June 27, 2022 • 54 mins
Jordan and Alex dive into Nickelodeon's ultimate test of physical and mental fitness. They'll explain how the classic millennial gameshow was produced on a shoestring budget, why the prizes were so lame, and how Olmec was made from old disco balls from Radio Shack. They'll also explore the rigorous auditions, why many contestants still have PTSD from doing the Temple Run, and why everyone sucked at assembling the Shrine of the Silver Monkey.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.
(00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret history and little known facts
behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We
are your masters of the minut show. My name is
Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Hegel, and today we're
gonna look back at the ultimate test of physical and
mental endurance for a generation of kids. I am talking,
(00:28):
of course, about Legends of the Hidden Temple, Nickelodeon's bull
attempt at blending Double Dare with Indiana Jones while exclusively
using items purchased from Party City. Yes, the set was cheap,
the stories were hokey, But I watched this show religiously
after school because it was a crucial reminder that no
matter how bad my day went in third grade, at
(00:50):
least I wasn't getting manhandled by a man in a
headdress or falling into lukewarm water on national television. Did
you watch this a lot growing up? This was like
a big thing for me. Did you harborand visions to
be on the show? No? I um mine was the
aggro crag one, Okay, I very I mean I was
also like belying my extremely sedentary lifestyle, lives mostly indoors,
(01:14):
almost exclusively indoors. At this point in my life. Um,
I was a really like backyard ninja kid. I was
just forty feet up in trees jumping off. So I like, well,
you're a black belt, I can imagine that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I was. Yeah, yeah, I would watch guts
and be like those puts is, how dare they? Why
(01:35):
were you guts over over the temple? I don't know.
I think it was it was the aggro crack, Yeah,
just more impressive. There was an a limpic element to it,
Like wasn't there the international global guts didn't they have?
Like I just wanted to beat a Frenchman. I just
wanted to beat a young French child m for the
(01:56):
honor of my country on the igro crack. I wanted
to break him on the wheel of pain. Continue. Yeah,
I mean I guess I you know, legends for me,
as you know, as you were out in the backyard
climbing trees. I was a wanna be historian, So maybe
the kind of Indiana Jones nature of legends kind of
has more of an appeal for me. Yeah. I mean,
(02:18):
also the other thing I think part of the appeal
of these Nickelodeon game shows just in general was that
it really was a chance to see kids truly just
like me, but more coordinated on television. You know, in
this era, kids are basically born knowing how to be
on camera thanks to iPhones, So it's kind of refreshing
to see clips where, you know, contestants are so insanely
(02:40):
on media trained. It was nice to like revisit some
of these clips. Yeah, it's really it is refreshing and
and um, you know, it taught many kids and very
important lessons. Don't trust giant stone heads. Yes, that is right.
Danger lurks around every corner anyway, from the possible, possibly
factual connection that the show has to the Sopranos, to
(03:01):
the man trapped inside the aforementioned stone head, to the
I refused to believe that this man's actual name is
Kirk Fogg, but to the host, Kirk Fogg, here is
everything you didn't know about Legends of the Hidden Temple.
(03:24):
Legends of the Hidden Temple was the brainchild of three gentlemen,
David G. Stanley, Scott A. Stone, and Stephen Brown, who
together formed the Stone Stanley production squad. And these guys
were fairly heavy hitters. Scott Stone and David G. Stanley
helped create The Mole, the Man Show, Love Line and
My Favorite Shop Till You Drop. But Stephen Brown has
(03:46):
something even more interesting on his resume. And I wasn't
able to confirm this. It's not on his IMDb page,
but it's on his Wikipedia page and various fans sites,
and I just want to share it because it's so
weird and interesting. Several sources cite him as having an
executive producer credit on several episodes in the final season
of The Sopranos. I choose to believe this because it's
(04:10):
so crazy and I so badly want to believe um.
But yeah, this trio of gentlemen planned to create a
show for kids that was essentially a blend of Jeopardy
and American Gladiators. Um. But as it was initially conceived,
it was going to be set in a haunted house,
and Scott Stone, one of the executive producers and creators
of Legends of Hin Temple, talked about this in an
(04:32):
interview with The A V Club. In this initial concept,
kids would work their way through this haunted house and
monsters would jump out at you as you attempted to
do the challenges. Um not unlike real life. And they
pitched this idea to Nickelodeon, who, in classic corporate speak,
basically said, we love it. Just changed everything about it,
Just change supremise and it'll be great. Uh. They really
(04:54):
weren't happy with the monster's element. They didn't like the
whole haunted house thing. So Stone Stanley Productions went back
to the drawing board and they ultimately hit upon the
idea of the jungle. And as Scott Stone told the
A V. Club, the jungle was a perfect idea because
it's still scary place. And then we stumbled on the
idea of this temple where all these interesting things come together,
(05:15):
which I don't know. It's weird to me that Nickelodeon
didn't like monsters, because a few years later they would
green light a show called Real Monsters. Um, not to
mention like, are you very the Dark? I think was
around this era, so I don't know. Maybe they thought
they were going to morrow scary stuff. Goose Bumps were huge. Man,
we should have we missed our boat. Should have pitched
a children's competition show based in the world of goose
(05:36):
bumps werewolves and or event for like with dummies. Nope, nope,
that thing. I was not allowed to have avenge for
like a stummy in my house as a kid. My
parents were like that. Yeah, no Ah, slappy Man, Nightmare
fuel God second only the fern Collie for me, so funny.
All right, I'm piecing together the Jordan fear Quilt. The
(06:01):
producers behind Legends of Hinden Temple have this theory about
game shows. They say that they're all story driven, or
at least the good ones are. Scott Stone has said
that every competition from professional sports to wheel Fortune has
a narrative element or a story and they created Legends
of the Hidden Temple specifically to be story driven rather
than game driven, and in the aforementioned Davy Club interview,
(06:23):
he said it was designed to be the anti Double Dare,
if you will. Double Dare was about individual games that
were sloppy and funny and funny, and this was designed
to have a story arc and characters and no sloppiness,
no sloppiness, and that's where you get the legends that
give each episode the title and story arc through line.
(06:43):
And these legends usually drew on historical figure and an
object of some kind, usually a fictitious one. There was
Harriet Tubbins walking stick, or the pig of Amelia Earhart,
or the yellow snakeskin boots of Billy the Kid, or
my favorite, the giant nose ring of Babe, the big
blue ox, Paul Bunyan's pet. Actually, no, my favorite is
the golden pepperoni of Catherine de Medici. That's also a
(07:06):
very good one. So they're all these, you know, kind
of goofy historical items. So obviously these things are all
pretty goofy, and Stone says that they drew on the
fractured fairy tales segment from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons
sort of inspirations for these legends. Uh. To be honest,
I have no memory of any of these so called
legends having any educational value whatsoever, And the clips that
(07:29):
I watched on YouTube recently backed this up. Total fictitious,
fantasy garbage, goofy nous. But Stone claims that the show
was supposed to double as a covert history lesson that
made learning fun and an interview around the show's launched
David Stanley, another one of the show's co creators, is
quoted as saying, we call it edutainment. You're gonna work
on you have to work on that word. We just
(07:51):
reached into the history of legendary people so that we
could base the show in fact and combined it with
games and stunts that were fun to watch and felt
the kids responded well to being told a story, and
they said that this was just an experience that all
kids had through high school. There's always someone standing in
front of him telling them a story, being a teacher,
a parent, a relative. So in this case, the person
(08:14):
telling that story would be a giant stone face answer
olmec Enter pursued by a bear, I say, I don't know.
I mean, I feel like it's a pretty limited grasp
on child psychology. If I think the kids respawn well
to have an adult stand in front of being lecture
right exactly, I think, what was your favorite part of
your youth being lectured? Lectured to? Television examples TeV executives,
(08:40):
ladies and gentleman um Yes, oh Mack. Surprisingly, given his
intimidating appearance, Oh Mac was put together on a shoe
string erase your head style David Lynch style. So Olmec's
name is a reference to the Olmecs civilization, which predates
the Mayan's. The Old Mac on the set of Legends
was not made of stone, as I'm not made of stone. Um.
(09:07):
One former contestant, a woman named Nicole, described it in
an interview with Cracked dot Com as quote, this moving
rubber thing that if you were close enough you could
hear the parts inside. This was because, as Scott stone
Lighter admitted, they didn't have any money. The whole show
was really cheap. He said, everybody that was in that
show had multiple jobs. My cousin, Jed Clampitt was the
(09:31):
writer and he was also one of the temple guards,
so there was no money. They assembled oh Mac's giant
rubber head, but quickly realized it was lacking what the
French call a certain I don't know what, uh specifically,
it looked dead behind the eyes, which can relate uh quote.
(09:52):
It wasn't looking good. It wasn't coming alive. So they
figured that lighting the eyes would be helpful. And um,
they wanted them to kind of flicker as he spoke,
but nobody could figure out how to do that, which
Jesus Christ, I feel like the stoners in my high
school shop class could be like I've seen more impressive
haunted houses in central Pennsylvania. You could figure out how
to make that work anyway. Co creator producer David Stanley
(10:16):
went to radio Shack to buy voice activated disco balls
that would flash in time to the music. Then they
gutted it, busted out a soldering iron, and connected it
to al Mac's eyeballs so that when he spoke into
the microphone, it flashed with his voice. But like a
David Cronenberg movie, Ole Mac was a hideous mixture of
(10:36):
the mechanical and the biological. Inside that giant six ft head,
there was an actual human being with a script and
a microphone and a series of levers or just one actually,
of course, not a series. They couldn't afford a series
one two by four lever that he would move the
bottom lip of this thing in time to his speech.
(10:57):
That gentleman's name was d Idlely Baker, who voiceover nerds
will recognize as potentially being the most prolific voice actor
in the world. They have his number of characters as
seventeen hundred and eighty four as of so potentially is
higher than that, and this is even greater than mel
(11:20):
Blank who's Looney Tunes icon who had done one thousand one.
He's like the voice artist guy. I mean he did
Bugs Bonney, he did everybody Dee. Bradley Baker has done SpongeBob,
Phineas and ferb American Dad, and has the distinction of
voicing a parrot on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride
(11:41):
at Disneyland. So there you go. But he liked the gig.
He had a fun time on Legends, he said he
when he didn't have anything to do, he would just
hang out in the head and read a book, which
cozy I guess uh, and he got a front row
seat when the kids were doing the stunts. He also
used to love to rib the stage crew whenever something
(12:03):
technical went wrong, because he would then laugh at them
inside of this giant head, which probably caused some nightmares.
The sight of a giant stonehead laughing at your misfortune
is pretty terrifying. I mean, as we get too later.
These shoots were between twelve and eighteen hours long each day,
so yeah, it's probably a good thing that he brought
a book, setting the tone for the relatively fly by
(12:25):
night nature of this production. Again went to Radio Shack
Cannibalize and disco balls for All mac. The producers chose
their host more or less at random, opting for the
less than thorough practice of thumbing through a head shot catalog,
and they liked the look of a guy named Kirk Fogg,
who I suspect was chosen at least for his evocative name.
(12:49):
I mean, it's set in the jungle, all that dry ice,
Kirk Fog, come on, what an incredible name. He was
asked to audition where he read some play by play
from a teleprompter, and then we never hosted any thing
in his life. He got the gig, and he seems
like a lovely guy who got super invested in the kids,
as evidenced by his frantic and frequently incoherent coaching from
(13:11):
the sidelines as kids were running through the temple at
the end of the game. Turn left, turn night, Oh
turn it. Yeah. It was very sweet, and he said
an interview with BuzzFeed, we didn't go through that whole
day of shooting for them. They got stuck doing something.
Those rooms were super hard and there were a lot
of technical things to do in there, so I would
have to scream, like turn the wheel to the left,
to the left put the base on the other way.
(13:32):
Very sweet, and he tells the story of this one
little girl who, to use his words, did not seem
like she had the capabilities of making it through the temple,
but ultimately she did. She made it, and she started
to cry after she completed it out of just happiness
and pride. And then Kirk started to cry because it
was just, you know, so unexpected. What a guy, And
all the interviews that I've had with him, he seems
(13:53):
very very sweet. Um. As a point of fact, he
says that his favorite team was the Silver Snake because quote,
they're very down and dirty, very blue collar. A lot
of the interview gives he's pretty dry, so he could
just be being sarcastic and facetious here. Yeah, Kirk Fogg,
good dude. Years later, he got a letter from a
(14:14):
fan asking him to sign a picture of himself so
that an engaged couple could auction it off at their
wedding shower to raise money for their honeymoon. I love that.
I just think that's you don't see, yeah, Kirk, I
mean it's fine. I was I thought it was going
to be for something a little bit more like children,
like a make a wish thing or something, and now
(14:35):
it's like Disney adults like need money for their whatever.
That's fine, it's fine, it's all fine. Kirk Fogg, He's
truly the kids game show host of the people. We're
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.
(15:00):
So the show has its host, they have its premise,
they have its giant talking stone head. Now they need
some contestants. This brings us to the auditions for Legends
of the Hidden Temple, A test of the mind, a
test in the body, and a test of Nickelodeon Trivia.
The auditions for this really kind of sound like they
were pretty rigorous. One former contestant told The Orlando Sentinel
(15:23):
back that she had to take a written test, run,
climb a rope, and do pull ups during the triout,
which Lord, which means that I would have failed both
then and now. But in recent years the kind of
more cutthroat nature of these auditions was made clear, and
a former contestants interview with Cracked that we mentioned earlier,
this woman the coal She said that kids froze while
(15:45):
climbing the rope, only to be shouted at by producers.
You stay up there on you're out, And they apparently
weren't kidding. Um, These poor kids just terrified at the
top of these ropes. They were also asked trivia questions
about Nickelodeon and and I guess one of these questions
was about Ren and Stimpy, and some kid apparently said
Ren's the cat right And as soon as he said that,
(16:08):
a Nickelodeon producer put his hand on this kid's shoulder
and just escorted him out of the line. Gone, said
the former contestant. Like just like that, Um, she like
in the process to a jury selection, she said that
really hyper kids were taken out of consideration, crabby kids
were gone, and kids who didn't know nick were also gone.
(16:28):
Those are her words. Each team was paired with two kids,
a boy and a girl between the ages of eleven
and fifteen, and according to a former contestant named Anthony,
the two person teams were usually the result of kids
being herded into a staging area impaired together at random
by a production assistant, and so the whole getting to
know your period was limited in just a few minutes
while they got into their gear and headed to the Moat,
(16:50):
and it seems like more often than not, these teammates
did not get along. Reading all of the interviews I
could find with former contestants, the word idiot peers with
alarming frequency. Uh. Usually this was a result of blowing
the trivia portion of the game. On the Steps of Knowledge,
we'll get through all the different parts of the game
in a minute. One X contestant is quoted as saying
(17:13):
and cracked my partner was an idiot. He didn't tell
who Manta Zuma was, despite the talking head explaining that
and a producer telling us before we went on. Seriously,
I've been divorced once now, and I'm more angry about
my partner messing that up in it's a tremendous quote.
All right, So before we get any further into the Temple,
(17:34):
onto the Temple, into the legends of into the legends. Yes,
then we should talk about the gameplay. Let's talk about
the specifics a little refresher because it was twenty five
years from me. It took me a minute to remember
all this stuff. So it's been divided divided into four sections,
the Moat, Steps of Knowledge, the Temple Games, and finally
the Temple run where stranger danger, what happened to you?
(17:57):
Man would jump out of nowhere? In Temple guards, Damn
temple Guards. We'll talk more about that later. The moat.
The moat requires players to cross a shallow pool of
lukewarm water obscured with dry ice um, which harder than
did you really not watch this at all? Is this
to remember what it was? I remember vaguely what it was.
(18:18):
I don't remember having the option of things to bridge
that though, well every time every episode was different. Sometimes
you need to get across the moat via raft. Sometimes
you have to swing across on a rope. Sometimes there
were these a little bridges. So is whatever the producers
felt like that day? Anna find torturing kids? I think
in my mind this is all just blending with the many,
(18:39):
many more episodes of Most Extreme Elimination Challenge that I watched. Anyway,
the first of four six teams to ring their gong
progresses to the next round, and then the other teams
who don't are sent home with a consolation prize, which
garbage Hershey's chocolate syrup, Nestlee's Quick l a Looks hair gel,
(19:01):
star Kissed Tuna Nerds, candy, Miriam Webster's Dictionary or fifty
dollars savings bond, all of which sounds like you would
find out in a cardboard box around the end of
the marked free. Yes, I imagine competing on a game
show and getting a can of star kissed tuna as
your price. I mean again, not to look a gift
(19:23):
horse in the mouth, but might hocket at the producers
before and left. You kidding me? Give me a can
of tuna? Fish? Do these people? Here's the here's my alternate.
The kids are Yeah, I was gonna say they hated children.
They were trying to create a game show. It would
punish every child that they came across. Oh man, just
(19:43):
throw this can at the producer's lexis in the parking Yeah, exactly, alright,
So make it across the moat gets to the steps
of knowledge. You get at all. Mac would tell the
story of that episode's legend. Are har It's like a
pig Katherine d Medici's pepperoni. Katherine the greats Harness. You
(20:06):
get that one too, Okay, google that you folks will
get that one in your car ride home. Um. When
it was done, the teams would be quizzed about the
info that they were given. The retention was not challenging,
although I don't know if you're six years old and
you're spazzing out for being on your favorite network, I
probably wouldn't remember, and so to hedge their bets, the
(20:28):
producers made the questions multiple choice. You answer the question correctly,
you go down the step. First two teams to get
to the bottom would progress, while the others get slightly
better constellation prizes like Duncan yo Yo's. I would have
been jacked. Duncan Yoyo. Were you an imperial or a
butterfly man? Butterfly all the way? Yeah, copies of Honey
(20:49):
we shrunk ourselves on VHS, which I would still take honestly,
or say, say a Genesis Games, which I would also take. Man,
Hell yeah, it turns out all you need to do
is get to the steps of knowledge and then you
start getting the good stuff. Next up we have the
Temple Games. These are a series of three one minute
challenges in which teams compete for the ominously named pendance
(21:10):
of life, which is not the thing that Grandma clicks
in a desperate attempt to reprove another day. The first
two games were worth half a pendant the second was
worth a full pendant. Teams with the most pendants would
progress to the Temple. Prizes include NBA Jam for Genesis,
(21:31):
we should do NBA Jam, Hush Puppies, moon Shoes, bk
Ratch check Ye our Matron, Looney Tunes, watches in Laguna
sports where holy sh I forgot about b k ratchtech
till just now. I Oh my god, I had a
pair of those. I feel like, Oh man, I think
(21:52):
I got kicked out of class a couple of times
for just for ratcheting them, you know, too aggressively. I
was just too extreme. Lastly, the temple run. Everybody remembers this. Yeah,
more on this to come. We'll talk about the obstacle
course in a bit, but first, you know, we have
to get through the actual obstacle course, the behind the
scenes obstacle course. Yes. Like most game shows, Legends taped
(22:16):
multiple episodes a day, sometimes as many as six because
it was the most economical way to do it. Most
of the production crew was based out of Los Angeles.
The show was taped on Orlando, so they had a
limited amount of time to record episodes for the show.
They basically turned this into an assembly line, cranking out
the first season of forty episodes in just ten days,
which is yeah. But the production got off to a
(22:40):
rough start on day one, which turned into an eighteen
hour torture test for these kids. Um, and a lot
of that was due to the first day kinks. And
the big issue was at the record of the show
section by section so that they wouldn't have to keep
resetting up the shots for every episode they were shooting.
So they did all the moat crossings for all the
episodes they were shooting that day at once, then all
(23:01):
the Steps of Knowledge segments, all of the Temple game segments,
and finally, at the very end of the day, when
as Kurt Fogg told BuzzFeed, the kids were quote properly
delirious and loaded down with complimentary pizza, they would tackle
the temple runs, and Kirk would say the kids were
so wiped that they were crying. They were weeping because
(23:23):
it was like eleven o'clock at night and we were
running them through the temple. I do think that he's
being slightly hyperbolic, but I've also seen some sources say
that some tapings went on until one in the morning,
So um, I'd be very interested in reading whatever contract
the contestants signed in running it by a child labor lawyer,
because that sounds like a lot. Do you think they
(23:44):
circumvented by being a quote unquote competition and not like
a scripted thing? Because I know they're not allowed. You're
not allowed to have kids in like a scripted thing
for more than eight hours. Right, it's like in full hours.
They got the twins because you could have them on
and off and alternate. Yeah, no, I probably, Yeah, I'm sure. Um,
as one might expect on a set where the chief
(24:05):
special effect was something rigged up from a radio check
just go ball, many of the prop's malfunctioned bucket lifts
would be missing and doors would stick shut, and every
time this happened, the team would have to start the
Temple runs again. Um, this is interesting. The wheel from
the wheel Room was a leftover prop from Double Dare,
so eventually, yeah, how about that? Uh. They eventually worked
(24:28):
out most of the kinks, but even in later seasons
the experience of running the Temple is reportedly not pleasant
for most of these kids. We go back to our
friend Nicole, who spoke to crack dot com. She described
the Temple as quote a mix between a cheap haunted
house and a McDonald's play place. And she also complained
that the backside of the temple sets just were bare plywood.
(24:51):
She said, yeah, they didn't even bother painting the side
that wasn't on camera, Like, look, we know it wasn't
an actual temple or anything, but you think they put
out some kind of petile effort to make it less
sad for the contestants. She said, it's almost as if
they enjoyed disillusioning them. I don't know, I will say
that kind of seems like an unreasonable complain. Of course,
I'm not going to paint the back of a set,
(25:12):
but still I personally enjoyed this theory. Really have we
have going on where the kids just hated children created
the show to punish them. Nicole would go on to
say that the only thing worse than hanging out backstage
was actually entering the temple. She said, this is the quote.
The stage was like coming into a nightmare. It was darker,
(25:33):
smoke was there. You saw a kid after kid coming
in looking exhausted or crying or something else terrible, and
then you went in there was actually dread there. Cheap
effects are not it was a sense of foreboding. It
just because they kept playing Alan split score to erase
her head in the background's picturing something out of like Apocalypse. Now,
(25:56):
good lord, rats in here, Michael. Long time listeners of
the podcast will know that I consistently referenced the scene
from Deer Hunter, Uh, in which characters submerged in a
pow has submerged in a river in a wooden cage,
much like Legends of the Hidden Temple. And yeah, and
(26:17):
uh there were rats swarming on him, and so he shouts,
there's rats in here, Michael. And that was not in
the script. That was an actual thing that happened to him.
He was not talking to the character named Michael, but
to the film's director, Michael Simono, who would later go
on to blow up a horse. If I am remembering correctly,
he's the reason. He's the reason that there's the peta
thing in every movie right now, right from Keaven's Gate.
(26:41):
I'm not making that up. He blew up a horse,
all right, Cool, moving on, it's the vibe for this.
Adding to this weird feeling as you entered the temple
was the fact that the audience had usually gone home
by the time the Temple runs are recorded because it
was so it at night, the studio closed to guests. Jesus,
(27:04):
they just did this to an empty studio and children
crying and throwing up in an empty room so he
filling with dry fog, and a middle aged man yelling
at them from the sidelines. This is unimaginaively grim and
a giant rubber head laughing whenever a problem occurred. Yeah,
I mean, so there's the whole sense of foreboding. Yeah,
(27:25):
I get that. That makes sense. And I guess they
dubbed in like an audience track after for the Temple runs,
just to make it seem like it wasn't this, you know,
dead studio. So that's weird. I guess I should add,
for legal reasons that the show eventually got the shoot
day down to just twelve hours instead of eighteen. They
also had a nurse on set in case of emergencies.
(27:46):
Apparently no kids were ever seriously harmed, though a girl
did once vomit into the pit of despair who among us?
Though uh this delayed the shoot for a not insignificant
out of time. But these nurses were unable to do
anything for the emotional wounds inflicted by the Temple Guards.
(28:07):
Alex Oh tell us about the Temple Guards folks as
these children at the end of their ropes uh literal physical, metaphysical, metaphorical, emotional, spiritual, spiritual,
running through an empty TV studio in front of a
bunch of piste off teamsters stuffed with pizza, having seen
(28:29):
their peers sent home in tears with a can of
stark His Tuna. Suddenly, as you're running your way through
ap plywood maze in the dark, the scent of dry
eyes clogging your tiny nostrils, Strange men in pseudo Mayan
outfits burst out of random corners, attempting to seize your
(28:52):
hard earned pendance of life by force, which teaches children
an important lesson about the way that life actually works.
Stranger danger. They actually grabbed these kids, man, Yeah, I
had to like rewatch some of those clips to like
make sure that was right, because that was how I
remembered it. And good lord, yeah they grab them. Yeah,
of course these people were just lowly production assistance or
(29:15):
even shows writers. God, can you I mention being low
enough in the writer's room, totem Pole that they're like,
we ran out of p a s. You're in the headdress.
I went to screenwriting school. I can very much imagine that. Yes, yeah,
I guess sure you can. Um, but yeah, man, I
mean I don't know. Kids have their breaking point and
after hours of this nonsense running through this terrifying set,
(29:38):
as unforgiving cameras capture their every move before millions of
members of the viewing public, these temple guards understandably push
many of these kids over the edge. So according to
one of the many Nickelodeon fan sites that are around
the internet, they crunched the numbers on this stuff, like
the wind loss ratio of the different teams of contestants
on the show. Cried after here being scared by a
(30:01):
temple guard anecdotally seems to scan haven't gone through all
the tapes yet. We've got Jamie working on it. Um,
we'll get back to you. And again anecdotal evidence backs
this up. A lot of the former contestants talk about
it as something that has stuck with them to this
very day. One woman named Keeley told sp nation dot Com,
(30:22):
in the sight of a temple guard reduced her to tears,
saying they are the scariest thing imaginable. Nothing is scarier
and I will stand by that statement until the day
I die. I'm thirty one and I can't go to
haunted houses. I'm definitely afraid of things popping out of
closets and doors. Another ex contestant says she wrote a
(30:42):
paper for her high school English class about the scariest
things she ever saw, and she revisited her temple guard experience.
Yet another ex contestants said, those guardians picked up at
least a few kids lives. I know that for a fact,
but not every child lapse in the face of unimaginable whore.
Didn't go down without a fight. They went down. They
(31:05):
did not go gentle into that good night, as some
of these kids fought back, literally elbowing the men in
the crotch. Um. Good for that, uh. And Kirk Fogg
legendary television host Kirk Fogg, I just want to keep
saying his name. Give myself different reasons to say that. Uh.
In his BuzzFeed interview, he sympathized with the kids. He said,
(31:25):
come on, you are completely invested in going through that temple.
So just think about when you're going through a temple, Okay,
I will. You're trying to get something together and you
don't know where you're going next, and suddenly this costumed
man temple guard comes out and scares you. Ah. He
added in that interview, he's been trying to get all
the ex temple guards together for dinner, which is kind
(31:47):
of adorable. Uh, but that's just like a bunch of
middle aged men ribbing each other. Like I remember when
we made Keiley cry. Uh, if you were legends of
the Hidden Temple Guard or p A or Kirk Fogg,
please reach out to us and we will I don't know,
run a correction, send you a can of star kiss,
We'll do something. So contestants had three minutes to complete
(32:09):
the Temple run without getting stopped by these temple guards.
And during the series there were fifteen different temple layouts
and almost fifty different rooms. But for all these fifty rooms,
the most notorious room was the Shrine of the Silver Monkey,
which was notable because no one could ever get it right.
One of the first viral Facebook groups I remember was
I hate it when kids suck at assembling the Shine
(32:31):
of the Silver Monkey. Remember that, I do remember that.
That's one of the few things I remember about this
show is watching children butter fingers. This Monkey. Yeah, I
mean it was infuriating. There's three parts, a base, a middle,
ahead you put it together. For some reason, the kids
would always screw it up. Watching from home, you will
wonder why. What was the problem, But as with most
(32:53):
things on the show, it was deceptively difficult. As usual,
our beloved host Kirk Fogg has these kids back. He said,
do you know how tired you are by the time
you get to the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. You're
completely out of gas. You get there to this room,
the lighting is a little bit funky, and you have
to find the three pieces. Okay, that's true. I forgot
you have to actually find the three pieces of the
puzzle first. So you're stressed. The clock is ticking. You
(33:16):
never know when the temple guards are gonna pop out.
And I think the real problem was you're doing it
with the monkey facing away from you. And I think
that was the problem. Is a lot of kids didn't
know if it was supposed to be, you know, facing
you or away from you. And even Old Mac weighed
in about how hard it was to put together the
Shrine of the Silver Monkey. Speaking out of panel during
the New York Comic Con a few years back. D Bradley,
(33:37):
the voice of All Mac, explained that the middle piece
was the problem spot. He said, it could be upside
down and you couldn't tell that it was upside down.
Apparently it took a lot of force to ram the
head on too. That was like something that was Yeah,
so you might think it wasn't supposed to go in
and you really just had to give it a little
more elbow grease. So there you go. Mystery solved trying
a silver monkey. That's why a lot of kids screwed
(33:59):
it up. Our friend the Cole speaking the Cracked, who
so beautifully described the temple set as a combination of
a cheap haunted house and McDonald's play place. She also
had thoughts on the shrine of the silver Monkey. She
said it was even cheaper than you think, felt like
heavy compressed foam, and had silver bits that flaked off.
It just ruined it. It was all hard foam to
(34:20):
look like rocks and signs out of camera views saying
avoid the dry ice m because dry ice will like
burn your skin off, right if you can't touch it. Yeah,
I don't, I don't think breathing. I mean, I'm sure
breathing it's not the best thing you can do. But
I don't think that's like super toxic. But yeah, touching it,
I think it's like agent orange. As you meditate on that,
(34:44):
We'll be right back with more too much information after
these messages. So, the Shrine of the Silver Monkey was
obviously super hard, as was the Temple Run in general.
It was so hard that, according to TV Tropes, only
(35:05):
thirty two teams actually completed it out of the shows
a hundred and twenty episodes. That's a win rate of
twenty six point seven. Um. As a point of fact,
as you mentioned earlier, the Silver Snakes and the Green
Monkeys were tied for completing the Temple Run, doing so
eight times a piece. So barely over a quarter of
the teams rescued the artifact that they needed to retrieve.
(35:27):
Which one would you be, um, I mean red was
my favorite color, so probably the red jaguars, blue barracutas baby.
So barely over a quarter of teams rescued the artifact
that they needed to recover, which most surely belongs in
the museum. There. I'm glad I got that in this episode. Um.
So the logical assumption is maybe the producers should have
(35:48):
made the run easier. Well, I'll be please know there's
a conspiracy theory about that. Kirk Fogg or beloved Kirk
Fogg told great Big story in that the Temple runs
were designed to be hard from the start because the
producers only had the budget for eight grand prizes a
season and couldn't afford to have a lot of people win.
But on the other hand, we love Kirk Fog, but
(36:10):
sometimes he speaks in hyperbole. In interviews, producer Scott Stone
refutes the whole budgetary constraint thing uh speaking to the
A V Club, he basically threw the kids under the
bus and said it was their own damn fault for
not being able to do it. He says, what happened
was that kids would get in the temple and they're
so afraid of the temple guards coming out. Who's fall
(36:31):
is that that they're not thinking. We were standing on
the ground in front of the temple, which is just
an open wall, basically a fourth wall, yelling at them
how to do it. Go left, go right, go up,
go down, go push the wall because we wanted to
give the prizes away. He said, it was never that
we were trying to hit a number or we're trying
to save money. The prizes weren't that expensive. I don't know.
(36:52):
I think this explanation is a little self serving. I mean,
you know, they just hate children once again, right, it
gets back to them, hey children. The prizes, I mean,
compared to what the first Constellation prizes were Nestle's Quick
Tuna Fish and Tuna Fish, the grand prizes weren't bad.
These prizes included trips on Norwegian cruises, stays at Smugglers
(37:13):
Notch in Vermont, Cayman Islands, Tampa, and Space Camp is
probably the most famous one. Yea space Camp distinctly you go, oh, yeah,
you went right. Oh they lied about my age so
I could go. And I had never even like slept
over at a friend's house successfully to that point without
(37:34):
losing my mind. Uh, and so yeah, I was. It
was pretty hardcore. You were like in a barracks with
all these kids and they would wake you up at
five in the morning by switching all the lights on
and going wakey, wakey, eggs and baky yeah, like running laps.
It was very military. It was. It was intense. I
(37:54):
wish they had like hardly Ermie yelling and yelling at you.
I bet you could suck a golf ball all through
a garden nose. I get it was pretty savage. Yea,
it was not a nice experience. Um, but these prizes included, weirdly,
a trip to Universal Studios, Florida. And I say weirdly
because that's where the show was being filmed, so it's like, hey,
(38:17):
thanks for coming for a grand prize, you get to
come back. So anyway, But um, I guess all final
contestants got sneakers and uh, you know what, maybe you
know what that might be it? Um, and if you
lost the Temple run, you actually got pretty decent prizes
(38:37):
like a boom box or portable CD player, camera, remote
control car or this was the one I probably would
have opted for a set of microscopes. I might have
got remote control car to Actually, I don't know where
you want to throw this in. But on eBay right now,
there is a set piece from the Legends of the
Hidden Bible available for sale. Oh well, all met got
(38:58):
auctioned off, so we'll touch on up. But what is it.
It's one of the Golden Idols from the Room of
the Golden Idols. Yes, how much is it five th
dollars five grand local pickup only? All right, Well, folks,
for five grand, you too can own a piece of
the Hidden Temple or one of the shirts. I am
(39:20):
seeing some of these shirts that are out there because
the kids all got to take home their shirts, which
was just a lovely consolation prize. Can tune in a
T shirt, enjoy you the nightmares for the rest of
your life. Kids, except for the silver Snakes, which is
picked up. Well, now it makes sense because the shirts
that they were on the show were designed to show
up better on camera because they were silver. It's kind
(39:40):
of a weird color to show up. So they had
to keep those because they were they were custom made.
But they got facsimile, so that's nice. And you know
who else kept his shirt from the show. That would
be our beloved host Kirk Fog, who says that the
only prop that he kept from it is his iconic
denim shirt which he keeps on his top coat. Hangar
(40:02):
rack by itself in a plastic bag. It belongs at
a museum. It does that, truly? Does it belongs to
a museum? Uh? You know? Kirk banged out the first
season of Legends in ten days. When you think about
the amount of time that he actually spent filming on
(40:23):
this show for it to pass into legend and be
something he can dine out on the rest of his life.
You know, let's just assume that there were three seasons.
Let's just assume that they all were similar length of time.
This was a month of his life. Yea of his life,
and it's yeah, man, his IMDb is non extensive. I
think he's a real tour I just looked him up
on Facebook and among the non entertainment credits on his
(40:46):
Facebook page, he is involved in real estate in some way,
so you know, he's got the personality for it. I
respect that, but I guarantee you man, people are showing
up to those showings going Kirk and Fog, Yeah, not
realizing and showing up to look at a condo and
you know what he's shown by. You should swing in,
(41:08):
you know, you should do one time. That would take
his career, but tould be worth it. He has a
temple guard pop out of the linen closet. He's like
showing it to folks and they're like, yeah, and this
place is beautiful, light coming in the evenings. Oh yeah,
you should check out these linen calls. Just tries to
rip their necklaces off, he would get fired. That's why
he wants to get the old Temple Guard gang back
(41:30):
together for dinner. It's gonna punk people in l a
real estate. Um speaking of ridiculous bad ideas. The production
staff used to get drunk and do the Temple Run
by themselves after daping racked wrapped. It sounds like a
lawsuit waiting to happen, But truly, who among us? Now
the kids were gone? I would have done that in
(41:50):
a heartbeat. Um Fog said that after the shoots would wrap,
the production team would have a few drinks, run the
course themselves and bet on each other, which, once again
who among us? He also said that before each season
he would always try to do the Temple Run himself,
because if they can make it through the Temple, I
can make it through the Temple. It's good to have goals.
(42:14):
But did you ever say how what his best time was? No,
that I don't find that anywhere. Well, you have to
make it on the three minutes, so presumably I don't
know his best time was, though, Yeah, what do you
think you could do it in? Uh? I'm surprisingly fast.
I bet you I could get it in two thirty. Okay,
all right. I would probably get sidetracked by the garden.
(42:37):
I would try and fight the guard. That would disqualify me.
But nothing gold can stay. And so it was with
Legends of the Indian Temple. That is right. The show
premiered in September and its ratings were still going strong.
In Nickelodeon inexplicably canned it. They prefer to use the
classic executive nomenclature not renewed, but we all know what
(43:00):
that's code for. According to Kirk Fogg, host Kirk Fog,
and others associated with the program, this was pretty much
standard operating procedure for nick at the time because they'd
already filmed a hundred and twenty episodes and at that point,
the reason, hey, our target audience with children, they have
no attention span. We can just run it in syndication
under perpetuity was the minimum amount of shows that need
(43:22):
to be filmed for syndication. Isn't there like a goal
that I don't know, scripted shows have to hit one
hundred episodes is the traditional threshold for a television series
to enter syndicated. I am also seeing eight, which I
guess goes back to the era of twenty two episode
sitcom seasons with the notion that sitcoms start to suck
after the fourth season, which is pretty much a tried Yeah.
(43:45):
So yeah, twenty two episodes of season four seasons you
get eight eight. Ship it off to syndication. Anyway, So
they had a hundred and twenty, which is over every threshold. Uh,
and they figured, you know, screw it, let's uh stop
running up these high radio shack bills and paying Kirk
fog is outrageous salary, and uh, let's send it to syndication.
(44:07):
Close it. Yeah, not quite two years. Last one was
September one, which brings us to the ignominous end of
Senor Ol mac Yes. Uh, this is probably our most
extreme segment of it belongs in museum yet the sad
tale of all mac Uh in two thousand to the
iconic Nickelodeon Studios and Universal Studios theme park in Orlando
(44:31):
was on its last legs and it would close in
two thousand five. And this place was I mean it
should be turned into a museum. Really it was host
to Clarissa explains at all Nick Arcade, what would you
do Guts and I Assume Global Guts, Legends and Temple,
certain seasons of All That, Eureka's Castle, Gallagalla Island Figure
(44:54):
it Out, and the mystery files of Show We Woo.
So a lot of history in those walls. But the
game show trends started to decline in the mid nineties
following the surprise success of rug Rats and Reruns, so
the network doubled down on animated shows, and they diverted
resources from all the game shows they were making to
the animated studios back in l A. And then several
(45:15):
producers started requesting that shows like All That be moved
to l A so they wouldn't have to leave home
because all these producers for the most part, were based
in l A anyway, they didn't want to slept all
the way to Orlando whenever the show was shooting. Uh So,
then Nickelodeon opened the new live action studio on Sunset,
which became the home base for the majority of all
the non game show stuff. And this is a whole
(45:36):
other bigger topic that maybe we can tackle on another episode,
But by the early two thousand's, the studio in Orlando
was becoming redundant and to clear out space. Nickelodeon sold
off a number of props from their glory years, including
the old mac Head. And this is according to author
Matthew Klickstein, who wrote the incredible book Slimed and Oral
(45:57):
History of Nickelodeon. It's so good. A form Nickelodeon staffer
told Matthew Clickstein that the old my Head was up
for sale, and the staffer said, I wanted to buy it,
but my wife would have killed me, which makes sense
limited design options for a six ft tall film rubber head. Um.
A Pendantive Life medallion was sold at auction a few
(46:18):
years back for three hundred dollars, so not the five
thousand of that idol. But still and some still pop
up on eBay every now and then, and there's uh,
you sometimes get some t shirts that are alleged to
be original legends. Sure, although they're so many replicas out there.
It's hard to tell that Rugrats thing is so funny because,
I mean, we mentioned this, but like people forget that
(46:40):
Rugrats went away, um, and it was only because of
the success in syndication that it came back and became
the massive hit that it was. I mean, it became
a hidden syndication, and then Nickelodeon was like, oh, what
do we have on our hands here? Man. I remember
seeing that studio and just thinking it was like the
happiest place on earth, and then actually going to Orlando
and learning the truth. Did you go and take a
(47:03):
tour of it? No? I just went to Orlando when
I realized that anything good is there. So All Mac
has been sold off, our beloved Kirk Fogg is selling
real estate. It's a sad time for Legends of Hidden
Temple fans. But in the there was a resurgence, a
renaissance of sorts. There was the sixteen made for TV
movie inspired by the show, in which Kirk Fogg and
(47:25):
All Mac voice d Bradley Baker had a cameo. And
then in March time, when literally nothing else was going on,
such a peaceful, quiet time, um quick Castenberg Quimby put
out a casting call looking for adults to participate in
a quote supersized, reimagined versions of Legends of the Hidden Temple. Hi,
(47:48):
I go tell us about Quimby. Queeby Queeby? Is that Queeb? Yeah,
you may remember, or perhaps blissfully not. Queeby was what
the coastal elites like to call a new media venture.
They were vertically oriented videos. Queeby short for quick Bites,
lasted less than a year, led by menius guy in
(48:09):
Hollywood non actual rapist category, Jeffrey Catsenberg and a woman
named Meg Whitman. So they basically shot a bunch of
that was just supposed to look good on your phone,
and everything was going to be short, hence the quick
Bites thing. They invested billion dollars in this thing. So
Queeby a ignoble flop from your least favorite person in Hollywood,
(48:33):
Jeffrey Catsenberg. So obviously, when the platform went belly up,
many felt that The Legends of the Hidden Temple was
not gonna get it's reboot, but they were wrong, dead wrong. Ultimately,
the c W picked it up and it premiered in
October with Chrystella Alawance as the host, Dee Bradley Baker
(48:53):
reprising his voice is all Mac, and Kirk Fogg appeared
as a guest mentor in four episodes. And this new
version is fascinating me because I barely remember hearing a
thing about it. It was dubbed more Authentic by Entertainment
Weekly UM culturally at least. For example, all mechs earrings
(49:14):
were changed from round ones in the original to square
ones to better represent Mayan culture more authentically, and real
hieroglyphics were added to the temple run instead of random
design squiggles. Thanks progress. And this was with adults. So
this was supposed to be like heavy duty, serious obstacle course.
(49:35):
And they initially planned to shoot in a real jungle,
but ultimately they settled on an outdoor set twice the
size of the twenty three ft original set that I
would watch. Yeah, well, I mean you can it's out there. No,
no, no no, the jungle one. Oh yeah, absolutely, just like
someone's like running through their goofy, like you know, this
(49:56):
is for you, Karen, Like at home, they like point
up and and Jaguar stypo. They would add, they would
add some kind of horrifying like they're doing this to
pay for their mother's burial or something. They'd have to
add some kind of horrible American dystopia crowdfunding aspect to it,
and then just poisoned, darted and they're surviving. Loved ones
(50:18):
got a cantatuna from son Kiss. Oh so instead of
doing the jungle, they settle on an outdoor set twice
the size of the twenty three ft original set, because
being fet that sounds wrong, But it was supposed to
be significantly bigger than the original set, because their justification was,
it's got to match the memory you had as a kid.
(50:40):
You know, when you go back to places that you
knew when you were a kid, and they're so small.
They wanted this to be bigger for the adults and
bigger for the adults watching on screen too. The moat
was upgraded from a two ft bathtub, as producers call it,
to an eight foot deep course the size of half
a football field. The rooms in the Temple were also
(51:01):
significantly more adult. Case in point the Crypt of the Heartless,
And to describe it, I like to quote original Legends
of the Hidden Temple creators Scott Stone, who worked on
on this reboot, and he's speaking to my friend Patrick
Gomez from Entertainment Weekly last year. This is describing the
Crypt of the Heartless. There are three corpses and there's
(51:21):
a split in their chest. You reach in and looked
for the heart that's beating one of them. One of
these corpses still has a beating heart, and you rip
the heart out and you go and you put it
into this receptacle in the room, and it lights the
room up with the veins and arteries that are now
flowing with blood inside you. There are three corpses Jesus Scott,
(51:45):
so that would not have made it on Nickelodeon. But
I'm honestly unsure if anyone actually expected this whole thing
to work, this adult reboot of Legends of Hidden Temple
to work. The show was panned, with critics in Variety
and a number of other outlets saying that the real
Achilles heel was the fact that there were adults cast
as the contestants, and it basically turned it from a
(52:08):
quaint but lovable kids show to a watered down survivor
uh and that was really the problem. I don't know,
I didn't watch. I barely remember hearing of this. Ultimately,
it was canceled in June, just a couple of weeks ago,
and may it's memory serve as a reminder to TV
executives that not everything needs to be rebooted with a
gritty backstory. It does seem like they really pushed for
(52:32):
the like joke rification of Yeah, making Legends of the
hidden Temple. Oh boy, and that yeah, that just happened
just a couple of weeks ago. So I think we
are up. Yeah, and uh well, folks, I think the
temple guards are coming for us and we're being escorted
out of the studio right now because we are fresh
(52:53):
audependence of life. Uh. We hope you enjoyed yourselves. Please
rate the show five stars and will send you some
Nestlie's Quick or a tin of star Kiss tuna. Uh.
And if you write a five star review, we'll send
you a Duncan Imperial Yo yo or a hunchback of
Notre Dame VHS from Walt Disney Home Video. That does
not constitute a verbal and binding contract. Oh thanks for listening, everybody.
(53:17):
Until next time, I'm Jordan runt Talk and I'm Alex Hegel.
We'll see you next time. Too Much Information was a
production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are
Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is
Mike John's. The show was researched, written, and hosted by
(53:38):
Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by
Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like
what you heard, Please subscribe and leave us a review.
For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I
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Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio.
(00:08):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret history and little known facts
behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We
are your masters of the minut show. My name is
Jordan run Tug and I'm Alex Hegel, and today we're
gonna look back at the ultimate test of physical and
mental endurance for a generation of kids. I am talking,
(00:28):
of course, about Legends of the Hidden Temple, Nickelodeon's bull
attempt at blending Double Dare with Indiana Jones while exclusively
using items purchased from Party City. Yes, the set was cheap,
the stories were hokey, But I watched this show religiously
after school because it was a crucial reminder that no
matter how bad my day went in third grade, at
(00:50):
least I wasn't getting manhandled by a man in a
headdress or falling into lukewarm water on national television. Did
you watch this a lot growing up? This was like
a big thing for me. Did you harborand visions to
be on the show? No? I um mine was the
aggro crag one, Okay, I very I mean I was
also like belying my extremely sedentary lifestyle, lives mostly indoors,
(01:14):
almost exclusively indoors. At this point in my life. Um,
I was a really like backyard ninja kid. I was
just forty feet up in trees jumping off. So I like, well,
you're a black belt, I can imagine that. Yeah, yeah,
I mean I was. Yeah, yeah, I would watch guts
and be like those puts is, how dare they? Why
(01:35):
were you guts over over the temple? I don't know.
I think it was it was the aggro crack, Yeah,
just more impressive. There was an a limpic element to it,
Like wasn't there the international global guts didn't they have?
Like I just wanted to beat a Frenchman. I just
wanted to beat a young French child m for the
(01:56):
honor of my country on the igro crack. I wanted
to break him on the wheel of pain. Continue. Yeah,
I mean I guess I you know, legends for me,
as you know, as you were out in the backyard
climbing trees. I was a wanna be historian, So maybe
the kind of Indiana Jones nature of legends kind of
has more of an appeal for me. Yeah. I mean,
(02:18):
also the other thing I think part of the appeal
of these Nickelodeon game shows just in general was that
it really was a chance to see kids truly just
like me, but more coordinated on television. You know, in
this era, kids are basically born knowing how to be
on camera thanks to iPhones, So it's kind of refreshing
to see clips where, you know, contestants are so insanely
(02:40):
on media trained. It was nice to like revisit some
of these clips. Yeah, it's really it is refreshing and
and um, you know, it taught many kids and very
important lessons. Don't trust giant stone heads. Yes, that is right.
Danger lurks around every corner anyway, from the possible, possibly
factual connection that the show has to the Sopranos, to
(03:01):
the man trapped inside the aforementioned stone head, to the
I refused to believe that this man's actual name is
Kirk Fogg, but to the host, Kirk Fogg, here is
everything you didn't know about Legends of the Hidden Temple.
(03:24):
Legends of the Hidden Temple was the brainchild of three gentlemen,
David G. Stanley, Scott A. Stone, and Stephen Brown, who
together formed the Stone Stanley production squad. And these guys
were fairly heavy hitters. Scott Stone and David G. Stanley
helped create The Mole, the Man Show, Love Line and
My Favorite Shop Till You Drop. But Stephen Brown has
(03:46):
something even more interesting on his resume. And I wasn't
able to confirm this. It's not on his IMDb page,
but it's on his Wikipedia page and various fans sites,
and I just want to share it because it's so
weird and interesting. Several sources cite him as having an
executive producer credit on several episodes in the final season
of The Sopranos. I choose to believe this because it's
(04:10):
so crazy and I so badly want to believe um.
But yeah, this trio of gentlemen planned to create a
show for kids that was essentially a blend of Jeopardy
and American Gladiators. Um. But as it was initially conceived,
it was going to be set in a haunted house,
and Scott Stone, one of the executive producers and creators
of Legends of Hin Temple, talked about this in an
(04:32):
interview with The A V Club. In this initial concept,
kids would work their way through this haunted house and
monsters would jump out at you as you attempted to
do the challenges. Um not unlike real life. And they
pitched this idea to Nickelodeon, who, in classic corporate speak,
basically said, we love it. Just changed everything about it,
Just change supremise and it'll be great. Uh. They really
(04:54):
weren't happy with the monster's element. They didn't like the
whole haunted house thing. So Stone Stanley Productions went back
to the drawing board and they ultimately hit upon the
idea of the jungle. And as Scott Stone told the
A V. Club, the jungle was a perfect idea because
it's still scary place. And then we stumbled on the
idea of this temple where all these interesting things come together,
(05:15):
which I don't know. It's weird to me that Nickelodeon
didn't like monsters, because a few years later they would
green light a show called Real Monsters. Um, not to
mention like, are you very the Dark? I think was
around this era, so I don't know. Maybe they thought
they were going to morrow scary stuff. Goose Bumps were huge. Man,
we should have we missed our boat. Should have pitched
a children's competition show based in the world of goose
(05:36):
bumps werewolves and or event for like with dummies. Nope, nope,
that thing. I was not allowed to have avenge for
like a stummy in my house as a kid. My
parents were like that. Yeah, no Ah, slappy Man, Nightmare
fuel God second only the fern Collie for me, so funny.
All right, I'm piecing together the Jordan fear Quilt. The
(06:01):
producers behind Legends of Hinden Temple have this theory about
game shows. They say that they're all story driven, or
at least the good ones are. Scott Stone has said
that every competition from professional sports to wheel Fortune has
a narrative element or a story and they created Legends
of the Hidden Temple specifically to be story driven rather
than game driven, and in the aforementioned Davy Club interview,
(06:23):
he said it was designed to be the anti Double Dare,
if you will. Double Dare was about individual games that
were sloppy and funny and funny, and this was designed
to have a story arc and characters and no sloppiness,
no sloppiness, and that's where you get the legends that
give each episode the title and story arc through line.
(06:43):
And these legends usually drew on historical figure and an
object of some kind, usually a fictitious one. There was
Harriet Tubbins walking stick, or the pig of Amelia Earhart,
or the yellow snakeskin boots of Billy the Kid, or
my favorite, the giant nose ring of Babe, the big
blue ox, Paul Bunyan's pet. Actually, no, my favorite is
the golden pepperoni of Catherine de Medici. That's also a
(07:06):
very good one. So they're all these, you know, kind
of goofy historical items. So obviously these things are all
pretty goofy, and Stone says that they drew on the
fractured fairy tales segment from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons
sort of inspirations for these legends. Uh. To be honest,
I have no memory of any of these so called
legends having any educational value whatsoever, And the clips that
(07:29):
I watched on YouTube recently backed this up. Total fictitious,
fantasy garbage, goofy nous. But Stone claims that the show
was supposed to double as a covert history lesson that
made learning fun and an interview around the show's launched
David Stanley, another one of the show's co creators, is
quoted as saying, we call it edutainment. You're gonna work
on you have to work on that word. We just
(07:51):
reached into the history of legendary people so that we
could base the show in fact and combined it with
games and stunts that were fun to watch and felt
the kids responded well to being told a story, and
they said that this was just an experience that all
kids had through high school. There's always someone standing in
front of him telling them a story, being a teacher,
a parent, a relative. So in this case, the person
(08:14):
telling that story would be a giant stone face answer
olmec Enter pursued by a bear, I say, I don't know.
I mean, I feel like it's a pretty limited grasp
on child psychology. If I think the kids respawn well
to have an adult stand in front of being lecture
right exactly, I think, what was your favorite part of
your youth being lectured? Lectured to? Television examples TeV executives,
(08:40):
ladies and gentleman um Yes, oh Mack. Surprisingly, given his
intimidating appearance, Oh Mac was put together on a shoe
string erase your head style David Lynch style. So Olmec's
name is a reference to the Olmecs civilization, which predates
the Mayan's. The Old Mac on the set of Legends
was not made of stone, as I'm not made of stone. Um.
(09:07):
One former contestant, a woman named Nicole, described it in
an interview with Cracked dot Com as quote, this moving
rubber thing that if you were close enough you could
hear the parts inside. This was because, as Scott stone
Lighter admitted, they didn't have any money. The whole show
was really cheap. He said, everybody that was in that
show had multiple jobs. My cousin, Jed Clampitt was the
(09:31):
writer and he was also one of the temple guards,
so there was no money. They assembled oh Mac's giant
rubber head, but quickly realized it was lacking what the
French call a certain I don't know what, uh specifically,
it looked dead behind the eyes, which can relate uh quote.
(09:52):
It wasn't looking good. It wasn't coming alive. So they
figured that lighting the eyes would be helpful. And um,
they wanted them to kind of flicker as he spoke,
but nobody could figure out how to do that, which
Jesus Christ, I feel like the stoners in my high
school shop class could be like I've seen more impressive
haunted houses in central Pennsylvania. You could figure out how
to make that work anyway. Co creator producer David Stanley
(10:16):
went to radio Shack to buy voice activated disco balls
that would flash in time to the music. Then they
gutted it, busted out a soldering iron, and connected it
to al Mac's eyeballs so that when he spoke into
the microphone, it flashed with his voice. But like a
David Cronenberg movie, Ole Mac was a hideous mixture of
(10:36):
the mechanical and the biological. Inside that giant six ft head,
there was an actual human being with a script and
a microphone and a series of levers or just one actually,
of course, not a series. They couldn't afford a series
one two by four lever that he would move the
bottom lip of this thing in time to his speech.
(10:57):
That gentleman's name was d Idlely Baker, who voiceover nerds
will recognize as potentially being the most prolific voice actor
in the world. They have his number of characters as
seventeen hundred and eighty four as of so potentially is
higher than that, and this is even greater than mel
(11:20):
Blank who's Looney Tunes icon who had done one thousand one.
He's like the voice artist guy. I mean he did
Bugs Bonney, he did everybody Dee. Bradley Baker has done SpongeBob,
Phineas and ferb American Dad, and has the distinction of
voicing a parrot on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride
(11:41):
at Disneyland. So there you go. But he liked the gig.
He had a fun time on Legends, he said he
when he didn't have anything to do, he would just
hang out in the head and read a book, which
cozy I guess uh, and he got a front row
seat when the kids were doing the stunts. He also
used to love to rib the stage crew whenever something
(12:03):
technical went wrong, because he would then laugh at them
inside of this giant head, which probably caused some nightmares.
The sight of a giant stonehead laughing at your misfortune
is pretty terrifying. I mean, as we get too later.
These shoots were between twelve and eighteen hours long each day,
so yeah, it's probably a good thing that he brought
a book, setting the tone for the relatively fly by
(12:25):
night nature of this production. Again went to Radio Shack
Cannibalize and disco balls for All mac. The producers chose
their host more or less at random, opting for the
less than thorough practice of thumbing through a head shot catalog,
and they liked the look of a guy named Kirk Fogg,
who I suspect was chosen at least for his evocative name.
(12:49):
I mean, it's set in the jungle, all that dry ice,
Kirk Fog, come on, what an incredible name. He was
asked to audition where he read some play by play
from a teleprompter, and then we never hosted any thing
in his life. He got the gig, and he seems
like a lovely guy who got super invested in the kids,
as evidenced by his frantic and frequently incoherent coaching from
(13:11):
the sidelines as kids were running through the temple at
the end of the game. Turn left, turn night, Oh
turn it. Yeah. It was very sweet, and he said
an interview with BuzzFeed, we didn't go through that whole
day of shooting for them. They got stuck doing something.
Those rooms were super hard and there were a lot
of technical things to do in there, so I would
have to scream, like turn the wheel to the left,
to the left put the base on the other way.
(13:32):
Very sweet, and he tells the story of this one
little girl who, to use his words, did not seem
like she had the capabilities of making it through the temple,
but ultimately she did. She made it, and she started
to cry after she completed it out of just happiness
and pride. And then Kirk started to cry because it
was just, you know, so unexpected. What a guy, And
all the interviews that I've had with him, he seems
(13:53):
very very sweet. Um. As a point of fact, he
says that his favorite team was the Silver Snake because quote,
they're very down and dirty, very blue collar. A lot
of the interview gives he's pretty dry, so he could
just be being sarcastic and facetious here. Yeah, Kirk Fogg,
good dude. Years later, he got a letter from a
(14:14):
fan asking him to sign a picture of himself so
that an engaged couple could auction it off at their
wedding shower to raise money for their honeymoon. I love that.
I just think that's you don't see, yeah, Kirk, I
mean it's fine. I was I thought it was going
to be for something a little bit more like children,
like a make a wish thing or something, and now
(14:35):
it's like Disney adults like need money for their whatever.
That's fine, it's fine, it's all fine. Kirk Fogg, He's
truly the kids game show host of the people. We're
going to take a quick break, but we'll be right
back with more too much information in just a moment.
(15:00):
So the show has its host, they have its premise,
they have its giant talking stone head. Now they need
some contestants. This brings us to the auditions for Legends
of the Hidden Temple, A test of the mind, a
test in the body, and a test of Nickelodeon Trivia.
The auditions for this really kind of sound like they
were pretty rigorous. One former contestant told The Orlando Sentinel
(15:23):
back that she had to take a written test, run,
climb a rope, and do pull ups during the triout,
which Lord, which means that I would have failed both
then and now. But in recent years the kind of
more cutthroat nature of these auditions was made clear, and
a former contestants interview with Cracked that we mentioned earlier,
this woman the coal She said that kids froze while
(15:45):
climbing the rope, only to be shouted at by producers.
You stay up there on you're out, And they apparently
weren't kidding. Um, These poor kids just terrified at the
top of these ropes. They were also asked trivia questions
about Nickelodeon and and I guess one of these questions
was about Ren and Stimpy, and some kid apparently said
Ren's the cat right And as soon as he said that,
(16:08):
a Nickelodeon producer put his hand on this kid's shoulder
and just escorted him out of the line. Gone, said
the former contestant. Like just like that, Um, she like
in the process to a jury selection, she said that
really hyper kids were taken out of consideration, crabby kids
were gone, and kids who didn't know nick were also gone.
(16:28):
Those are her words. Each team was paired with two kids,
a boy and a girl between the ages of eleven
and fifteen, and according to a former contestant named Anthony,
the two person teams were usually the result of kids
being herded into a staging area impaired together at random
by a production assistant, and so the whole getting to
know your period was limited in just a few minutes
while they got into their gear and headed to the Moat,
(16:50):
and it seems like more often than not, these teammates
did not get along. Reading all of the interviews I
could find with former contestants, the word idiot peers with
alarming frequency. Uh. Usually this was a result of blowing
the trivia portion of the game. On the Steps of Knowledge,
we'll get through all the different parts of the game
in a minute. One X contestant is quoted as saying
(17:13):
and cracked my partner was an idiot. He didn't tell
who Manta Zuma was, despite the talking head explaining that
and a producer telling us before we went on. Seriously,
I've been divorced once now, and I'm more angry about
my partner messing that up in it's a tremendous quote.
All right, So before we get any further into the Temple,
(17:34):
onto the Temple, into the legends of into the legends. Yes,
then we should talk about the gameplay. Let's talk about
the specifics a little refresher because it was twenty five
years from me. It took me a minute to remember
all this stuff. So it's been divided divided into four sections,
the Moat, Steps of Knowledge, the Temple Games, and finally
the Temple run where stranger danger, what happened to you?
(17:57):
Man would jump out of nowhere? In Temple guards, Damn
temple Guards. We'll talk more about that later. The moat.
The moat requires players to cross a shallow pool of
lukewarm water obscured with dry ice um, which harder than
did you really not watch this at all? Is this
to remember what it was? I remember vaguely what it was.
(18:18):
I don't remember having the option of things to bridge
that though, well every time every episode was different. Sometimes
you need to get across the moat via raft. Sometimes
you have to swing across on a rope. Sometimes there
were these a little bridges. So is whatever the producers
felt like that day? Anna find torturing kids? I think
in my mind this is all just blending with the many,
(18:39):
many more episodes of Most Extreme Elimination Challenge that I watched. Anyway,
the first of four six teams to ring their gong
progresses to the next round, and then the other teams
who don't are sent home with a consolation prize, which
garbage Hershey's chocolate syrup, Nestlee's Quick l a Looks hair gel,
(19:01):
star Kissed Tuna Nerds, candy, Miriam Webster's Dictionary or fifty
dollars savings bond, all of which sounds like you would
find out in a cardboard box around the end of
the marked free. Yes, I imagine competing on a game
show and getting a can of star kissed tuna as
your price. I mean again, not to look a gift
(19:23):
horse in the mouth, but might hocket at the producers
before and left. You kidding me? Give me a can
of tuna? Fish? Do these people? Here's the here's my alternate.
The kids are Yeah, I was gonna say they hated children.
They were trying to create a game show. It would
punish every child that they came across. Oh man, just
(19:43):
throw this can at the producer's lexis in the parking Yeah, exactly, alright,
So make it across the moat gets to the steps
of knowledge. You get at all. Mac would tell the
story of that episode's legend. Are har It's like a
pig Katherine d Medici's pepperoni. Katherine the greats Harness. You
(20:06):
get that one too, Okay, google that you folks will
get that one in your car ride home. Um. When
it was done, the teams would be quizzed about the
info that they were given. The retention was not challenging,
although I don't know if you're six years old and
you're spazzing out for being on your favorite network, I
probably wouldn't remember, and so to hedge their bets, the
(20:28):
producers made the questions multiple choice. You answer the question correctly,
you go down the step. First two teams to get
to the bottom would progress, while the others get slightly
better constellation prizes like Duncan yo Yo's. I would have
been jacked. Duncan Yoyo. Were you an imperial or a
butterfly man? Butterfly all the way? Yeah, copies of Honey
(20:49):
we shrunk ourselves on VHS, which I would still take honestly,
or say, say a Genesis Games, which I would also take. Man,
Hell yeah, it turns out all you need to do
is get to the steps of knowledge and then you
start getting the good stuff. Next up we have the
Temple Games. These are a series of three one minute
challenges in which teams compete for the ominously named pendance
(21:10):
of life, which is not the thing that Grandma clicks
in a desperate attempt to reprove another day. The first
two games were worth half a pendant the second was
worth a full pendant. Teams with the most pendants would
progress to the Temple. Prizes include NBA Jam for Genesis,
(21:31):
we should do NBA Jam, Hush Puppies, moon Shoes, bk
Ratch check Ye our Matron, Looney Tunes, watches in Laguna
sports where holy sh I forgot about b k ratchtech
till just now. I Oh my god, I had a
pair of those. I feel like, Oh man, I think
(21:52):
I got kicked out of class a couple of times
for just for ratcheting them, you know, too aggressively. I
was just too extreme. Lastly, the temple run. Everybody remembers this. Yeah,
more on this to come. We'll talk about the obstacle
course in a bit, but first, you know, we have
to get through the actual obstacle course, the behind the
scenes obstacle course. Yes. Like most game shows, Legends taped
(22:16):
multiple episodes a day, sometimes as many as six because
it was the most economical way to do it. Most
of the production crew was based out of Los Angeles.
The show was taped on Orlando, so they had a
limited amount of time to record episodes for the show.
They basically turned this into an assembly line, cranking out
the first season of forty episodes in just ten days,
which is yeah. But the production got off to a
(22:40):
rough start on day one, which turned into an eighteen
hour torture test for these kids. Um, and a lot
of that was due to the first day kinks. And
the big issue was at the record of the show
section by section so that they wouldn't have to keep
resetting up the shots for every episode they were shooting.
So they did all the moat crossings for all the
episodes they were shooting that day at once, then all
(23:01):
the Steps of Knowledge segments, all of the Temple game segments,
and finally, at the very end of the day, when
as Kurt Fogg told BuzzFeed, the kids were quote properly
delirious and loaded down with complimentary pizza, they would tackle
the temple runs, and Kirk would say the kids were
so wiped that they were crying. They were weeping because
(23:23):
it was like eleven o'clock at night and we were
running them through the temple. I do think that he's
being slightly hyperbolic, but I've also seen some sources say
that some tapings went on until one in the morning,
So um, I'd be very interested in reading whatever contract
the contestants signed in running it by a child labor lawyer,
because that sounds like a lot. Do you think they
(23:44):
circumvented by being a quote unquote competition and not like
a scripted thing? Because I know they're not allowed. You're
not allowed to have kids in like a scripted thing
for more than eight hours. Right, it's like in full hours.
They got the twins because you could have them on
and off and alternate. Yeah, no, I probably, Yeah, I'm sure. Um,
as one might expect on a set where the chief
(24:05):
special effect was something rigged up from a radio check
just go ball, many of the prop's malfunctioned bucket lifts
would be missing and doors would stick shut, and every
time this happened, the team would have to start the
Temple runs again. Um, this is interesting. The wheel from
the wheel Room was a leftover prop from Double Dare,
so eventually, yeah, how about that? Uh. They eventually worked
(24:28):
out most of the kinks, but even in later seasons
the experience of running the Temple is reportedly not pleasant
for most of these kids. We go back to our
friend Nicole, who spoke to crack dot com. She described
the Temple as quote a mix between a cheap haunted
house and a McDonald's play place. And she also complained
that the backside of the temple sets just were bare plywood.
(24:51):
She said, yeah, they didn't even bother painting the side
that wasn't on camera, Like, look, we know it wasn't
an actual temple or anything, but you think they put
out some kind of petile effort to make it less
sad for the contestants. She said, it's almost as if
they enjoyed disillusioning them. I don't know, I will say
that kind of seems like an unreasonable complain. Of course,
I'm not going to paint the back of a set,
(25:12):
but still I personally enjoyed this theory. Really have we
have going on where the kids just hated children created
the show to punish them. Nicole would go on to
say that the only thing worse than hanging out backstage
was actually entering the temple. She said, this is the quote.
The stage was like coming into a nightmare. It was darker,
(25:33):
smoke was there. You saw a kid after kid coming
in looking exhausted or crying or something else terrible, and
then you went in there was actually dread there. Cheap
effects are not it was a sense of foreboding. It
just because they kept playing Alan split score to erase
her head in the background's picturing something out of like Apocalypse. Now,
(25:56):
good lord, rats in here, Michael. Long time listeners of
the podcast will know that I consistently referenced the scene
from Deer Hunter, Uh, in which characters submerged in a
pow has submerged in a river in a wooden cage,
much like Legends of the Hidden Temple. And yeah, and
(26:17):
uh there were rats swarming on him, and so he shouts,
there's rats in here, Michael. And that was not in
the script. That was an actual thing that happened to him.
He was not talking to the character named Michael, but
to the film's director, Michael Simono, who would later go
on to blow up a horse. If I am remembering correctly,
he's the reason. He's the reason that there's the peta
thing in every movie right now, right from Keaven's Gate.
(26:41):
I'm not making that up. He blew up a horse,
all right, Cool, moving on, it's the vibe for this.
Adding to this weird feeling as you entered the temple
was the fact that the audience had usually gone home
by the time the Temple runs are recorded because it
was so it at night, the studio closed to guests. Jesus,
(27:04):
they just did this to an empty studio and children
crying and throwing up in an empty room so he
filling with dry fog, and a middle aged man yelling
at them from the sidelines. This is unimaginaively grim and
a giant rubber head laughing whenever a problem occurred. Yeah,
I mean, so there's the whole sense of foreboding. Yeah,
(27:25):
I get that. That makes sense. And I guess they
dubbed in like an audience track after for the Temple runs,
just to make it seem like it wasn't this, you know,
dead studio. So that's weird. I guess I should add,
for legal reasons that the show eventually got the shoot
day down to just twelve hours instead of eighteen. They
also had a nurse on set in case of emergencies.
(27:46):
Apparently no kids were ever seriously harmed, though a girl
did once vomit into the pit of despair who among us?
Though uh this delayed the shoot for a not insignificant
out of time. But these nurses were unable to do
anything for the emotional wounds inflicted by the Temple Guards.
(28:07):
Alex Oh tell us about the Temple Guards folks as
these children at the end of their ropes uh literal physical, metaphysical, metaphorical, emotional, spiritual, spiritual,
running through an empty TV studio in front of a
bunch of piste off teamsters stuffed with pizza, having seen
(28:29):
their peers sent home in tears with a can of
stark His Tuna. Suddenly, as you're running your way through
ap plywood maze in the dark, the scent of dry
eyes clogging your tiny nostrils, Strange men in pseudo Mayan
outfits burst out of random corners, attempting to seize your
(28:52):
hard earned pendance of life by force, which teaches children
an important lesson about the way that life actually works.
Stranger danger. They actually grabbed these kids, man, Yeah, I
had to like rewatch some of those clips to like
make sure that was right, because that was how I
remembered it. And good lord, yeah they grab them. Yeah,
of course these people were just lowly production assistance or
(29:15):
even shows writers. God, can you I mention being low
enough in the writer's room, totem Pole that they're like,
we ran out of p a s. You're in the headdress.
I went to screenwriting school. I can very much imagine that. Yes, yeah,
I guess sure you can. Um, but yeah, man, I
mean I don't know. Kids have their breaking point and
after hours of this nonsense running through this terrifying set,
(29:38):
as unforgiving cameras capture their every move before millions of
members of the viewing public, these temple guards understandably push
many of these kids over the edge. So according to
one of the many Nickelodeon fan sites that are around
the internet, they crunched the numbers on this stuff, like
the wind loss ratio of the different teams of contestants
on the show. Cried after here being scared by a
(30:01):
temple guard anecdotally seems to scan haven't gone through all
the tapes yet. We've got Jamie working on it. Um,
we'll get back to you. And again anecdotal evidence backs
this up. A lot of the former contestants talk about
it as something that has stuck with them to this
very day. One woman named Keeley told sp nation dot Com,
(30:22):
in the sight of a temple guard reduced her to tears,
saying they are the scariest thing imaginable. Nothing is scarier
and I will stand by that statement until the day
I die. I'm thirty one and I can't go to
haunted houses. I'm definitely afraid of things popping out of
closets and doors. Another ex contestant says she wrote a
(30:42):
paper for her high school English class about the scariest
things she ever saw, and she revisited her temple guard experience.
Yet another ex contestants said, those guardians picked up at
least a few kids lives. I know that for a fact,
but not every child lapse in the face of unimaginable whore.
Didn't go down without a fight. They went down. They
(31:05):
did not go gentle into that good night, as some
of these kids fought back, literally elbowing the men in
the crotch. Um. Good for that, uh. And Kirk Fogg
legendary television host Kirk Fogg, I just want to keep
saying his name. Give myself different reasons to say that. Uh.
In his BuzzFeed interview, he sympathized with the kids. He said,
(31:25):
come on, you are completely invested in going through that temple.
So just think about when you're going through a temple, Okay,
I will. You're trying to get something together and you
don't know where you're going next, and suddenly this costumed
man temple guard comes out and scares you. Ah. He
added in that interview, he's been trying to get all
the ex temple guards together for dinner, which is kind
(31:47):
of adorable. Uh, but that's just like a bunch of
middle aged men ribbing each other. Like I remember when
we made Keiley cry. Uh, if you were legends of
the Hidden Temple Guard or p A or Kirk Fogg,
please reach out to us and we will I don't know,
run a correction, send you a can of star kiss,
We'll do something. So contestants had three minutes to complete
(32:09):
the Temple run without getting stopped by these temple guards.
And during the series there were fifteen different temple layouts
and almost fifty different rooms. But for all these fifty rooms,
the most notorious room was the Shrine of the Silver Monkey,
which was notable because no one could ever get it right.
One of the first viral Facebook groups I remember was
I hate it when kids suck at assembling the Shine
(32:31):
of the Silver Monkey. Remember that, I do remember that.
That's one of the few things I remember about this
show is watching children butter fingers. This Monkey. Yeah, I
mean it was infuriating. There's three parts, a base, a middle,
ahead you put it together. For some reason, the kids
would always screw it up. Watching from home, you will
wonder why. What was the problem, But as with most
(32:53):
things on the show, it was deceptively difficult. As usual,
our beloved host Kirk Fogg has these kids back. He said,
do you know how tired you are by the time
you get to the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. You're
completely out of gas. You get there to this room,
the lighting is a little bit funky, and you have
to find the three pieces. Okay, that's true. I forgot
you have to actually find the three pieces of the
puzzle first. So you're stressed. The clock is ticking. You
(33:16):
never know when the temple guards are gonna pop out.
And I think the real problem was you're doing it
with the monkey facing away from you. And I think
that was the problem. Is a lot of kids didn't
know if it was supposed to be, you know, facing
you or away from you. And even Old Mac weighed
in about how hard it was to put together the
Shrine of the Silver Monkey. Speaking out of panel during
the New York Comic Con a few years back. D Bradley,
(33:37):
the voice of All Mac, explained that the middle piece
was the problem spot. He said, it could be upside
down and you couldn't tell that it was upside down.
Apparently it took a lot of force to ram the
head on too. That was like something that was Yeah,
so you might think it wasn't supposed to go in
and you really just had to give it a little
more elbow grease. So there you go. Mystery solved trying
a silver monkey. That's why a lot of kids screwed
(33:59):
it up. Our friend the Cole speaking the Cracked, who
so beautifully described the temple set as a combination of
a cheap haunted house and McDonald's play place. She also
had thoughts on the shrine of the silver Monkey. She
said it was even cheaper than you think, felt like
heavy compressed foam, and had silver bits that flaked off.
It just ruined it. It was all hard foam to
(34:20):
look like rocks and signs out of camera views saying
avoid the dry ice m because dry ice will like
burn your skin off, right if you can't touch it. Yeah,
I don't, I don't think breathing. I mean, I'm sure
breathing it's not the best thing you can do. But
I don't think that's like super toxic. But yeah, touching it,
I think it's like agent orange. As you meditate on that,
(34:44):
We'll be right back with more too much information after
these messages. So, the Shrine of the Silver Monkey was
obviously super hard, as was the Temple Run in general.
It was so hard that, according to TV Tropes, only
(35:05):
thirty two teams actually completed it out of the shows
a hundred and twenty episodes. That's a win rate of
twenty six point seven. Um. As a point of fact,
as you mentioned earlier, the Silver Snakes and the Green
Monkeys were tied for completing the Temple Run, doing so
eight times a piece. So barely over a quarter of
the teams rescued the artifact that they needed to retrieve.
(35:27):
Which one would you be, um, I mean red was
my favorite color, so probably the red jaguars, blue barracutas baby.
So barely over a quarter of teams rescued the artifact
that they needed to recover, which most surely belongs in
the museum. There. I'm glad I got that in this episode. Um.
So the logical assumption is maybe the producers should have
(35:48):
made the run easier. Well, I'll be please know there's
a conspiracy theory about that. Kirk Fogg or beloved Kirk
Fogg told great Big story in that the Temple runs
were designed to be hard from the start because the
producers only had the budget for eight grand prizes a
season and couldn't afford to have a lot of people win.
But on the other hand, we love Kirk Fog, but
(36:10):
sometimes he speaks in hyperbole. In interviews, producer Scott Stone
refutes the whole budgetary constraint thing uh speaking to the
A V Club, he basically threw the kids under the
bus and said it was their own damn fault for
not being able to do it. He says, what happened
was that kids would get in the temple and they're
so afraid of the temple guards coming out. Who's fall
(36:31):
is that that they're not thinking. We were standing on
the ground in front of the temple, which is just
an open wall, basically a fourth wall, yelling at them
how to do it. Go left, go right, go up,
go down, go push the wall because we wanted to
give the prizes away. He said, it was never that
we were trying to hit a number or we're trying
to save money. The prizes weren't that expensive. I don't know.
(36:52):
I think this explanation is a little self serving. I mean,
you know, they just hate children once again, right, it
gets back to them, hey children. The prizes, I mean,
compared to what the first Constellation prizes were Nestle's Quick
Tuna Fish and Tuna Fish, the grand prizes weren't bad.
These prizes included trips on Norwegian cruises, stays at Smugglers
(37:13):
Notch in Vermont, Cayman Islands, Tampa, and Space Camp is
probably the most famous one. Yea space Camp distinctly you go, oh, yeah,
you went right. Oh they lied about my age so
I could go. And I had never even like slept
over at a friend's house successfully to that point without
(37:34):
losing my mind. Uh, and so yeah, I was. It
was pretty hardcore. You were like in a barracks with
all these kids and they would wake you up at
five in the morning by switching all the lights on
and going wakey, wakey, eggs and baky yeah, like running laps.
It was very military. It was. It was intense. I
(37:54):
wish they had like hardly Ermie yelling and yelling at you.
I bet you could suck a golf ball all through
a garden nose. I get it was pretty savage. Yea,
it was not a nice experience. Um, but these prizes included, weirdly,
a trip to Universal Studios, Florida. And I say weirdly
because that's where the show was being filmed, so it's like, hey,
(38:17):
thanks for coming for a grand prize, you get to
come back. So anyway, But um, I guess all final
contestants got sneakers and uh, you know what, maybe you
know what that might be it? Um, and if you
lost the Temple run, you actually got pretty decent prizes
(38:37):
like a boom box or portable CD player, camera, remote
control car or this was the one I probably would
have opted for a set of microscopes. I might have
got remote control car to Actually, I don't know where
you want to throw this in. But on eBay right now,
there is a set piece from the Legends of the
Hidden Bible available for sale. Oh well, all met got
(38:58):
auctioned off, so we'll touch on up. But what is it.
It's one of the Golden Idols from the Room of
the Golden Idols. Yes, how much is it five th
dollars five grand local pickup only? All right, Well, folks,
for five grand, you too can own a piece of
the Hidden Temple or one of the shirts. I am
(39:20):
seeing some of these shirts that are out there because
the kids all got to take home their shirts, which
was just a lovely consolation prize. Can tune in a
T shirt, enjoy you the nightmares for the rest of
your life. Kids, except for the silver Snakes, which is
picked up. Well, now it makes sense because the shirts
that they were on the show were designed to show
up better on camera because they were silver. It's kind
(39:40):
of a weird color to show up. So they had
to keep those because they were they were custom made.
But they got facsimile, so that's nice. And you know
who else kept his shirt from the show. That would
be our beloved host Kirk Fog, who says that the
only prop that he kept from it is his iconic
denim shirt which he keeps on his top coat. Hangar
(40:02):
rack by itself in a plastic bag. It belongs at
a museum. It does that, truly? Does it belongs to
a museum? Uh? You know? Kirk banged out the first
season of Legends in ten days. When you think about
the amount of time that he actually spent filming on
(40:23):
this show for it to pass into legend and be
something he can dine out on the rest of his life.
You know, let's just assume that there were three seasons.
Let's just assume that they all were similar length of time.
This was a month of his life. Yea of his life,
and it's yeah, man, his IMDb is non extensive. I
think he's a real tour I just looked him up
on Facebook and among the non entertainment credits on his
(40:46):
Facebook page, he is involved in real estate in some way,
so you know, he's got the personality for it. I
respect that, but I guarantee you man, people are showing
up to those showings going Kirk and Fog, Yeah, not
realizing and showing up to look at a condo and
you know what he's shown by. You should swing in,
(41:08):
you know, you should do one time. That would take
his career, but tould be worth it. He has a
temple guard pop out of the linen closet. He's like
showing it to folks and they're like, yeah, and this
place is beautiful, light coming in the evenings. Oh yeah,
you should check out these linen calls. Just tries to
rip their necklaces off, he would get fired. That's why
he wants to get the old Temple Guard gang back
(41:30):
together for dinner. It's gonna punk people in l a
real estate. Um speaking of ridiculous bad ideas. The production
staff used to get drunk and do the Temple Run
by themselves after daping racked wrapped. It sounds like a
lawsuit waiting to happen, But truly, who among us? Now
the kids were gone? I would have done that in
(41:50):
a heartbeat. Um Fog said that after the shoots would wrap,
the production team would have a few drinks, run the
course themselves and bet on each other, which, once again
who among us? He also said that before each season
he would always try to do the Temple Run himself,
because if they can make it through the Temple, I
can make it through the Temple. It's good to have goals.
(42:14):
But did you ever say how what his best time was? No,
that I don't find that anywhere. Well, you have to
make it on the three minutes, so presumably I don't
know his best time was, though, Yeah, what do you
think you could do it in? Uh? I'm surprisingly fast.
I bet you I could get it in two thirty. Okay,
all right. I would probably get sidetracked by the garden.
(42:37):
I would try and fight the guard. That would disqualify me.
But nothing gold can stay. And so it was with
Legends of the Indian Temple. That is right. The show
premiered in September and its ratings were still going strong.
In Nickelodeon inexplicably canned it. They prefer to use the
classic executive nomenclature not renewed, but we all know what
(43:00):
that's code for. According to Kirk Fogg, host Kirk Fog,
and others associated with the program, this was pretty much
standard operating procedure for nick at the time because they'd
already filmed a hundred and twenty episodes and at that point,
the reason, hey, our target audience with children, they have
no attention span. We can just run it in syndication
under perpetuity was the minimum amount of shows that need
(43:22):
to be filmed for syndication. Isn't there like a goal
that I don't know, scripted shows have to hit one
hundred episodes is the traditional threshold for a television series
to enter syndicated. I am also seeing eight, which I
guess goes back to the era of twenty two episode
sitcom seasons with the notion that sitcoms start to suck
after the fourth season, which is pretty much a tried Yeah.
(43:45):
So yeah, twenty two episodes of season four seasons you
get eight eight. Ship it off to syndication. Anyway, So
they had a hundred and twenty, which is over every threshold. Uh,
and they figured, you know, screw it, let's uh stop
running up these high radio shack bills and paying Kirk
fog is outrageous salary, and uh, let's send it to syndication.
(44:07):
Close it. Yeah, not quite two years. Last one was
September one, which brings us to the ignominous end of
Senor Ol mac Yes. Uh, this is probably our most
extreme segment of it belongs in museum yet the sad
tale of all mac Uh in two thousand to the
iconic Nickelodeon Studios and Universal Studios theme park in Orlando
(44:31):
was on its last legs and it would close in
two thousand five. And this place was I mean it
should be turned into a museum. Really it was host
to Clarissa explains at all Nick Arcade, what would you
do Guts and I Assume Global Guts, Legends and Temple,
certain seasons of All That, Eureka's Castle, Gallagalla Island Figure
(44:54):
it Out, and the mystery files of Show We Woo.
So a lot of history in those walls. But the
game show trends started to decline in the mid nineties
following the surprise success of rug Rats and Reruns, so
the network doubled down on animated shows, and they diverted
resources from all the game shows they were making to
the animated studios back in l A. And then several
(45:15):
producers started requesting that shows like All That be moved
to l A so they wouldn't have to leave home
because all these producers for the most part, were based
in l A anyway, they didn't want to slept all
the way to Orlando whenever the show was shooting. Uh So,
then Nickelodeon opened the new live action studio on Sunset,
which became the home base for the majority of all
the non game show stuff. And this is a whole
(45:36):
other bigger topic that maybe we can tackle on another episode,
But by the early two thousand's, the studio in Orlando
was becoming redundant and to clear out space. Nickelodeon sold
off a number of props from their glory years, including
the old mac Head. And this is according to author
Matthew Klickstein, who wrote the incredible book Slimed and Oral
(45:57):
History of Nickelodeon. It's so good. A form Nickelodeon staffer
told Matthew Clickstein that the old my Head was up
for sale, and the staffer said, I wanted to buy it,
but my wife would have killed me, which makes sense
limited design options for a six ft tall film rubber head. Um.
A Pendantive Life medallion was sold at auction a few
(46:18):
years back for three hundred dollars, so not the five
thousand of that idol. But still and some still pop
up on eBay every now and then, and there's uh,
you sometimes get some t shirts that are alleged to
be original legends. Sure, although they're so many replicas out there.
It's hard to tell that Rugrats thing is so funny because,
I mean, we mentioned this, but like people forget that
(46:40):
Rugrats went away, um, and it was only because of
the success in syndication that it came back and became
the massive hit that it was. I mean, it became
a hidden syndication, and then Nickelodeon was like, oh, what
do we have on our hands here? Man. I remember
seeing that studio and just thinking it was like the
happiest place on earth, and then actually going to Orlando
and learning the truth. Did you go and take a
(47:03):
tour of it? No? I just went to Orlando when
I realized that anything good is there. So All Mac
has been sold off, our beloved Kirk Fogg is selling
real estate. It's a sad time for Legends of Hidden
Temple fans. But in the there was a resurgence, a
renaissance of sorts. There was the sixteen made for TV
movie inspired by the show, in which Kirk Fogg and
(47:25):
All Mac voice d Bradley Baker had a cameo. And
then in March time, when literally nothing else was going on,
such a peaceful, quiet time, um quick Castenberg Quimby put
out a casting call looking for adults to participate in
a quote supersized, reimagined versions of Legends of the Hidden Temple. Hi,
(47:48):
I go tell us about Quimby. Queeby Queeby? Is that Queeb? Yeah,
you may remember, or perhaps blissfully not. Queeby was what
the coastal elites like to call a new media venture.
They were vertically oriented videos. Queeby short for quick Bites,
lasted less than a year, led by menius guy in
(48:09):
Hollywood non actual rapist category, Jeffrey Catsenberg and a woman
named Meg Whitman. So they basically shot a bunch of
that was just supposed to look good on your phone,
and everything was going to be short, hence the quick
Bites thing. They invested billion dollars in this thing. So
Queeby a ignoble flop from your least favorite person in Hollywood,
(48:33):
Jeffrey Catsenberg. So obviously, when the platform went belly up,
many felt that The Legends of the Hidden Temple was
not gonna get it's reboot, but they were wrong, dead wrong. Ultimately,
the c W picked it up and it premiered in
October with Chrystella Alawance as the host, Dee Bradley Baker
(48:53):
reprising his voice is all Mac, and Kirk Fogg appeared
as a guest mentor in four episodes. And this new
version is fascinating me because I barely remember hearing a
thing about it. It was dubbed more Authentic by Entertainment
Weekly UM culturally at least. For example, all mechs earrings
(49:14):
were changed from round ones in the original to square
ones to better represent Mayan culture more authentically, and real
hieroglyphics were added to the temple run instead of random
design squiggles. Thanks progress. And this was with adults. So
this was supposed to be like heavy duty, serious obstacle course.
(49:35):
And they initially planned to shoot in a real jungle,
but ultimately they settled on an outdoor set twice the
size of the twenty three ft original set that I
would watch. Yeah, well, I mean you can it's out there. No,
no, no no, the jungle one. Oh yeah, absolutely, just like
someone's like running through their goofy, like you know, this
(49:56):
is for you, Karen, Like at home, they like point
up and and Jaguar stypo. They would add, they would
add some kind of horrifying like they're doing this to
pay for their mother's burial or something. They'd have to
add some kind of horrible American dystopia crowdfunding aspect to it,
and then just poisoned, darted and they're surviving. Loved ones
(50:18):
got a cantatuna from son Kiss. Oh so instead of
doing the jungle, they settle on an outdoor set twice
the size of the twenty three ft original set, because
being fet that sounds wrong, But it was supposed to
be significantly bigger than the original set, because their justification was,
it's got to match the memory you had as a kid.
(50:40):
You know, when you go back to places that you
knew when you were a kid, and they're so small.
They wanted this to be bigger for the adults and
bigger for the adults watching on screen too. The moat
was upgraded from a two ft bathtub, as producers call it,
to an eight foot deep course the size of half
a football field. The rooms in the Temple were also
(51:01):
significantly more adult. Case in point the Crypt of the Heartless,
And to describe it, I like to quote original Legends
of the Hidden Temple creators Scott Stone, who worked on
on this reboot, and he's speaking to my friend Patrick
Gomez from Entertainment Weekly last year. This is describing the
Crypt of the Heartless. There are three corpses and there's
(51:21):
a split in their chest. You reach in and looked
for the heart that's beating one of them. One of
these corpses still has a beating heart, and you rip
the heart out and you go and you put it
into this receptacle in the room, and it lights the
room up with the veins and arteries that are now
flowing with blood inside you. There are three corpses Jesus Scott,
(51:45):
so that would not have made it on Nickelodeon. But
I'm honestly unsure if anyone actually expected this whole thing
to work, this adult reboot of Legends of Hidden Temple
to work. The show was panned, with critics in Variety
and a number of other outlets saying that the real
Achilles heel was the fact that there were adults cast
as the contestants, and it basically turned it from a
(52:08):
quaint but lovable kids show to a watered down survivor
uh and that was really the problem. I don't know,
I didn't watch. I barely remember hearing of this. Ultimately,
it was canceled in June, just a couple of weeks ago,
and may it's memory serve as a reminder to TV
executives that not everything needs to be rebooted with a
gritty backstory. It does seem like they really pushed for
(52:32):
the like joke rification of Yeah, making Legends of the
hidden Temple. Oh boy, and that yeah, that just happened
just a couple of weeks ago. So I think we
are up. Yeah, and uh well, folks, I think the
temple guards are coming for us and we're being escorted
out of the studio right now because we are fresh
(52:53):
audependence of life. Uh. We hope you enjoyed yourselves. Please
rate the show five stars and will send you some
Nestlie's Quick or a tin of star Kiss tuna. Uh.
And if you write a five star review, we'll send
you a Duncan Imperial Yo yo or a hunchback of
Notre Dame VHS from Walt Disney Home Video. That does
not constitute a verbal and binding contract. Oh thanks for listening, everybody.
(53:17):
Until next time, I'm Jordan runt Talk and I'm Alex Hegel.
We'll see you next time. Too Much Information was a
production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are
Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is
Mike John's. The show was researched, written, and hosted by
(53:38):
Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by
Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like
what you heard, Please subscribe and leave us a review.
For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I
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Host
Jordan Runtagh
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