oh my golly you lucky!! LOL! was it special ordered gunge or was it watered down shaving foam? either way green and white looks good on you!

It's the real stuff - you wouldn't believe the size of the bag of natrosol that's in the utility room... I'm told it's usually colored with poster paint so that it's totally opaque, but it had a bit of shaving foam in it here to give it its color. And even though it looks translucent when it's thin, it's... really thick stuff!

And you know you deserved every drip of it! ;)

On a related note, are big rusty iron tanks going to be featuring in IZ any time soon? I couldn't help but think of it when I was there, but they look almost too rusted to be safe for use on a set. Perhaps if they get an 'abandoned derelict' zone, or something? Although that'd be taking the series dangerously close to Scavengers territory, and let's face it, Alex is more than a match for John Leslie in Starship Troopers gear any day of the week. :P

D.F.

Scavengers, I rediscovered that only a couple of months ago :) Even though I'd forgotten about it, it was very much a subconscious influence on IZ - perhaps more so than the Crystal Maze, with Scavengers' sort of... more improvised-seeming games from the surrounding environment, sometimes. I used to love it, but admittedly I can recognize how rubbish it was now - it was a shame, because I think it was a really good idea and they just ran out of money after building the set to hire anyone who could write or act. Something else that was mentioned to me when I rediscovered it was that the British love to fictionalize their game shows... which I can certainly see what with that and Knightmare in particular - two programmes in which contestants could 'die'!

I've always imagined IZ to have the general sort of... abandoned 'dark' look as most of its decor, especially the sections where they're deeper into the base. Really, the backstory that I came up with for it post-IZ4 isn't all that different from Scavengers' one, excuse plot though it is :)

Certainly those iron tanks wouldn't have been out of place in the Industrial Zone of the Crystal Maze...

I have to say that I really enjoy your writing - I'm a big fan of old game shows such as the Crystal Maze as well as the old gunge game shows - I was absolutely shocked that they worked so well together.

Thank you so much :) It's always wonderful to hear from new people who are into this whole thing, both from a general... 80s game show perspective and for interest in the gunge itself, and knowing that people enjoy my writing is a huge boost to me completing more of it! I miss the spirit of the older game shows, where I always got a greater feeling that people on them were doing this purely for the fun of it.

Industrial Zone's format was fairly... accidental, to start off with - at the stage where I was writing the first one, I was just throwing ideas around as they came to me in half-formed memories and organizing them into a rough story, and all of that eventually came together in the form of this game show where the players were led around a large set Crystal Maze-style. And given that, when it was taking shape enough to think about giving it a name, I decided to name it as an homage to this part of the original maze that was replaced with the Ocean Zone later on. The look of the Crystal Maze Industrial Zone definitely isn't far off what I was going for :)

Wow. I just now noticed that the names are the same. D'oh! Suddenly my previous comment sounds very inane.

The older game shows really had a much lighter, friendly spirit about them. Wheel of Fortune is probably one of the few modern game shows I could imagine myself going on - even if you lose, they ask "Did you at least have fun? Here's a thousand dollars anyway!"

It's really funny watching clips from shows now on YouTube that I saw as a child - especially the old Nickelodeon stuff. It amuses me when I recognize clips from, say, Wild and Crazy Kids, and remember which team won even though I haven't seen the show in a decade or so.

That rather depends on how you define 'fun,' I think.

For certain values of fun, Only Connect would probably qualify (What? Insanely difficult quizes are part of the national psyche. Granted Only Connect involves less alcohol than the average pub quiz, but...)

...And for certain values of people, Wipeout/Total Wipeout (US or British depending) probably does (...And for myself, the Krypton Factor assault course always looked fun)

While there's been a darker streak to gameshows lately, (The Million Dollar Drop, Distraction, etc) it really isn't hard to find lighter, friendlier ones...

...Although there was a time in the mid 00s that you needed to delve into kids television to find it (Which is capable of doing 'dark and fun' with stuff like Trapped, I note... Though there is a cultural bias going on there: As a kid I was raised on innocent fun such as child eating wolves*, and I note that in the mid 00s kids were being raised on innocent fun such as child eating Hyenas... With identical personalities to the child eating wolves I was raised on. There's nothing in fictional harm that prevents copious amounts of fun, and while I wouldn't describe Distraction as 'fun' I don't think there's anything in the concept of betting that prevents fun, it's probably a presentation thing [Presumably hence why Mastermind comes across as Serious Competition while Only Connect comes across as good fun despite having harder questions... And why am I suddenly imagining someone trying to solve a connection wall against a gunge clock?])

...Though stuff like Mastermind has never been 'light,' even if answering difficult questions is a recreational activity for some people...

*...I try not to think about how much of the art and fiction I enjoy on here can be traced back to childhood...

'Dark and fun', that's also a good phrase to describe the mood that I'm going for here... and perhaps a couple of the shows mentioned above in the thread! I was actually impressed with Wipeout from what I've seen of it because I had previously thought that things like that would just be untelevisable now because of all the over-stringent health and safety concerns, but... here's a giant obstacle course that involves dive-bombing into slop (on at least certain obstacles) again. I haven't seen any full episodes of it yet, though, and am terrified that it might have been twatted up by concentrating on the contestants' lifetime struggles.

I think that our childhood messed us all up, so to speak :) But I get the feeling that life would be far less fun without the little... insanities that it implanted into my brain.

I don't think Wipeout is anywhere near as dangerous as it looks (And even the inferior British adaptation doesn't do life stories central for it), the injuries on it are no worse than Gladiators used to get (and, actually, probably far lighter; sprains, twists, and bruised knees are an inherent dangers to any physical activity, the broken leg in the first series of Gladiators? Not so much), I think it just looks more dangerous because the equipment and environment doesn't look like a sports arena and sports equipment.

While you are, to a certain extent, getting a dark feel, and you're certainly getting a fun feel, in TIZ, I'm not sure you're getting to the levels of dark and fun Jungle Run got towards the end of its life - The Monkey Trap game is a good example of the 'dark' I think, particularly if it ended, as it sometimes did, with two kids trapped in the monkey traps, and The Crystal Maze was heading in that sort of direction, albeit very, very, slowly, by the end of its run (To which I point as evidence the addition of automatic lock ins as of S2, the 'reverse game' (easy pick up of crystal, then play game to get out) which I think was S3, S5's double whammy of a reverse game with a bad joke set up ("When is a safe not a safe? When you are locked in it."), and the Ocean World zone with the build-your-own-escape route rope ladder thing and S6's "Light six lights to get crystal, light six lights to get out" thing - Though I think Dark and Fun is manifest when it comes to both Terror Towers and (much) later, Scratch 'n' Sniff's Den O' Doom - The former I think you grew up with in part, had losing contestants, off screen, eaten by werewolves and winning ones becoming a guest of Terror Towers forever, the latter came to my attention due to gameshow fandom and combined messy content with the context that losing contestants would become lunch for the show's hosts (Who were basically Bro and Bro reincarnated as hyenas to avoid copyright issues with WB... Something that frustrated me at the time because it was like being cruelly robbed a source of nostalgia.)

Actually, I think the most uncomfortable element of Den O' Doom for me was it was like the show's developers had reached into my mind and put on screen almost exactly the show I was imagining when I was age 6... Thus completely nullifying any chance I ever had of reviewing that show objectively. Was it good? Was it bad? I have no freaking idea, all I know is it's the sort of show a six year old could invent because I thought pretty much the exact same format up when playing with my bricks. [...I probably should note here that I was playing out gameshows with my bricks, using the longer ones to represent contestants, not idly thinking of gameshows while building with bricks. Just, you know, to emphasize how big a dork I was...] - And I also don't know if kids gameshows being the sort of thing that six year olds could invent is a good thing or a bad thing...

And I quite agree that life would be far less fun without the weirdness implanted into my brain by my childhood.

And to save you the bother of looking it up yourself, incidentally, 101 Ways to Leave A Gameshow is hideously paced, is closer to '101 ways to fall off a tower', and as far as I can tell the only mess in it is similar to the Tour of the Great House with lower production values, only instead of a mostly horizontal ghost-train style ride it's a slow decent via an entirely vertical tunnel... The actual content isn't not exactly dark in its presentation, and it does come across as fun in the same sort of way that a bungee jump might be fun*... Which doesn't translate to screen at all due to the horrific pacing - Might be worth watching the Escape Route round, don't worry about any of the other bits.

*Though my definition of fun might be biased here, what with a few weeks back practicing falling during rock climbing lessons. *gets about 10-12 feet off the ground* "OK, you two stop belaying him now." *climbs about 10-12 feet higher* "You can let go now." - More fear, less adrenalin, than coming off while lead climbing, actually, about same distance to drop if your clips are 5-6 feet apart and you fall at a clip, but the fact that with the one its sudden and with the other you're deliberately dropping completely changes the feel of the thing. Still fun, though. So, yes, I am implying that falling off of tall things when safely harnessed up is fun. But, as I said earlier, fun in this sort of context is highly nebulous... And, yeah, if I were to win that show I'd probably want to take the trap door rather than the stairs (Which is basically the 'gunge or prize' problem, where you're giving an incentive to not win to folk who'd enjoy getting gunged, only applied to adrenalin junkies... And which in the vast majority of IZ games you avoid... Or, at least, for IZ as a whole you avoid.)

This threading's getting a bit weird, isn't it? Yes, I remember Gladiators being responsible for a few broken limbs (mostly that the event called "Tilt" had a few people landing on their necks), and that was brought back for a new series, although I realized that it had become a bit ridiculous for its own good over here quite quickly. But things like that do, at least, show that health and safety haven't got their iron grip on everything yet - you're very right that to enjoy yourself, you sometimes need to take and accept risks (which can always be diminished, but not eliminated).

I didn't really watch Jungle Run, I think it came a bit after my time, but I'll make an effort to look it up! Going back in time, I remember being quite scared of the games on The Crystal Maze that involved being trapped and then having to work their way out - the second part of the evolution that you mentioned) the first time I saw them - but then again, I was scared of an extraordinary amount of things at that age. And despite my fear of them, I certainly used to make up things like you describe, when very young :) It's strange thinking back to the things that we used to do when we were just discovering our fascination of things, and finding out just how similar they were - someone else in the community mentioned that he had a sort of "trapped in mechanical maze" fantasy that was extremely similar to one of my own. It's just that normally, nobody realizes because they're not shared!

I have vaguely heard of 101 Ways... all I know of it is that one of the rounds involved someone being expelled from the tower by (quote) "being hit up the bum by a giant hammer", and if that isn't a worthwhile demonstration of the classic British sense of humour, I don't know what is :)

Yes, "friendly" is a good word to use for that mood from the older shows - I definitely got that sense from them, that even though they might involve things that involved being slightly undignified, the idea was that you were supporting these people and that it was kept... fun. Now, America in particular (which I've since moved to) seems to muck everything up by making it a reality whingefest in turning people against each other - the idea of the physical game show seems to have strangely vanished. All I can do while watching The Crystal Maze and so on on Youtube is wonder why they're not on any more!

I know what you mean about the memories, as well - it's really strange to suddenly be given the opportunity to rediscover them, when other people dig out their video archives and post them up. Recently I was happy to rediscover a programme called Eyespy that was one of the very first things that I remembered starting me down the road into ending up writing this stuff.

Heh - I just noticed that I have a slight cultural bias here. I'm a college student from the US (North Carolina, to be exact) who doesn't currently have a TV. So I'm... uhh... a little unfamiliar with the current state of shows on TV, and was also looking at more of the US state of affairs. As to my other comment, I have a little bit of an anxiety complex, so I'd be really particular about what TV shows I would be on. There are certainly many modern game shows (both from the US and UK) that I enjoy along with the older stuff.

I grew up in the late 90's / early 2000's era when game shows were kind of dying out. Most of what I remember seeing (aside from, say, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune) was reruns - both on the traditional game show side (Supermarket Sweep comes to mind as a show I loved as a kid) and the Nickelodeon type stuff. Much of my knowledge (especially of the older stuff and shows from the UK) comes from watching stuff online.

I guess I grew up in the Slime Time Live era of Nickelodeon - which was pretty decent until they did all of those crappy spin-offs. I always secretly wanted to be on one of those shows. GUTS was probably my favorite at the time, but one of the slime-related game shows like Double Dare or Fun House looks like they would have been a lot of fun. By the way, those pictures make it look like you had a lot of fun - I'm secretly really jealous of you.

Wow, I'm getting nostalgic - I'll have to put all of this into a journal post in the near future.

North Carolina, I was there for the first time just a couple of days ago! (Not on purpose, mind you.) I don't watch a tremendous amount of television in this country, so I'm not really all that up on the actual selection of things that are shown... all I hear of are the really terrible ones that stand out enough to get coverage on the things that I import from the UK. You'll have seen the kind of stuff that the UK used to do to people in the early 90s through your Youtube adventures :)

A video was taken, showing the full extent of my pathetic whimpering as it's about to start (I really hadn't realized my voice could get that high), but I'm identifiable for at least a short time in it! It's... sort of terrifying being under that thing (and skin-crawling after the event), but they're not exactly 'bad' feelings at the same time - I've now experienced the sort of fun nervousness I've put so many characters through. I'd had a repressed fascination of it for a very long time as well, and now that's a twenty-year-old curiosity satisfied... I've found myself oddly proud of it, as if now indoctrinated into a small group of people through some sort of unholy baptism. A large order of industrial food thickener, and you too can experience... this!

Nice pictures. ^^

Oh wow, that looks great fun.