November 17, 1989: Double Dare To Use Real "Physical Challenges"

November 17, 1989: Double Dare To Use Real “Physical Challenges”
Producers for Double Dare, the popular children’s game show filmed at WHYY’s Independence Mall studios, yesterday announced that the program’s upcoming season would use real-life “physical challenges” to determine its winners. “While catching pies in one’s pants or filling containers with slime are decent measures of skill, we’ve come to feel that that approach [see video below] has run its course,” said Michael Klinghoffer, one of the Nickelodeon show’s creators. “And besides, it’s much more exciting to watch a kid in a helmet run across 6th St. when the light is changing.”

Double Dare host Marc Summers listed a few of the hair-raising acts that contestants would be asked to pull in the show’s fifth season. “We’re going to have the kids sit, by themselves, in the Spring Garden [subway] station for fifteen minutes,” he said, reading from a list of potentially harmful stunts. “We’re also thinking it might be interesting to have them walk across the Ben Franklin Bridge and back after dark.” Summers assistant Jean Chorba added, “If a kid can do those things, he’d be far more deserving of a prize than if he could, say, pull a flag out of a giant foot’s toe cheese.”

Prospective contestants, meanwhile, seemed disappointed that they would not be able to slide into a vat of purple goo, root through an oversized waffle’s synthetic syrup, or slip around in a puddle of vanilla ice cream. “I want to do the fun stuff on Double Dare,” moped New Jersey resident Dave Croatto, 10. “It doesn’t sound fun to sit on a homeless guy’s lap for thirty seconds.” Klinghoffer, though, insisted that the new approach would be just as entertaining. “I think that the real-world aspect of the new challenges is very compelling,” he said as he walked through northwest Camden, notepad in hand. “We’re going to make these kids earn their trips to Space Camp.”