If you’re a product of the 90s and early 2000s culture, you’ll definitely remember the kids’ game show that you either wanted to be part of or suffered nightmares from the Temple Guards.
Throughout its run on Nickelodeon, Legends of the Hidden Temple feels like stepping into a real-life Indiana Jones film, with Aztec aesthetics. Groups of kids were challenged to complete physical and mental competitions in order to make it to the Temple Run. The remaining two teams would face off in order to crown the winners. If they could complete it, there were prizes at the end. Out of over 100 episodes, only 32 teams completed the Temple Run.
Why was Legends of the Hidden Temple so hard?
According to former contestants, the Temple Guards played a huge role in thwarting children from winning. They could just pop up anywhere, so the kids never knew when they’d be asked to present a pendant. If they didn’t have one, they’d be escorted out of the game. Unfortunately, each competitor had only one pendant. The grueling filming day, with these challenges, certainly makes it even more difficult. A former contestant, Nicole, shared her experience filming with Cracked.
According to her recount, they’d film challenges in batches, with the production team filming five episodes a day, resulting in a 14-hour shoot day. One of the more memorable challenges —the moat, where the kids would have to cross the swimming pool with obstacles in their way—was filmed in this fashion.
“It wasn’t each group’s moat, questions, etc. It was group 1, group 2, group 3. Moat, moat, moat. I was waiting backstage, and you saw half the people wet and crying and half the people less wet and ecstatic,” Nicole said. “There was a girl who went to my school who was on the Silver Snakes, yelling at her teammate about how he wasn’t trying. There was a girl backstage from the orange team from another group, and she was spitting up water and gasping when she sat down.”
They cheapened out on prizes
After all that work, only eight grand prizes were given out each year due to budget constraints.
“I got to keep the shirt, but that was it. I technically won $50 and this arts and craft thing, but that $50 was in a savings bond, so I’m not getting that money for at least another 10 years,” she said. “And I don’t even remember what I got — it was one of those ‘rad’ arts and crafts things the ’90s had so much of. I never opened it … I remember in the parking lot, another kid who went out that round brought it to their car, and it had somehow opened, so there was this multi-color sludge staining their mom’s car seats and her freaking out about it. So not only did we get almost nothing, we got, like, the cheapest kinds of things from it.”
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