The Legend of Legends of the Hidden Temple - S01E01

Ages and ages ago, in a time known as 1993, there debuted the greatest game show of all-time: Legends of the Hidden Temple. It combined the greatest loves of children everywhere - stupid swimming events, fake historical artifacts, Mayan horn music and a maze full of weird pedophile guards that left you alone if you had a medal.

Recently, I acquired the full run of Legends of the Hidden Temple - Three seasons, 120 total episodes. I've decided to use these as a bit of a break from Baggage. While the replay value isn't as high as a show like Wild and Crazy Kids, because the peaks weren't as high, the show was consistently better.

This is apparently even from the start, although as I allude to in my first paragraph, that first water event always sucked. One to three teams would always breeze through the event, while the other kids, who clearly couldn't swim, struggled to paddle their way across a small pool. Likewise, the little quiz they had about the day's relic, Blackbeard's Treasure Map, had kids just randomly guessing, and it took about 40 tries to get the two winners.

Anyway, on to the two winning teams! James is on the Red Jaguars, along with Sabrina, who kind of looks like a boy. (Sorry Sabrina.) They're opposed by the Silver Snakes, which was always my favorite team. The third-round half-medal games are also a bit better, as they rely on pushing a cannon ball up a hill backwards, and climbing up a wall to put together a relic. The medal game, which has the teams working a see-saw pulley to assemble a flag, ends in a tie. Unfortunately, those pesky Jaguars beat my Silver Snakes. (Check Sabrina's papers! I think we have a Caster Semenya situation going on.)

Finally though, we get to the best part of the game - the freakin' temple itself! I always got annoyed at players in the future seasons, who clearly had never ever seen the show, since they would easily get lost. However, since this was the first ever episode, they deserve a break. Sabrina gets an especially tough break, as a guard takes her medal in the very first room, one of the trapdoors she tries to open doesn't work at all, and she gets lost in the temple. James doesn't even get to go in at all. Womp womp womppppp.

Also, is it weird that the grand prize for the show was a trip to the Cayman Islands? The show was shot in Orlando, Florida, so the kids were already on vacation. Why did they need yet another vacation?

Note: Sorry about the lateness of this entry, but I had a trivia contest I was in at a local bar tonight, and it ran late. This entry was supposed to auto-post, but something went haywire. I blame Hurricane Earl.