4

Shooting Was A Rush To Crank Out As Many Episodes As Possible

Each episode of Legends Of The Hidden Temple featured six teams competing, with activities like a moat crossing, a trivia round, a final physical test, and then the big temple run, thinning the teams down to two, and then the winners. It got stupid at times.

If it seems like everyone is in a rush, there's a reason for that. The production was filming five episodes a day in a brutal 14-hour marathon. Coming in, Nicole was given her team (The Green Monkeys) and randomly paired with "some guy I have not talked to before or since." After that, it was a relentless series of kids cranking out game after game, getting through them as quickly as possible.

For efficiency, all of the moat challenges (in which the kids had to cross a swimming pool in some ridiculous way) for all of the episodes were done at once, then they progressed through all of the other stuff they had to shoot in the same fashion.

3

The Set Was Much Sadder (And Cheaper) Than It Looked On Television

The set of Legends looked pretty amazing on TV, at least by mid '90s kids' show standards:

The key words there are "on TV." Seeing it up close was enough to ruin a childhood. "On the other side of those sets, like the Temple Run, it was bare plywood ... they didn't bother painting the side not on camera." Look, we knew it wasn't an actual temple or anything, but you'd think they'd put out some trivial effort to make it less sad for the contestants. It's almost as if they enjoyed disillusioning them.

2

Yet It Was Still Fairly Terrifying For A Kid

Note that when we say the stage was cheap, that doesn't mean it wasn't somewhat traumatizing.

"The stage was like coming into a nightmare. It was darker, smoke was there, and you saw kid after kid come in looking exhausted or crying or something else terrible, and then you went in. There was actually dread there. Cheap effects or not, it was a sense of foreboding. Then you come back into the happy fun game room and your mood changed suddenly, with waiting kids asking how it went."

And then there were the Temple Guards, the crew members who dressed up in native costumes and jumped out to snatch kids, instantly ending their run if they didn't have a spare "life" to give.

"I took a break from the games and asked one of the group winners what the temple run was like, and he said, 'The guardians. My grandpa told me what a heart attack felt like, and I think I had one when he popped out.' A girl from my school later went on and actually won ... and she told us that she had honest-to-god nightmares about them. Like, years later. She had a paper in high school. I was in her English class, and it was a Halloween paper about the scariest thing you ever saw, and for her, it was having a temple guardian pop up. Those guardians fucked up at least a few kids' lives. I know that for a fact."

1

After All That, They Cheaped Out On The Prizes

So why go through this, besides the appeal of being on TV and possibly getting PTSD? The prizes, right? Well, because of the budget, they actually set the number of grand prize winners per year (eight), stopping the rest with temple guards and the like at strategic times. Holy shit, this whole thing was a masterful metaphor for adulthood all along.

"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. 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 his 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."

It was like winning the lottery, only to find out the prize is a Dollar Tree gift card. Ultimately, the true magic driving Legends Of The Hidden Temple was the fact that children will always work for cheap.

Evan V. Symon is an interviewer, journalist and interview finder guy at Cracked. Have an awesome job/experience for a Personal Experience? Hit us up here today!

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