Entertainment
Kids Today Will Never Understand A Generation's Hatred For The Shrine Of The Silver Monkey
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
If you read that headline, and immediately was filled with the rage of a thousand burning suns, let this be your reminder to stretch. We may be getting old, but we still get unreasonably angry over the inability to put together a three-piece statue. It had a top, a middle, and a base. That’s it. It’s not difficult. Nickelodeon’s Legend of the Hidden Temple started airing in 1993, went off the air in 1995, but its impact has traumatized a generation.
Legends Of The Hidden Temple Was An Afterschool Staple
Legend of the Hidden Temple was one of the many game shows filmed at the network’s Universal Studio location in the early 90s. This one pit six teams against each other in a race across the temple moat. The Red Jaguars, Green Monkeys, Blue Barracudas, Orange Iguanas, Silver Snakes, and the best of them, Purple Parrots, were all comprised of one boy and one girl, and after the race, only four would be left to descend the Steps of Knowledge. This was the shoe-horned in “educational” component of the show with questions centered around the legendary artifact they have to receive from the Temple at the end of the game.
Round 3 let teams win pendants, and the team with the most at the end of three games was able to go on a run through the Temple. This was why every kid was watching Legend of the Hidden Temple in the first place. We all daydreamed about making the run, going from room to room, evading temple guards, and getting the artifact. Waiting for every team at some point during the run was the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. It spelled doom for all of the idiot pre-teens.
That’s what I thought at least, watching from the floor after I got home from school. The pieces of the monkey were set around the room at random, and yet, for some reason, countless kids would try to put the head on the base. Or install the middle without the base in place. Even pure guessing trial and error should get them to the right combination. THERE WERE ONLY THREE PIECES. What I didn’t know as a kid watching, was the depths of evil that the show’s producers tapped into when designing the Silver Monkey.
I knew it was frustrating for the contestants between the host, Kirk Fogg, the studio lights, the audience cheering them on, and the very tight three minute time limit. What I didn’t know until later was that the statue was purposely designed to be as difficult as possible. The head of the statue has a pole that goes through the middle and the base at the right angle, will hit a button at the bottom that opens the door to the next room. It was especially brutal for the shorter contestants.
Now, host Kirk Fogg and co-host Olmec (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker) never let on that there was an added degree of difficulty. The angle was purposely designed to be hard, and looking back, the pedestal was set up juuuuust high enough to where it would be hard to aim the rod. Every kid watching Legends of the Hidden Temple was getting angry at the wrong people.
The Forgotten Legend Of The Hidden Temple Movie
In 2016, Nickelodeon aired the TV movie Legend of the Hidden Temple, starring DC’s Hawkgirl Isabela Merced as Sadie, which brought back Fogg and Baker to reprise their roles. Of course, it turns out the Temple isn’t a run-down theme park attraction, but an actual Temple. Sadie and her two younger siblings have to run through the Temple, retrieve the pendant, and get out. And yes, they have to solve the Shrine of the Silver Monkey.
The Nickelodeon movie was watched by 1.6 million viewers, and then, in 2021, The CW brought back the original game show, except now, it was for adults. Slapping in reality television style confessionals between the rounds helped pad out each episode to 60-minutes, but also wrecked the flow of the game show. To the shock of absolutely no one, it was cancelled after one season.
Legend of the Hidden Temple only aired for 120 episodes over three seasons, but it was one of those shows that felt like it was on forever. The entire genre of cheap game shows made for kids has been overtaken now by YouTubers. It’s how MrBeast got so big in the first place. If kids today wanted to see why the mere mention of the Shrine of the Silver Monkey causes eye twitches in Millennials, they can catch the entire original run on Paramount+.