When you consider the best crazy kid game shows of the '90s and '80s, it's hard not to immediately think about Double Dare. Combining trivia, physical challenges, and over-the-top obstacles and hosted by the affable Marc Summers, it was must-watch TV for many kids. But while you may remember the show through a nostalgic, joyful haze, the truth behind Nickelodeon's Double Dare show is much stranger than you might think. Stories of what it was like to compete on Double Dare reveal a smelly, sloppy mess.
One of the weirdest Nickelodeon shows to ever air on the network, but also one of its most popular, Double Dare took the traditional game show format to new zany heights. Whether that be by making its competitors jump into various liquid mixtures to find tiny cloth flags, or running on human hamster wheels, Double Dare never failed to deliver a crazy time for viewers at home. For its contestants, though, things were more complicated.
Double Dare's set is pretty memorable, particularly itsbright blue linoleum floor. But that floor was also responsible for making everyone on the crew want to throw up and leave the room.
According to announcer John Harvey, the quick way the floor was cleaned after each episode eventually resulted in the set having a truly horrifying smell most of the time:
"They eventually used a hard rubber flooring material, like linoleum. It was a continuous piece, and it was brightly colored, and they could use a squeegee on it. They built troughs in the front of the set, and in between every break, they’d take these giant squeegees and pull all this crap into these troughs and put the grates back over the top of them. The good part was that after a day of hot lights, it smelled like death."
The Physical Challenges Took 30 Minutes To Clean Up
The physical challenges on Double Dare were complete messes, often involving a strange assortment of liquids spilling onto the floor. The DD crew figured out how to clean the set as quickly as possible, but still only managed to shave their time down to 30 minutes.
That fast turnaround was a necessity. Since multiple episodes of Double Dare were often filmed in one day, that meant the physical challenges were usually filmed back-to-back. The crew had to scramble to make the stage presentable for the next group of competitors.
It's important to remember just how dangerous some of the physical challenges were on Double Dare, especially with that slippery linoleum floor. Fortunately, very few actual injuries occurred during filming – but there were some serious scares.
Host Marc Summers revealed one time when he thought a little boy might have actually died while running through one of the obstacle courses:
"We had an obstacle called the Sewer Chute, which was, you’d go up a ladder and then go down a ladder in a very narrow sort of Plexiglass box, and the kid coming down fell backwards, and it looked like he snapped his neck. I thought he was dead. If you see me on the course, all I say over and over again is, 'Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you sure you’re okay?'
We go into the control room after the fact, and this kid should not be alive. His neck snapped like I couldn’t believe. [Geoffrey] Darby used to say, when they’re that young, they bounce, but this one was scary as hell."
Turns out, the kid's father was an attorney too, who threatened to sue the show if they didn't give his son the prize flat-screen TV he had been competing for.
In order to live up to its established craziness, Double Dare found some truly ingenious ways to make its physical challenges that much stranger over the years. At one point, that even included having the contestants jump into a kind of baked bean mixture, which was disgusting from the get-go. And just got worse as more time passed, and the mixture boiled under the heat of the hot stage lights.
Announcer John Harvey revealed that eventually, septic trucks were called in to take the baked bean mixture out, because the crew refused to come into contact with it:
"[Steve Pannepacker] called the honey wagon. You know, the guy who brings the big sucker truck that sucks out septic tanks. He’s parked outside on 7th and Arch in Philadelphia, and he runs a big, long hose into the baked bean tank that’s been there all week under the lights and sucks it out."
Double Dare's budget did not reflect its success. In fact, one of the biggest reasons Double Dare went into production in the first place was because the Nickelodeon executives were promised it could be done for very little money.
This meant that the show's pilot wasn't even shot on an actual soundstage or set – instead, it was staged in the basement of someone's house. But apparently that didn't affect morale, according to creator Bob Mittenthal:
“We actually shot a pilot using a couple of VHS camcorders in the basement of Geoffrey Darby’s house in New Jersey. That’s the way that they used to do all of their game show pilots. When they tested it, kids absolutely didn’t care at all that it was shot on VHS in somebody’s basement. They just wanted to see people get messed up.”
Sometimes The Crew Forgot Key Pieces Of The Challenges
Double Dare was a beloved show precisely because of its chaotic nature. But as crazy as it was for viewers to watch, it was even more so for the crew and directors running everything on set. No wonder the crew occasionally forget to make sure everything was ready from time-to-time.
Director Dana Calderwood recounted one instance in particular, when the show's crew forgot to include the most important part of an episode's key obstacle course:
"Basically, it was a giant sack of feathers, and you would have to dig in there and find the flag and hand it to your partner and move on. What happened is that they dove in, and feathers were flying everywhere, so it was giving us the right look we wanted for television. And they couldn’t find the flag. The entire 60 seconds went through, and they didn’t find the flag, so we went and looked, and sure enough, they had forgotten to put the flag in."
