The Creators Of 'Double Dare' Revealed All The Wild Backstage Shit That Went Into Your Childhood's Favorite Disgusting Show
So I’m a big oral history guy (the oral history of the CAA agency by the guy who did the ESPN tell-all Those Guys Have All The Fun is my current jam) and when I saw this piece from The Onion’s AV Club on one of the favorite shows of my youth Double Dare in honor of its 30th anniversary, I knew it had to be shared. The whole article is worth a read but here are some of my favorite snippets that’ll help you get a better read on the boulevard of broken and slimed dreams that was Double Dare.
The creators of the show almost entirely lucked into the whole messy obstacle course concept since none of the dudes had any idea of what they wanted to do besides torture children:
Geoffrey Darby, executive producer and Double Dare co-creator: I recall I said, “I always wanted to put a live kid through a Rube Goldberg machine where they would be the pinball in [the game] Mouse Trap.”
Bob Mittenthal, Double Dare co-creator: I kind of hated the obstacle course in the beginning, even though it’s clearly everybody’s favorite part of the show. Everyone was like, “Let’s just do an obstacle course,” and I was like, “That has nothing to do with the rest of the show.”
The show was unsurprisingly both unsanitary and an injury risk at first:
Steve Pannepacker, property master: We used a lot of mops. We couldn’t hose. There was no runoff drop that we could use. One of the biggest concerns was always how slippery the floor was. Especially once it got whipped cream on it, there wasn’t much you could do.
Byron Taylor, set designer: We learned [that it was slippery] on practically the first day. One of the camera people got a fracture or something. He went down early on one of the rehearsals, or during one of the first shows. He worked the remainder of that first season with his ankle taped up.
..but then it ended up just smelling like shit mostly:
John Harvey, announcer: Gradually, the set began to morph a little bit. I don’t know exactly when it came in, but 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.
Steve Pannepacker, property master: You could walk in the studio early in the morning and you could just smell the sour build-up. You couldn’t forget it.
Marc Summers, Double Dare host: The first day it smelled good, and by day four it smelled like an old high school cafeteria…
…and giving people hand, foot, mouth and slime disease:
Marc Summers, Double Dare host: [W]e got picked up, but they didn’t clean that blue, shiny floor particularly well. So when they unrolled it, anybody who touched that floor broke out in the most disgusting blisters. It was like everybody had leprosy. It was the most bizarre thing in the world. Anybody who touched anything on that floor who then touched their face would break out in horrible stuff.
They figured out prizes to offer to be more budget conscious by exploiting how dumb kids are in terms of understanding the value of things:
Dana Calderwood, director: You want to do prizes more than you want to do money. Because money costs exactly how much it costs. If it’s a $5,000 prize, then that’s what you get. But with prizes, there’s a perceived value, and sometimes Disney World donates prizes because they get the recognition value. It’s called a promotional consideration. And the kids just loved them.
Geoffrey Darby, executive producer and co-creator: The prizes themselves, though, the dollar value wasn’t as important as the intrinsic value to the kids. In other words, a CD player or a DVD player was $200 or something. And a set of encyclopedias—you just remember, this was 30 years ago—but those might be worth $1,000. The kid would much rather have the DVD player for $200.
And oh what idiots the kids were:
Marc Summers, host: You might as well have said stuff in Spanish, French, or Japanese. They never heard a word of it, because we’d say, “On your mark, get set, go!” and they forgot everything, and then when they couldn’t do it, they couldn’t understand why. We gave them every hint that was legally possible, and they wouldn’t follow through on it.
Mike Klinghoffer, co-creator: We filled the tank one day with Styrofoam peanuts. You know, simple and easy. Marc would come by [during filming] and say, “Oh, look. Today in the tank we have Styrofoam peanuts.” And then he took a bite and said, “Mmm, delicious.” Show airs, and a week later, we get a letter from a kid’s parent who is an attorney. It says, “My kid started eating Styrofoam peanuts, because he saw Marc Summers do it. You created an attractive nuisance.” That’s when we learned that every time we did something like that, we had to say, “Don’t try this at home.”
It’s all an interesting read on one of the most bizarre, hard-to-explain shows to anyone who’s never heard of it. Check out the full article at the AV Club aaaand now I’ll spend the rest of my day quietly hoping someone hears my prayers and gives me a full oral history nerd breakdown of GUTS or Legends of the Hidden Temple next. Olmec had to have been ripping heroin off chicks’ tits behind the scenes, I’ve got no doubts in my mind.