Ali Jackson | Where have all the Blue Barracudas gone?

Last Monday, at about 11 a.m., I nearly incited a fistfight on Locust Walk.

It's pretty easy to do actually. I didn't have to mention same-sex marriage or abortion, or even yell, "Yeah, so's your mother!" All I did was say, "So, Silver Snakes or Blue Barracudas?"

For those of us between the ages of 18 and 22 - basically every Penn undergraduate - who had cable growing up, this simple question evokes great nostalgia of a different time, when kids competed to search through a temple, climb an Aggro Crag and avoid being pied in the face: the era of the Nickelodeon game show.

It was during this time that shows like Legends of the Hidden Temple, Guts and Family Double Dare ruled the air waves and gave every kid hope that maybe one day he'd bring home a piece of the Crag.

For those of you weren't privy to the brilliance of these shows, here's a quick recap.

On Legends of the Hidden Temple, two-member teams - such as the Blue Barracudas - competed in three rounds of play, culminating in one team making it to the Temple. Once there, the winning team fought through various rooms of the building to find an artifact and win the game. Guts continued the theme of rounds, but pitted individuals against each other. The final round saw the contestants scaling the "Aggro Crag" to claim a piece of the rock. Finally, Family Double Dare took families and put them through various obstacles and tasks, most of them involving slime.

With the exception of early bird Family Double Dare in 1988, all of these programs premiered in the early '90s to great success. However, by 1995, every last one of them had hit the cutting room floor, at least in America. (Legends of the Hidden Temple still runs on Nickelodeon Asia - who knew?)

Communication professor Amy Jordan attributes this to the narrow audience these shows reached. "If you have to answer questions, you're only going to hit a very small demographic of people," she says.

While it may seem that everyone you know watched and loved these shows, remember who you are: a college student. Just the fact that you're even at Penn means that you want to learn. (Come on, admit it - even just a little bit?) For most of us, that academic atmosphere has been ingrained in our lives since day one. So while it seemed that the whole world watched the same shows as you, it was really just your immediate environment.

Jordan also cited networks "trying to target adults and kids at the same time" as a reason for the extinction of children's game shows. Networks realize that kids will watch adult shows as well, and so they don't create entire game shows aimed toward them as they once did. Jordan even contends that adult game shows like Survivor are more beneficial to children than the game shows of yesteryear. "Before, it was just 'watch these families compete not to get slimed,'" she said. "Now, it's 'who got voted off the island and why?'" In other words, they make kids think.

College junior Alex Distell disagrees. "Adults have game shows, but kids can't relate to them," he said.

He believes that children's game shows "inspired a healthy sense of competition" that is lacking in today's programming. Watching teams or families "work together to achieve a goal" inspired children to go out and do something themselves, he contends.

While I'll admit that I never actually went out and did anything sporty as a child (let's face it - I had absolutely no motivation to be active coupled with the strength of an anorexic dragonfly), I do know that watching those shows allowed me to feel like a part of something, much as sport teams do with older kids and adults today. Jordan calls this "the work of the adolescent:" creating identities and figuring out who you are. While kids are working on who they're going to be for the rest of their lives, it helps to have groups to affiliate with.

In elementary school, Monday's scene on the Walk would have been commonplace; much as Chargers and Raiders fans (I'm from California, so sue me) battle it out in the streets, so did devotees of the Silver Snakes or the Blue Barracudas.

Believe it or not, I wasn't even speaking directly to the would-be brawlers, but rather to two girls standing near them. This just goes to show how deeply the love for these shows runs in our age group.

As soon as I posed my question to my intended audience, one boy said pompously, "Oh, Silver Snakes, obviously."

"What?!" the other gasped, "I know you meant to say Blue Barracudas!"

Luckily, your friendly columnist-mediator was there to save the day. "Gentlemen," I chided softly. "Come on now, let's be adults. Everyone knows it's all about the Purple Parrots."

And then I ran.

Ali Jackson is a Wharton and College sophomore from Cardiff, Calif. Her e-mail address is jackson@dailypennsylvanian.com. All Talk and One Jackson appears on Mondays.

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