Moment of Truth

[davidn]

All last month: "I can't believe they're doing this, it's revolting."

All last week: "It looks like you're plumbing new depths of television now."

This evening: "Well, I'll watch it anyway, just in case."

Obviously as a direct result of the writer's strike that suddenly eliminated what little worthwhile American television there was, Moment of Truth is the latest "quiz" programme to appear on FOX - Television for Idiots. And I'm saying "quiz" with that irritating air-quotes action because there isn't one - the premise of the programme is that a contender, wired to a lie detector, answers increasingly personal and/or embarrassing yes/no questions for unlikely amounts of money, while people related to them (those who would be most shocked to hear the answers to some of the questions such as "Have you ever used the Internet to flirt with other women since getting married?") look on. You can decide to stop after each question, but after a question is asked you must answer it, and if you're caught lying then you're booted off instantly. Simple.

Before I continue, I must mention we can't blame America entirely for this. The TV company Endemol used to put the Netherlands firmly in the lead position of having some of the most consistently bad television in the world* and therefore the programmes that people were most eager to export - their latest worldwide example is Deal or No Deal. But against all odds it's Colombia that has come up with something duller, because even a full hour of somebody picking random numbers is more captivating than this (though over here they attempt to spruce Deal or No Deal up a bit by featuring twenty supermodels wearing very little in an attempt to extend the average American attention span).

If we examine the rules for a moment, which doesn't take long - from your point of view (and this is the only real decision-making moment in the whole affair) there is no point in lying. If you tell the truth, everyone knows Awful Secret #94 and you continue. If you lie, you're detected lying, you miss out on the cash, and everyone with the slightest sliver of a sense of deduction by elimination knows Awful Secret #94 anyway. There's no sense of skill or tactics to it. There's no challenge. There isn't even a game, to be honest. You've got to say "yes" fifteen times or give up halfway through if you don't feel like humiliating yourself any further (or filing a divorce if you've just admitted to anything particularly incriminating). The programme has actually been taken off air in some countries after one woman was arrested after exposing certain truths, but then I wouldn't have expected "Did you murder your late husband in order to get his life insurance money?" to have come up as a random question either.

I rather miss the era when TV games were actually enjoyable instead of relying on ridiculously overblown tension, and had some sort of challenge to them (at this point even any sort of game at all would be nice). Nostalgia is kinder to everything, but I don't think that it's just the rose-tinted spectacles that make things like The Crystal Maze look inexorably ace by comparison. And, of course, some things go without saying.

* Apart from MTV

Comments

[kjorteo]

I grew up on Video Power, the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? game show (the one with Rockapella,) plus whatever kids' game shows were on Nickelodeon at the time, particularly Nick Arcade and Legends of the Hidden Temple.

I could get a fair deal into any of them, because something about us getting together and discussing anything seems to bring out the ten-reply-deep multi-paragraph discussions, but I figure I may as well check which ones you're also familiar with first.

[davidn]

All right, let's make a start - I can't say I know anything much about any of those, so feel free to go into any and all of them! I don't recognize any of them as anything that ever made it to Britain - it was common for people only to have our four terrestrial channels up until the mid-90s at the very earliest, and the Nickelodeon phenomenomenon hadn't got there. I know of the Where the Hell is Carmen Sandiego? series of games in which you had to trace a route round America/the world/time and space itself by following three clues given to you in each location, wasting a lot of time if you went to the wrong place, but I don't know how that was related to the TV version.

I think that CITV eventually had a version of "Legends of the Hidden Temple" as "Jungle Run", based on a quick look at Wikipedia, but that was rather after my time - its Wikipedia entry doesn't mention it, but I'm sure it took inspiration from that American programme. Infamously (and you'll think I'm making this up, but I promise it's true), a pilot for a nudist version was also aired, featuring a naked Keith Chegwin as the host. Naturally everyone in Britain was scarred for life and it was discontinued immediately (and they riveted Cheggers' trousers on so that it would never happen again).

It also had a lot of the spirit of The Crystal Maze, which was a physical game show/glorified adventure playground for adults, and had Richard O'Brien as the host (a lot of Americans think it's incredibly weird seeing Riff Raff in anything else, but Crystal Maze is what he's known for in the UK). It didn't make it out of Britain, but you may know about the similar French programme Fort Boyard, which I think was shown in America - originally it had been planned to make a British version of that, but they couldn't get the set at the time they wanted so just invented something new instead.

Anyone who's reading this is going to think I'm a bit sad for this, but I didn't actually watch many children's game shows growing up because my mum didn't like me watching anything that wasn't 'intelligent' enough, so before I was in school and during my first couple of years in it, I grew up more on things like that and daytime TV puzzle/quiz shows - two of my favourites were Turnabout and Four Square. They don't write TV themes like that any more.

Of the children's shows I watched, though, Knightmare was by far the best of them, and there really hasn't been anything remotely like it since it finished in 1994. It was one of the first programmes to use chromakey/blue-screen, and was very computer-gamey in nature - three 'advisors' had to guide a fourth 'dungeoneer' through a fantasy adventure-game style scenario, avoiding being killed by electronic obstacles. The overacting and Commodore Amiga graphics can look pretty ropey these days if you didn't grow up with it, but I've found one of the best ways to get someone interested is to show them one of the causeway rooms. The Corridor of Blades is also one of the most infamous bits, done without much success in that clip.

[kjorteo]

Oh, character limits.

The Carmen Sandiego game show...oh, man. I went to see if I could find a clip on YouTube, and they had an entire episode in three parts, and I completely got sucked in all over again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7LoCQKPceg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtMTPvFb2es
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVfKymICcfE

It's basically a cleverly-disguised Geography lesson passed off as entertainment, just like the PC games! Contestants answer geography questions, then go play one of those games where you uncover things on a board, and cap it all off with a horrifically unfair geography lightning round on a giant map to try and catch Carmen herself. I watched that show religiously, so I've seen contestants win before, but it was almost as infrequent as the similarly unfair temple run on Legends of the Hidden Temple. And yes, they win on the temple run here, but that has to be the best temple run I've ever seen from all my watching of that show, and she still only pulled it off by about five seconds. I guarantee that if she had been caught by a second randomly-placed temple guard (which would have eliminated her and made her partner have to run in and retrace her path,) they'd have been doomed. And good lord, that temple run music takes me back.

I went through your other comments here and saw both the Crystal Maze spoof and a clip from the actual show. Now that show just looks like pure fun. I'm sorry I missed out on it--I'm sure I would have loved it back in the day. Knightmare looks fun in a Nick Arcade sense (which I'll get to in a moment,) but all the clips on YouTube were apparently taken out of context, as I had no idea how most of what I was watching was supposed to be played, so the frequent deaths were somewhat unsurprising. I have to give it to the host to find a particularly effective informative-yet-snarky "this is what you should have done, idiots" speech when eliminating them. I think there's just something about a British accent that automatically makes you better at sarcasm.

[kjorteo]

As an official child of Nintendo Power, though, the video game shows were where it was at for me. It was always my dream to be on Video Power (which I unfortunately can't find on YouTube anywhere, but for the downright sad theme song. The actual show was much less embarrassing than that, I swear.) Basically, kids were chosen from the audience and played an NES game (usually Rescue Rangers.) The two with the highest score went on to answer video game questions for points, then play the game again against each other for more points, and whoever had the most points at the end more or less died and went to Heaven: Picture, if you will, the contestant being fitted in a cat suit completely made out of the hook side of velcro. Now picture a room completely full of shelf after shelf of NES games, with all the boxes treated with the fuzzy size of velcro. Contestants had...I want to say 1:30, but it could have been 60 seconds, to basically loot the place and go through a slide at the end, and got to keep whatever stuck to them at the end. Plus there was one particular game (the contestant wasn't told which one) that, if they took, they'd also win a Neo-Geo.

Oh man, I wanted that so bad. As a child, one of my larger fears was somehow actually making it onto that show, and getting to play Rescue Rangers (as opposed to a game I've never even heard of and would thus suck at,) but having to be Chip. Because, as we all know, Chip sucks and would have cost me the game and my chance to go to video game Heaven.

Anyway, I wasn't able to find a Nick Arcade clip, but here's a commercial that at least shows what the end part is like. I'm almost sure that what happened was that the contestants were in a giant blue screen room with monitors off to the side so they could see what was going on, which would explain why (when actually watching the show) the contestants always seemed to be looking at something off-scene when trying to do their whole video game thing. Still, though, that was so incredibly cool back then.

The other major thing I remember about Nick Arcade was that sometime during the actual show, before the end segment, there was invariably a part where a team had to play their choice of real video games and try to beat a "Wizard's challenge" (usually either beat level 1 or score x points before y seconds) for points. And everyone I ever saw play, without exception, was absolutely terrible at Gradius. (slither remembers it differently, with Magician Lord being the game that everyone tried but no one had the slightest bit of skill with for whatever reason. I do remember some rather spectacular Magician Lord failures now that I think about it, but I remember having the "You idiot, why do you suck so much at games?" moments more with either Gradius or ActRaiser at the time.)

[davidn]

That theme song is really something - I haven't seen anything quite like it since the Zelda rap. Strange how we never noticed how laughable these things were when they were on (see the Gladiators theme I linked to in the earlier comment).

The end part does sound a lot like Knightmare. I'd actually quite like to see more of that brief clip just to see how well the whole thing worked, because as much as I love it, Knightmare was incredibly slow-paced by necessity, and having a live game rather than playing against an invisible man controlling everything through an Amiga upstairs would make things have to be a lot faster. But for the most part, I think the nearest thing that we had to Arcade was Gamesmaster, which I didn't watch a whole lot (largely because of irritating Scottish host Dominik Diamond) - ingeniously, though, it starred Patrick Moore as a sort of demigod-like "Gamesmaster" entity. He didn't appear on-screen as his human self, instead being confined to a video screen or as the central biomechanical brain of a large robotic thing. Every time I try and describe British children's TV to anyone it sounds like I'm on drugs.

I don't think the programme really had any kind of continual organized game to it, instead inviting people down from the audience to play against each other and possibly win something of questionable value. There would also be a couple of star guest rounds - I have the one with Michael Jackson and Macaulay Culkin on it on tape - in which most people were comically useless, occasionally to the point of the Gamesmaster stepping in to stop the game and organizing something different instead. There was also a tips and cheats section where he dispensed advice to people perched atop a fiery mountain.

Video game programmes don't seem to have had much luck, on the whole - I know that there's G4 or whatever it's called here (I don't even know if that's a channel or a programme in itself), but I've heard from several people on the Classic Gaming board that it does to games what MTV does to music. The situation is much the same in Britain, with a couple of short-lived shows with rubbish names like "Thumb Bandits" and "Bits" being aired at about eleven at night. Ironically the situation was much better when games were more 'underground' and unpopular - the best of the lot proudly acknowledged that games were still considered a Bad Influence. There are some reviews of games like Sonic and Knuckles from when they were new on the site, and enthusiastic reports on the Philips CDi and 3DO before their respective catastrophic failures.

At least we now have a virtual form of the velcro room in the form of the many emulation sites on the Internet - dive in and download as much as possible before someone spots it and shuts it down! Although they've got a lot more stable since I discovered the whole emulation community in around 1999.

Now I'm off to watch Gladiators. :)

[kjorteo]

I just found this when looking for more Nick Arcade info, from Wikipedia:

The show was the first in America to regularly intermix live action with animation using a bluescreen (Knightmare was the first show worldwide).

So how about that. :) Still wasn't able to find a good clip of that final zone, though the Wikipedia article confirmed my theory that the contestants were in a blue screen room with monitors off to the side displaying the game so they could see themselves. This resulted in things moving much faster than Knightmare, though with the side-effect of it always looking like all the contestants were looking at something off-screen even as they were in the middle of the game. (Because they actually were.)

And, uh, Patrick Moore as in, the elderly astronomer with a monocle Patrick Moore? Patrick Moore Plays the Xylophone Patrick Moore?

I've been told by people who actually saw them that Tech TV used to be amazing and G4 has always sucked, and then G4 acquired Tech TV and dragged the new G4-TechTV thing down to G4 levels, making former Tech TV fans understandably upset. This theory was even put forward in a VG Cats strip. Having never watched a single thing from any of those stations ever before, though, I honestly wouldn't know.

And I should mention that I used to have access to all the big file dumps on Usenet, and as a result, I have nearly-complete ROM dumps for just about everything NES and SNES. This does include all the different regional versions and multiple attempts at dumps, and genuinely awful hacks, but hey, all the good games are still in there somewhere. (I just checked, and I have 4,728 NES ROMs, 26 of which are Super Mario Bros. 3 and/or hacks that actually start with "Super Mario." Tracking down all the hacks that start with completely different names, such as "Bloody Axe Bros.", is beyond the scope of this check.)

But hey, without that collection, I wouldn't have found Eggerland: Revival of the Labyrinth, so no complaints here!

[davidn]

Interesting that Wikipedia mentions them both together as well! By the end of Knightmare, they were experimenting with allowing the dungeoneer to see as well for brief periods of time, but the eighth series was the last and the idea never went further than that.

Something I didn't realize at the time was that the reason the dungeoneer was blinded wasn't a planned part of the game at first - it was done out of necessity because of the environment being computer-generated. When the creator, Tim Child, put forward the idea for a new series, he had actually changed it to a completely virtual environment with a seeing dungeoneer and just one advisor - something that hadn't been possible in 1987. But the trouble was that nobody liked the idea, and it's gone back for another redesign.

And yes - that is the Patrick Moore you're thinking of! The monocle-wearing, xylophone-playing, biomechanically enhanced Patrick Moore.

I've been meaning to play Eggerland or Lolo or whatever it's more correctly called since you mentioned it on videogame_tales (large post for that coming up, by the way, because I started playing Hexen 2 again this week). I always feel like it's a bit of a gap in my geek status when I say I've never actually used USENET - the Internet had barely been invented in Scotland until about 1995, and we got a connection a few years later. It's actually amazing how much more convenient Internet access has become in the last ten years, when I think about it.

[kjorteo]

Good Lord, I see what you mean about the sheer Scottishness of that host....

And hey, Adventures of Lolo 1 and 2 are on the Wii Virtual Console now! And if you're less scrupulous, 1, 2, and 3, and Revival of the Labyrinth are all somewhere in my ROM collection. They're really fantastic games, but if you want to get into the series, I strongly recommend playing anything but Revival of the Labyrinth first, since that one is about a million times as hard and has those stupid ? rooms that make the game completely inaccessible to everyone except people who love the Eggerland/Lolo series so incredibly much that they're ready for a new challenge and don't mind about eight of the 150 or so rooms being blatantly unfair and stupid. (It is a fantastic game overall if you can handle it, though, and I do recommend it eventually.)

Meanwhile, it's probably better to pick one of the American Adventures of Lolo games and play with them until you're intimately familiar with the basic rules, all the enemy types, and tricks like enemy respawn displacement and how to creatively use other enemies to block the Medusa line-of-sight. The thing I love about the Lolo series is that all the rules and enemy behavior and everything is so consistent and straightforward and that you can easily tell at a glance what you're supposed to do and what's in your way, but obviously one has to actually learn the workings in the first place.

[davidn]

OK, I'll have to look around for those - we don't have a Wii, but if we ever get into this generation of consoles, that's the one that I think we'll go for. It sounds like the kind of thing that quadralien would enjoy as well, so I'll point him at them. As I'll detail in the write-up of Hexen 2 I mentioned earlier, it looks like he's just solved something about the game that as far as I can tell, no walkthrough writer or forum-goer on the entire Internet has ever worked out - so he's the kind of person who would not only be able to do all of those unfair ? rooms, but then tell you why it was immediately obvious and logical that that was the way you had to solve them. I'd look forward to his explanation of that blocks-round-the-edges room in particular.

To go off in a completely different direction, it does seem slightly hypocritical of me to be so involved with preventing piracy in Clickteam while at the same time not giving a second thought to downloading games - there's something different about the feeling of downloading things like NES ROMs, even if they are now currently available again. I wouldn't immediately download anything released recently, but it's a bit difficult to define where the cut-off point is. I downloaded Hexen 2 the other day, for example, but I'm not sure if that would have felt 'wrong' or not if I didn't already own the CD (the only reason that I didn't install it from my own CD being that it's currently across the Atlantic).

The argument against downloading discontinued games was always that it stopped companies from putting together re-releases, but only the Wii seems to have that right at the moment. Vivendi's comically appalling handling of the "Windows remakes" of the King's Quest and Space Quest series put a lot of people off that excuse, I think - they're just the original games put onto a CD with an outdated version of DOSBox set up to run them fairly badly, and each of the collections has at least one game in the series missing entirely.

The same is true, unfortunately, of Knightmare. It has a small but dedicated community surrounding it, and I used to be quite an active member of the forum a few years ago. (Come to think of it, I'm not totally sure why I'm not active there now.) The creator, Tim Child, used to pop up occasionally and politely request that people don't offer to provide tapes of the programme to each other because it would harm the possibility of an eventual DVD release, and everyone respected this. Such a release never appeared, and the end result is that outside Britain the programme is now completely unobtainable - I was actually pleased to find so much of it on Youtube, compared to last time I looked were there were just the few clips that the fan site had been allowed to put up.

Additionally I'd like to mention that the currently ongoing conversation on my latest post is a bit weird.

[kjorteo]

Everyone who engages in downloading has their own personal code of ethics. Mine is that I freely do it, but if the product is actually available, I treat what I downloaded as an evaluation. I always (well, as soon as I get the money, anyway) go to Amazon and buy the CDs I've listened to enough times to determine that I like. I have pretty much every NES ROM ever, but I don't hesitate to buy any particularly good games on the Wii Virtual console when they're out. (When I saw they just released Lolo 2, for example, it literally took as long as saying "Lolo 2 is out!? Oh, hell yes," and then I bought it on the spot.)

And fortunately, Revival of the Labyrinth is the only Lolo game I know of with the damn ? rooms, but I must admit being interested in seeing how he handles them. And the blocks-around-the-edges room is not the most illogical one, believe it or not.

[kjorteo]

Also, in the Carmen Sandiego show, I do remember all the questions being disguised as random interruptions like that, but I don't remember seeing the guy being interrupted by God before. That was...interesting.

[davidn]

I didn't realize I'd forgotten to link you to the Crystal Maze - Punt and Dennis' spoof is incredible, and the "I can't see what I have to do!" line is a particularly accurate portrayal of the sometimes distressing stupidity of those taking part! I remember pretty much the same thing happening in the actual programme, with somebody in one of the more futuristic games having to piece together a jigsaw-like thing to get a grid reference and then tap it out on a wall-mounted board - except he completely failed to find said grid in the two and a half minutes available. It's fantastic that the link got you interested enough to have a look at the actual thing, though. It's something that deserves a revival if ever there was one, but sadly I think that tastes have got too 'extreme' for it to be considered now. I can definitely see the similarities to both it and Jungle Run in Legends of the Hidden Temple.

Most of the clips from Knightmare on Youtube seem to be from the later series, so quite a lot of them are unfamiliar to me as well - I have pretty complete tapes of series 4-6, but even though I'm sure I taped it religiously every Friday, all other episodes seem to have vanished and my usually good memory for these things has completely failed me. Broadly, there were two different types of room - either action-puzzles designed to test the ability to guide their dungeoneer effectively to avoid death by falling, crushing, impaling or being otherwise smashed to bits, or rooms where more adventure game-type interaction was required of the team, usually involving working out which items to pick up from a clue or answering questions from one of the other characters to get vital information to get through one of the puzzle rooms later on. Did any of the clips you saw feature the room with sliding platforms under a row of playing cards on the wall? I never had any idea what was going on there at all.

And Treguard the host was famous for his overdramatic advice and commentary - he was very good at refraining from calling them complete idiots when they messed up badly, but he did come close at one point after the best death ever (which sounds rather morbid, now I come to type it) where a guide who couldn't tell left from right got their hapless team-mate to sidestep confidently into a gaping hole in the floor. (It's series 4 team 4, but all the clips of it on Youtube are hopelessly out of sync.) And, as seems to be common in both sets of shows we're describing, winning was very difficult, too - only eight teams won in as many seasons, and it was really something special when a team got to one of the final giant puzzles. Similarly, I can't remember many teams winning Crystal Maze, either.

I'll have to watch the Carmen Sandiego programme (you got me interested with that last comment) - I'll let you know what my reaction is!

[kjorteo]

The Knightmare clips I've seen and my failures to understand them mostly consist of the room with all the numbered hexagonal tiles, and an adventure game type room where someone tried to stop an NPC from playing his horn by selling him a ring (which Treguard told them was for using, not selling, after they had gotten themselves killed.) For the former, without context, I can't understand why they don't just run all the way forward at full speed before any of them fall, or if they absolutely must be stepped on in some sequence, what the sequence is and how they figured it out. For the latter, I'm assuming I just would have needed context to understand what they were supposed to do, as "There's a guy about to blow a horn and you apparently have a ring" is pretty nebulous to me. I never did see a clip involving the playing cards, so I can't help you there, sadly.

I just watched that 4-4 death, and you're right. That's awesome.

[davidn]

Yes, they do make more sense if you see them from start to finish - each of them is a continuous adventure-game type scenario. Items and spells are picked up or given by characters, carried from room to room and eventually used when the situation demands. (I actually remember that death, as well - they were dead thick.)

Odd that you should ask why they never just ran straight across, because I always wondered that as well. I think in this case, "because it was against the rules of the programme" is the only reason that they never did it ;) As for the sequences, much like the in-game items, they would usually have discovered the sequence in an earlier room, or at least clues to give a sequence, and have to use the information they'd previously gathered to get themselves across. Although there were situations where the solution had to be worked out on the spot, such as a variety of offensive and defensive items (sword, helmet, mace, shield, etc) on the tiles and having to realize that, as they started on a defensive one, they had to stay on defensive items.

[davidn]

It turns out Whitney used to watch the Carmen Sandiego show too, so watching that together was a nostalgia trip for her. I was actually surprised to learn that the TV version was based on Broderbund's game, rather than the other way round as I had expected. I also found it surprisingly, well, intelligent, especially for a geography quiz in a country that's stereotyped as not knowing about anything outside its own borders. I had no idea about the answers to most of the questions, and yet a twelve-year-old Arab from Denmark seemed to have no problems.

I do see what you mean about the interruptions - the neighbour was rather Pythonesque and the hand of God looked like something from Alton Brown's programme. Additionally, that last game blatantly didn't have enough time on it - six and a half seconds to run across the room and back every time!

[kjorteo]

That show brings back memories because of the rotating villains. (The Contessa was the villain in the clip I gave you, obviously, but you can see all of them in the closing credit sequence.) I always wanted to see one particular one (RoboCrook) because he looked cool, but in all my years of watching it, I saw one episode that featured him. It was usually either Eartha Brute or Patty Larceny, who I quite frankly got tired of after a while. No complaints about the Contessa (other than the fact that she's not RoboCrook,) probably because she wasn't as overdone.

And yeah, going back and watching it again now, I was amazed at both how smart that kid was (way better at age twelve than I am now, certainly!) and how unfair the last game is. He clearly knew his stuff, had no wrong answers, or even things he didn't know that he happened to guess correctly. He had that game down, but 45 seconds for 7 right answers just isn't enough.

This could be my memory playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember two versions of the final game--one like you just saw, where the locations start with an introduction with a few clues and then he actually flat-out says them, and another version where they skip the clues and always just state the locations directly, and thinking even at the time how unfair that was to the kids who happened to get the clue version. (Had the latter been the case in this particular clip with how close it was anyway, the second or two saved on each question would have been enough that he would have won easily.) Of course, there's a chance I'm just completely wrong on that....

[stubbleupdate.livejournal.com]

Game shows are no good if you can't shout at the contestants for being stupid. This looks like it removes that element of the gameshow format.

The audience don't really know the answer, so they're just spectators.

[davidn]

The shout-at-the-TV factor is definitely a bonus, and definitely part of what made The Crystal Maze so appealing. That spoof is frighteningly accurate.

[bonappetite.livejournal.com]

It's the writers' strike. None of the script shows have had new episodes for two months.

[davidn]

I can imagine that it's difficult to come up with a programme that's (a) entertaining and (b) involves absolutely no scripting at all is not the easiest thing in the world, but you could just stick Baddiel and Skinner on a sofa and have something better than this.

[kjorteo]

On the plus side, the new American Gladiators is pretty fun in a sort of guilty-pleasure/if-you-like-Hulk-Hogan sort of way.

[davidn]

American Gladiators is indeed fantastic, and one of the few things that I find myself looking forward to out of the hundreds of channels that we have available. I'm really not sure how to cope with having so many, having lived with four and a half for most of my life. Virtually nobody in Britain can receive Channel 5 correctly because it broadcasts on the same frequency as French television and can't be boosted as much, or something like that. The programme is something genuinely difficult (and sometimes more deadly than intended, due to the number of career-ending injuries that "Tilt" caused in the British version) and something that you can at least respect people for trying, rather than being thinly disguised ritual humiliation.

It's the memory of watching the same thing during the 90s that does it - that and it feels so comfortable with being utterly ridiculous, something that isn't often seen now (if we discount power metal videos for a moment). They seem to have gone for something of a UT3/futuristic Mortal Kombat-type presentation - the British version's titles had even more Bill-and-Ted-style hilarity, and the Australian variety honestly looks like an Yngwie Malmsteen video.

The best bit, though, is Hulk Hogan himself (he was well-known even in Britain in the early 90s) - I can't stop concentrating on his library of exactly three hand gestures (the point, fist and a sort of two-fingered "OK" symbol/point hybrid) which he uses in strict rotation while talking. It's utterly fascinating.

[kjorteo]

The one thing I'll give the Australian version (and the original American version, that the new one is sadly lacking) is that "Tower" is an awesome Gladiator name.

But yeah...wow. Both American versions have a comparatively minimalist title sequence/theme song, so those were...goodness. Not nearly as sad as the Video Power intro (honestly, where else can you honestly and with a straight face say someone tried and failed to be as cool as Vanilla Ice?) but the Australian one in particular looks distressingly like someone commissioned Hammerfall to design a video for them.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I watched an episode of a new show a few months ago. Basically a giant version of Bingo. I like to think of it as the pinnacle of bad game shows. There are no choices for the contestants to make, or anyway for them to incorporate their skills or personalities. The simply stand and press a button to make balls come out of a machine at random.

It's like going to a bingo house, and watching people play. Actually, I wonder why they haven't set a couple dozen cameras up at an average bingo place: with a little editing, it would be at least equal to that show, and yet much cheaper to make.

[davidn]

It does seem a bit futile - although with ideas like that last one you should be a TV executive!