Throwback Tuesday-Legends of The Hidden Temple

Property of Stone Stanley Productions and Nickelodeon

Every kid growing up in the early 1990s remembers coming home from school to watch of Nickelodeon’s most successful game shows: Legends of the Hidden Temple. 

For three seasons, countless of preteens and teens arrived at Nickelodeon Studios in Universal Studios Florida, with four objectives on their mind:  try to cross The Moat, correctly answer questions on the Steps of Knowledge, outplay their opponents in the Temple Games, and race inside Olmec’s two-and-a-half floor temple in search of the artifact of the day.

Legends of the Hidden Temple first aired on Nickelodeon on September 11, 1993. The show was basically Jeopardy meets Raiders of the Lost Ark.   The contestants had to combine brainpower and athletic skills in order to be one of the two people who go inside the Temple.    Before the game was recorded, producers paired up 12 preteens or teens together in six classic teams:  Red Jaguars, Blue

, Green Monkeys, Orange Iguanas, Purple Parrots and the Silver Snakes.   During the opening, either host Kurt Fogg or Olmec (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker) in later seasons explained the crossing the Moat activity.   The first four teams that made it across the moat went on to the Steps of Knowledge.

During this stage of the competition, the contestants and audience heard a legend about an object of great importance that included: King Tut’s cobra staff, the golden goblet of Attila the Hun and Mary Shelley’s mysterious manuscript.   After each legend, the teams were given a set of questions; the first two teams that answered each of these correctly were going to the Temple Games.

The Temple Games represented the third round of the competition. Teams were playing for “Pendants of Life” so that the teams were able to protect themselves from the dreaded Temple Guards who guarded the rooms inside of Olmec’s temple.   The first two games highlighted the strengths of the individual team while the final game saw how the team worked together.     At the end of the round, the team who won the most pendants was sent to the temple.   If there was a tie, Olmec asked one final question and the team who answered it correctly won the right to head to the Temple.

The final round of the show featured the winning team trying to retrieve the object of the day from Olmec’s temple within three minutes.  There were 12 different rooms inside the temple.  One of the most beloved rooms was The Shrine of the Silver Monkey, which was the only room to stay on for the entire three seasons.   To complicate the team’s journey, three temple guards assigned to protect three specific rooms inside the temple.  If a contestant was inside that room, the temple guard would demand that they would give them a Pendant of Life, however if they went into another room, a temple guard would take them out of the temple and it would be the other partner’s turn to try their luck.   If they were successful, the team would win rewards that lead up to a huge family vacation or a trip to Space Camp.

In its’ two-year run, Legends aired over 120 episodes.  However, it was stated in a 1996 Orlando Sentinel article that while the show was up for a fourth season on Nickelodeon, but an official stated that it was unsure of its’ status.  Unfortunately for many fans, the popular TV show stopped producing new episodes by April 1996.

The show aired reruns on Nickelodeon from 1996 to 1998 and from 1999 to 2009 on Nickelodeon’s now defunct network: Nickelodeon Games and Sports Network.    To fans’ delight, the show’s reruns began to re-air in October on TeenNick’s popular 1990s program block: The 90s Are All That.