdul". Like, motherfucker, your dumb ass has heard of Katy Perry at least once. Paula Abdul has been irrelevant since the 90's. And even if you couldn't care less about pop culture, you couldn't have just extrapolated it out of the cat's name? Also he didn't know that "four score and seven years ago" was 87 years, because a score is 20 years, which made me wonder if they've asked how long a fortnight is and if the parents didn't know, but the kids nailed it.
So that's my thoughts on that. Family Double Dare's a pretty palatable show to watch even today, considering it's just a bunch of random people who aren't athletes or anything getting covered in all kinds of shit and answering random trivia questions. All things considered, it doesn't even seem like it'd be that expensive to produce, and there's a lot you could change about the formula your own thing. Why something like Double Dare isn't a perpetual staple of TV, I'll never know. They stopped producing new episodes of the old show in the early 90s, and other shows along its lines like Legends of the Hidden Temple were really popular, too. But the world just kinda went without anything like Double Dare after a while. Even the really good adult-oriented You Don't Know Jack TV show didn't last more than a few episodes:
But, we live in Clown World, and no fun is allowed in Clown World.
Well, fuck.
Anyway, talk about game shows.
Welcome to the Game Show thread.
So last night I watched an episode of the new version of Double Dare. That's right, they revived Double Dare, the classic children's game show where people throw shit at each other and answer trivia questions. Last year they filmed a season and aired it with a whole new host, new obstacles, and everything pretty much followed the old formula but with some modern upgrades. The host, Liza Koshy, is pretty much whom you'd expect to host a modern Nickelodeon game show: a racially ambiguous spunky girl who comes off like a G-rated discount version of Nicki Minaj. She has some corny lines and comes off as a bit of an attention whore, but what do you expect from a YouTuber born in 1996 hosting a game show that first aired a whole decade before she was born? She's not particularly bad, she's not particularly great, I probably wouldn't have minded her as a kid, but she does come off as sort of "how do you do fellow kids" with how she acts. Marc Summers is on as the side announcer, he makes on-screen appearances and basically does Harvey's job, but Harvey's nowhere to be found.
If you don't remember, Harvey is this guy:
and here's a video of him from a few years ago:
I didn't see Robin, either, go figure.
Other than that, the show is pretty much Double Dare. The physical challenges and obstacles were appropriate, nothing cringeworthy to wedge the fact that it's a modern version like having the contestants dive into a giant cake that looks like a smartphone or something, and even the prizes surprised me. I was ready to make a drinking game out of how many prizes would use a smartphone in some way, and in the episode I watched, only one of them did - a Crosley turntable that has Bluetooth. The grand prize wasn't anything spectacular like a vacation or a car, it was a 3D Printer. Nice, but not exactly a vacation. Also one of the prizes was a 6-month subscription box thing to some kind of mechanical toy kit, because it wouldn't be the 2010s if one of the prizes wasn't some sort of subscription box.
The most surprising difference was how the contestants acted. If you haven't seen Double Dare in a long time, there are a few episodes up on YouTube and DailyMotion you can watch, and you can see just what the contestants were like. Earlier episodes were taped in (I think) Philadelphia, PA, and later in Orlando, FL. The ones I grew up with were the Family Double Dare ones taped in Orlando, FL, so the contestants were all nuclear families on vacation, most of them being from around the south. So you'd get a lot of down-to-earth contestants that didn't seem to care much about being on TV, and treated it like a fun activity to do on their trip. And just so you know, Double Dare = 2 kids per team; Family Double Dare = 2 kids, 2 parents; Double Dare 2018 = 1 kid, 1 parent (presumably so they could have black contestants, lmao).
But it's the future and every kid's dream is to be a YouTube star, and the parents are all 30-somethings who grew up watching Double Dare as kids, so the parents give off a "hoooooooooooly shit I can't believe I'm here, doing this" vibe and the kids are lively and wanna make everyone laugh. It's pretty cool to see, though doesn't have that sort of classic Americana feeling the old contestants had, if that makes sense. Hell, my favorite part of the new show was seeing the look on the mom contestant's face right before her obstacle course run. That look of her just taking it all in, not believing what's about to happen, and her kid just getting amped up, knowing it's his moment and he's about to fuckin' do it.
The team that lost had a guy who was dumb as shit, though. There was a question that went like "Whom's't has a cat named "Kitty Purry"?" and his answer was "Paula Abdul". Like, motherfucker, your dumb ass has heard of Katy Perry at least once. Paula Abdul has been irrelevant since the 90's. And even if you couldn't care less about pop culture, you couldn't have just extrapolated it out of the cat's name? Also he didn't know that "four score and seven years ago" was 87 years, because a score is 20 years, which made me wonder if they've asked how long a fortnight is and if the parents didn't know, but the kids nailed it.
So that's my thoughts on that. Family Double Dare's a pretty palatable show to watch even today, considering it's just a bunch of random people who aren't athletes or anything getting covered in all kinds of shit and answering random trivia questions. All things considered, it doesn't even seem like it'd be that expensive to produce, and there's a lot you could change about the formula your own thing. Why something like Double Dare isn't a perpetual staple of TV, I'll never know. They stopped producing new episodes of the old show in the early 90s, and other shows along its lines like Legends of the Hidden Temple were really popular, too. But the world just kinda went without anything like Double Dare after a while. Even the really good adult-oriented You Don't Know Jack TV show didn't last more than a few episodes:
But, we live in Clown World, and no fun is allowed in Clown World.
Wikipedia said:
Well, fuck.
Anyway, talk about game shows.
