TGWTG User Blogs

What with Mr. With The Glasses making a Double Dare video in the coming weeks (SO looking forward to that, by the way), I thought I'd take a quick peek at its sister show:  Nickelodeon GUTS.

(NOTE:  I personally believe that Legends of the Hidden Temple is superior to this show, even with that gaytard Kirk Fogg as the host.  But I relate GUTS to DD more since they were invariably on back-to-back, so I'll get this out of the way first, and maybe do LotHT some other time.)

While DD was all about the slop and the mess and the zany fun, GUTS was the Kid Olympics.  The name of the game was "extreme".  That's all you needed to know.  Nothing but pure, unchained bungee-bouncin', Crag-climbin', Mad-Maxin', Jesus-Christ-My-Balls-Are-Two-Blocks-Ahead extremeness just like mama used to make.

The show was hosted by Mike O'Malley (who you probably know as part of the quartet that made up the main cast of the intolerable Yes, Dear), with referee Moira Quirk (who you probably remember as a middle-aged British tomboyish fantasy).

When I was a kid, I had a MAD crush on Moira.  Mike...not so much.

Anyway, the rules were simple--there were three contestants per episode, with ages ranging from 10 to 14.  Dressed in blue, red, and purple respectively, the three players (complete with "extreme" nicknames) would compete in four events for points:  300 for first place, 200 for second, and a piddling 100 for the loser of each event.  These four events were basically kid-friendly variations of standard sports (basketball, football, soccer, even archery), but with an "extreme" twist.  The first game of the show almost always involved using a big elastic bungee cord and almost always involved small children jumping obscene distances.

For instance, the archery game (Bull's Eye) would give the players 60 seconds to jump from a large matted stair (known as the "aerial bridge") and, thanks to the big bungees strapped to their asses, jump up 10 feet in the air to shoot one of those big Nerf arrows from a big Nerf bow to a big Nerf target about a yard away.  Nerf probably owned the rights to that yard, too.

The second game, more often than not, was an obstacle course called Basic Training.  This was my favorite.  First, you'd have to climb up a rope and wall, then you'd have to hand-to-hand yourself over to another platform (monkey bars or hanging ropes or giant gym flexy thingies), then you'd have to zipline back down to the ground (!), then you'd have to go through a giant mad-ass jungle of rubber bands, then you'd have to climb up cargo netting, then you'd have to get BACK DOWN to the ground, either onto a big stuntmat or the kicker--down a waterslide into the GUTS Pool.  Every episode needed to somehow involve that damned pool.  Eventually, they decided that the risk of kids drowning was too small, so they brought in a giant wave ball to simulate a violent ocean.  Then they'd make the kid hang from yet ANOTHER BUNGEE and tell them to cross to the other side.  They'd hand the kid a paddle and call the whole thing "Invisible Boat".

These people were on more crack than Vince McMahon.

Anyway, after four events (usually, the third and fourth were so boring, I won't even go into detail), it was time for the coup de grace--the reason people watched the show.  The most terrifying, gut-wrenching, pants-shitting two minutes in Nickelodeon history.  I'm talking, of course, about THE AGGRO FUCKING CRAG.

Yes, the Aggro Crag.  While there were a few variations of it over the years (from the Aggro Crag to the Mega Crag to the Super Aggro Crag, because they didn't think that Are You Afraid of the Dark? made you quite as scared as you could be), the rules were the same--climb the big gorram mountain in front you.  I still remember the schpiel, as if it were yesterday...

Mike:  Let's go to Mo for the rules.  MO!

Moira:  Players will start at the sound of my whistle.  Each player will have an identical side of the mountain to climb and may not cross into another player's path.  Now, during that climb, they must light up each of eight targets located on their side of the Crag.  The first player to activate ALL of the targets, including the FINAL one at the PEAK of the mountain, will take First. Place. Points. MIKE.

The Crag tested your endurance, your speed, and your testicular fortitude ("testicular fortitude" copyright Mick Foley).  You could be climbing the Crag.  "Doo-de-doo", you'd say.  Then, like in a bad Indiana Jones pirate that you see with an "Only at Blockbuster" label, you'd step on a platform that depresses, and SMOKE AND SNOW WOULD BLAST YOU RIGHT IN THE FACE!  Geysers shooting hot air into your ass, goats and monkeys FLYING EVERYWHERE!  Then, as you reached the top, a torrent of big rocks would be pushed right onto you.  As if a grade-2 concussion wasn't enough, if you wanted to win, you had to push the final switch at the top of the mountain.  To get there, you needed to climb a wall that was angled outward, basically forcing you to channel fucking Spider-Man.  It was like Dora the Explorer's worst nightmare.

The Crag, however, did have a lame side--that of the modified points system; if you were any good at math, you'd know who had the best chance of winning and who was really, REALLY screwed.  While up until this point, all the players have scores evenly divisible by 100, the Crag gave the third-placeman 375 points, the second-placeman 550, and first place snagged 725 points.  This means that, if you were more than 400 points away from the leader, you were fucked no matter what.

To get the perfect come-from-behind victory, you'd need to be a minimum of 300 points away from whoever's in first place, AND you'd need to rely on the leader to choke somehow (missing an actuator on the way up was the kiss of death), AND you'd need to still beat the other person up there (who, by the way, you can't be any more than 100 points behind, otherwise THEY'D get the grand prize even though they took second on the Crag).

Before you ask, yes, I DID have all this math done in my head all by myself by the second episode.  I was smart back then.

The perfect score (1,925 points) was attained quite a few times, even in the first season of the show.  It happened three times in the first season, in fact, and Nick found this to be so convenient (especially considering that they were each a different color) that they had a Tournament of Champions for those three which consisted of seven events and a big trophy.  A girl won, but she was cute, so I let it slide.

So, what was the regular prize?  Well, since it was the Kid Olympics, everyone got a medal.  Third, obviously, received the bronze medal, not to mention shame unto his house and family.  Second got silver, and first got gold.  The winner also got something else--a big glow-in-the-dark trophy that they passed off as "a glowing piece of our awesome rock".  They MEANT that it was a shard from the Aggro Crag (difficult considering the Crag was made of plastic and styrofoam), but it sounded more like they were passing narcotic evidence off to preteens.

Oh!  The cheapest part of all this is that the one they held up at the end of each episode is the exact same one every time--it's just hollowed out, and the real one (which weighed upward of 25 to 30 pounds) was shipped to the winner about six to eight weeks later.  Which, in retrospect, is good, because try explaining that to customs when you're leaving a Florida airport.

Guard:  And what would this be?

Kid:  Oh, it's my big rock.

Guard:  ...Your what?

Kid:  Yeah, dude.  They wouldn't even give it to me until I jumped off a high platform and threw Nerf footballs into a big net!

Have you ever seen a child cavity-searched in an airport before?  It's difficult to watch.

In the last year, popularity of the show waned, so they turned the whole thing into Global GUTS and brought in kids from all over the world, separated them into countries, and tallied all their medals up.  Believe it or not, fucking ENGLAND won the most gold medals (8), with Mexico coming in second (7), America came in third (6), and it went all the way down to a big fat goose egg for the "Commonwealth of Independent States" (four countries didn't have enough athletic kids, so they just bunched them all together).  Spain came in third place the most, earning eight bronze medals.

  YAY, WE SUCK!!!

Oh, it should be mentioned that there were a couple contestants on this show that became celebrities, basically making it practice for the VH1 world we live in today.  A.J. McLean of Backstreet Boys fame won the silver in 1992, as did Cloverfield's Mike Vogel in 1993.  I would have been on, but...well, I was a fat little bastard, so it didn't take.  It's probably a good thing, because I don't think my nickname (Matt "Sixty-Niner" Briner) would have even got past the censors of Nickelodeon's Innuendoland.

That's all I got.