There were a lot of games shows for kids in the 90s but none made you so certain that everyone was an idiot quite like “Legends of the Hidden Temple.”
For those of you who need a refresher, this show was hosted by some white dude and a talking statue, Olmec, who I’m pretty sure was a stroke victim since he only talked out of one side of his mouth.
The show divided kids into boy-girl pairs teams and put them through various physical challenges, slowly weeding out the weak and stupid.
Finally, one team would advance to the final challenge, a run through the Hidden Temple. Their goal was to find some kind of “historical artifact” that related to the theme of the episode. The temple was fraught with danger but none so terrifying as the temple guards whose job it was to create an extra obstacle for the kids and give them heart attacks at the tender age of ten.
To work through the temple, each room had different challenges or puzzles that a player needed to complete in order to unlock the next room. Some were easy, some were hard, but none were quite as difficult as the temple’s heart of darkness: the Shrine of the Silver Monkey.
As a kid, I remember spending more time than I’d like to admit screaming at my TV because some moron couldn’t assemble the damn thing before time ran out. The show offered some pretty sweet prizes and if you won, you could take your family on a Caribbean cruise. But more often than not, kids were left only with the knowledge that they brought shame upon their families and the need for therapy.
Emily Regan 