A lot of cool news has come out of San Diego Comic-Con this weekend. Teasers and trailers for dozens of movies and TV shows, surprise casting announcements, exciting new projects and more!
But one piece of news that might slipped under the radar was perhaps the puzzliest news of the convention: they’re making a Legends of the Hidden Temple movie!
In the mid-1990s, Legends of the Hidden Temple was a kids game show, a mix of puzzle-solving and Indiana Jones-esque adventure, an award-winning show that was all about cooperation, strategy, and outwitting foes rather than overpowering them.
Six teams of two would compete to see who would win the opportunity to enter the Temple and try to acquire the episode’s magical artifact (which changed from show to show). Host Kirk Fogg and a giant red-eyed stone head known as Olmec would challenge the players with trivia and physical challenges to see who would earn the right to test their speed and wits against the Temple.
I was a huge fan of the show because it didn’t rely solely on physical ability like so many other kids game shows did, and I’ve always been a sucker for Indiana Jones-style derring-do.
After crossing the moat, the members of the four teams that made it across first — be they the Purple Parrots, the Green Monkeys, the Red Jaguars, the Silver Snakes, the Blue Barracudas, or the Orange Iguanas — would find themselves on the Steps of Knowledge, answering questions about today’s artifact.
The first two teams to descend the steps would move on to the third round, where they would complete physical challenges to win the Pendants of Life, discs that would come in handy in the final round when the winning team braved the Temple.
The Temple itself was the puzzliest part of the show. As one team member tackled the labyrinthine Temple, hunting for the artifact, the other team member would wait in the wings, watching their performance. Moving from room to room by solving puzzles or accomplishing different tasks, the competitor would try to avoid the temple guards as they traversed the Temple.
(Those Pendants of Life could be exchanged for your freedom if you were captured by a temple guard. Get captured without one, and your turn is over, and the other member of the team would follow the path you’d made previously.)
The team as a whole had three minutes to find the artifact and escape the Temple in order to win the game.
And now, it’s going to be a TV movie!
It’s fun to see how much of the show they’ve worked into this trailer, and I hope the same adventuresome puzzle-solving spirit is an integral part of the storytelling.
After all, what good is a hidden temple without some Goonies-style puzzling?
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