There are almost too many gems to choose from in the AV Club’s oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course:
We had an obstacle called the Sewer Chute, which was, you’d go up a ladder and then go down a ladder in a very narrow sort of Plexiglass box, and the kid coming down fell backwards, and it looked like he snapped his neck. I thought he was dead. If you see me on the course, all I say over and over again is, “Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you sure you’re okay?”
So the kid only got to obstacle number six, and we said, “Hey, nice job. You’re doing great. See you tomorrow on Double Dare.” Well, we found out that the kid’s father was an attorney, and he came into the control room afterwards and said, “You know, that was a very dangerous obstacle course.” “Yeah, I know, we’ll remember that.” And he goes, “A large-screen TV was the prize for obstacle number seven.” Then he takes out his business card and hands it to us and says, “I’ll be happy not to sue you guys if you give him the TV from obstacle number seven. Otherwise, we got a problem here.” They went into a room, came back, and said, “Yes, sir, you want that TV? That’s your TV. No problem.” And that was the end of that.
From that point, they always looked at the kids’ applications, and if any kid had a parent who was an attorney, they never got on the show after that.
Sound legal strategy.
I remember that Double Dare was criticized for wasting tons of food, but every article I’ve read about Double Dare since then has been quick to point out that the show used expired food. That factoid permeated into seemingly every corner of pop culture, and it turns out it wasn’t true at all:
Marc Summers, host: Klinghoffer [eventually] made [something] up, because he was the best at this stuff. [He would say] we would go to food warehouses and try and find product that was dated that they couldn’t sell in supermarkets or to restaurants anymore, and they would sell us the dated stuff. It was more B.S. than I can begin to tell you, but we just got tired of dealing with people saying that we were not helping homeless people by throwing eggs and using pudding.
My entire childhood was a lie.