Adventure Game Shows, Further Reading/Watching

I'd say this blog makes it quite clear which adventure game show I and many others consider to be the best of the genre but there's plenty of others that many people under a certain age have missed out on. Not to say they're all great, missing out can sometimes be a stroke of luck.

"Les Mondes Fantastique" - because Fort Boyard is too obvious.

After The Crystal Maze had been on UK screens for a couple of years, in 1992 Jacques Antoine (the brains behind TCM) brought a cross between TCM and Fort Boyard to French television. Primarily a children's game show, it borrowed a few elements from TCM such as the colourful wireframe map to show where the contestants were, as well as a very familiar lightbulb themed steady-hand game (see below from 2:00). The show was so closely related it even took the original board game for The Crystal Maze and repackaged it under the LMF name.






Scavengers - Someone got horrifyingly close to creating "Alien - The Game Show"

That's not me being facetious, this show started off as a chapter of the Alien universe, and it was as underwhelming as Prometheus ended up being. Look up episodes on Youtube and it still mentions 20th Century Fox in the credits. Thankfully Ridley Scott stepped in and said "err... no".
Hosted by "Commander" John Leslie, turning the star of Blue Peter and other stuff that could be called blue into a sci-fi action hero bloke jumping and swinging about a bit. The commander would take two teams of male/female pairings to the stricken cargo ship The Cyclops to retrieve salvage in a series of games culminating in an escape across a watery abyss before the end of a strict time limit. The set was impressive, although the same parts were reused for different games and each show featured a little subplot between John Leslie and some aliens which disappointingly weren't Xenomorphs, one episode even going as far as to visit the familiar 'evil clone' plot. Whilst Scavengers started off as ITV watching TCM and wanting an adventure game show to fill the gap in the months that Gladiators wasn't on, it didn't last and since no one was watching it in its primetime Saturday slot the final ended up being broadcast after GMTV at 9.25 on a Monday morning. With a bit of a time jump, we could have had Commander Jeremy Kyle.



Incredible Games - "MOOOVVVVEEEE"

Before CBBC had the likes of Raven and Trapped, they had this little gem. Simple concept, a team of 3 kids (or celebrities at Christmas, including Keith Chegwin, I'll taint your memories forever with him in a bit) go up a skyscraper in a sentient lift with different games on each floor. Simple.
The lift was portrayed by David Walliams who has done plenty since then, including the video for Vindaloo by Fat Les which also featured Ed Tudor Pole in the crowd.
There were two games that always lingered in my memories of this show. One was from a later series and had a ghostly teacher asking the kids a series of questions in a Victorian classroom and having to answer the previous question, just imagine the Two Ronnies Mastermind sketch with gunge. The other is the game that this show is always remembered for, when it is remembered, and it's the Dark Knight (not that one). A large darkened room, a grid of squares, a man in black at the far side with a helmet more akin to Spaceballs. The kids and the Knight would take turns to move across the grid, having to alternate between forwards and sideways moves, and the Knight could only see where the kids had been from the illuminated square of their previous move. If the Knight caught a kid, he would open his cloak and the kid disappeared in a flash, and the team got points for every contestant that made it across the board unflashed.

Full episode below, Dark Knight starts at 10:10




Jungle Run - and Keith Chegwin's spin-off of sorts.

There's not much to say about Jungle Run, the format borrowed heavily from TCM, a team do challenges to obtain bananas/monkey statues. the more they achieved in the earlier games, the more time they'd have in the final game to win prizes. Even lock-ins were possible as were buybacks from those lock-ins. Three hosts took charge through the years: Dominic Wood of 'Dick and Dom' fame, Chris Jarvis who now may be more familiar to some from CBeebies shows, then Michael Underwood. Underwood started his television career after winning a role on CBBC through Saturday night game show 'Whatever You Want' hosted by Gaby Roslin, where the idea was people could win whatever they wanted. That wasn't his first TV appearance though. That, as far as I know, was the first Crystal Maze Christmas Special where he was the team captain.
Jungle Run had a purpose-built set in an aircraft hangar (a familiar idea) in Nottingham and it's that set I may be about to scar your memories of. In much the same way the SU2C special for Crystal Maze used an existing set in the Live Experience London venue, Channel 5 used the existing Jungle Run set to make their own adventure game show...for nudists.
A naked Keith Chegwin took naked contestants around the jungle to do virtually the same games the kids did. There was no focus on body parts or an attempt to obscure them but a starkers Cheggers, and little Cheggers, was headline news in the summer of 2000.

Here's that set in 2000, with Dom (No Dick, that was a different show) (ok, now I'm being facetious)