The Full Story of Double Dare

A cookie company walked into a struggling cable network and asked for a game show. Somebody in the room remembered a board game called Mouse Trap and wondered aloud what would happen if you made the ball a live child. And the messiest program on television, a show built on buckets of goo and whipped cream, ended up hosted by a man who went home and spent hours straightening the fringe on his rugs.

Double Dare premiered on Nickelodeon on October 6, 1986 as the network's first game show, created by Geoffrey Darby, Michael Klinghoffer, Dee LaDuke, and Robert Mittenthal on a promise to make each episode for under $10,000. Hosted by magician Marc Summers and taped in Philadelphia, it more than tripled Nickelodeon's afternoon audience, spawned Super Sloppy and Family editions, ran until February 7, 1993 across 482 episodes, and remains the network's longest-running game show.

A cookie company and a board game

Double Dare did not begin as a vision. It began as a sales call. "A production group approached Nickelodeon with Nabisco in tow," co-creator and executive producer Geoffrey Darby told Thrillist in 2016. "Nabisco thought a game show would be a good way to sponsor television for kids that wouldn't be the animated stuff, because what are you going to animate for Nabisco, y'know? Nabisco makes cookies."

The outside pitch was not good enough. Nickelodeon president Gerry Laybourne told the team to build a better one, and she did it in the open. "In the office, nobody was hierarchically more important than anyone else," Laybourne told Thrillist, "but the team that did Double Dare was Dee LaDuke, Bob Mittenthal, Mike Klinghoffer, and Geoffrey, who was the only person who'd ever produced anything before." Darby brought a framework: "I remember telling the group the three rules of game shows: it is 40% game, 50% jeopardy, and 10% production value."

The idea that made it Double Dare came out of that room, and Darby has never been sure exactly who said it. "One of us, I don't know who, maybe Dee, said she had always loved a board game called Mouse Trap," he told Thrillist. "It was basically a Rube Goldberg machine. We thought, 'Wouldn't it be fun if you made a big Rube Goldberg machine, but instead of a ball, it was a person?'" In the AV Club's 2016 oral history he put it in the first person: "I always wanted to put a live kid through a Rube Goldberg machine where they would be the pinball in [the game] Mouse Trap."

The budget was the other founding fact. "I promised we would bring the show in under $10,000 an episode," Darby told the AV Club. That promise shaped everything that followed, from the props to the city the show was shot in.

The magician who got the job

Finding a host took longer than building the set. "Geoffrey watched something like 1,200 tapes, or did something like 1,200 interviews," Laybourne told Thrillist. "It got down to one point where he wanted to audition my husband, who believe me, would be the worst possible host of any kids' show. It was like, 'Geoffrey, you are so desperate this is scaring me.' I think we found Marc Summers something like two weeks before we went into the studio."

Summers was a working game-show professional and, unusually, a card-carrying magician. "Marc was a magician. He was actually a member of the magicians' league, y'know?" Darby told Thrillist. "He was a real bona fide magician. He had an ability to connect with both kids and adults, because magic is often done that way." Summers had grown up on the genre. As he told Thrillist: "I grew up watching Bob Barker. I was a Price is Right freak and a Jeopardy freak. Back then, NBC, CBS, and ABC would have game shows on from 9 in the morning until 12 or 1 o'clock in the afternoon. When you were sick from school with chickenpox or faking it, you would sit home and watch game shows all day."

Summers is also the first to say the story of how he was cast has hardened into lore he cannot verify. "Everybody I've ever met says they auditioned for that job," he told Thrillist. "But here's the story I got: they initially wanted Soupy Sales to do it. Then it worked out that he was too old, according to the story I was told. And I was told they had offered the job to Dana Carvey on the same night he got the SNL offer. He took SNL. I've always meant to thank him for that."

Making it okay to not know

The mess was not the first idea. The kindness was. "We decided that if we were going to do a trivia-based game show, we didn't want there to be a punishment," Mittenthal told Thrillist. "We didn't want to embarrass kids for not knowing an answer. So physical challenges were a way to make it okay to not know. I think there were even times when kids knew an answer, but wanted to do a physical challenge."

That design choice is why the show poured goo instead of buzzing a wrong answer. A team that could not answer a trivia question could "dare," then "double dare," and finally take a physical challenge, and the physical challenge was always messier than the last. The gunk had rules of its own that the crew invented on the fly, and even the mess had limits. "We tried [to do poop-related obstacles] but they were not allowed," Klinghoffer told the AV Club. "We couldn't show a butt, but we could do a mouth. We could do a nose. We even got turned down for an armpit at one point in time. I'm still not even sure why." The green goo itself, the substance Nickelodeon had already been dumping on kids since You Can't Do That on Television, has its own tangled history, and the obstacle course grew into an engineering project all its own.

From one show to an empire of slop

Nickelodeon chose Philadelphia to keep the promise on the budget. Production originated at the studios of PBS affiliate WHYY-TV, which had just opened a new production wing, and the network judged Philadelphia cheaper than New York or Los Angeles. The seasons were enormous by cable standards, roughly 65 episodes shot in tight runs, and the set paid for it. "The good part was that after a day of hot lights, it smelled like death," announcer John Harvey told the AV Club. Summers agreed, with a cleaner nose: "The first day it smelled good, and by day four it smelled like an old high school cafeteria." He also remembered the floor turning on the crew between seasons. "When they unrolled it, anybody who touched that floor broke out in the most disgusting blisters. It was like everybody had leprosy," he told the AV Club.

The audience did not care what it smelled like. Almost immediately after its debut, Double Dare more than tripled viewership for Nickelodeon's afternoon lineup and became the most-watched original daily program on cable television. Success bred versions. A syndicated continuation premiered February 22, 1988. A Saturday-night Family Double Dare with four-member family teams ran on Fox from April 3 to July 23, 1988, then was cancelled before a second order over "creative differences." The syndicated show was revamped as Super Sloppy Double Dare on January 22, 1989, its production moving mid-run from WHYY in Philadelphia to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Nickelodeon launched its own Family Double Dare on October 6, 1990, taped at the newly opened Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, where the set became a stop on the studio tour. The original run ended February 7, 1993 after 482 episodes. The show came back as Double Dare 2000 with host Jason Harris, airing January 22 to November 10, 2000, and again from June 25, 2018 to December 20, 2019 with Liza Koshy hosting and Summers producing.

The host's private war

The most durable fact about Double Dare is the one nobody on the set knew at the time. Summers had obsessive-compulsive disorder, severe enough to consume hours of his day, and he hosted the messiest show on television for years without telling his bosses. "The thing to me that's so amazing, is Marc never told us anything about his OCD," Laybourne told Thrillist. "He never complained. He never mentioned it. When you think about the fact that this guy put himself through being the host of the messiest game show in the world, that's pretty amazing to me."

Summers has told the story himself many times, and it has not stayed the same. On The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1997 he framed it as absurd theater: "It was like a bad sitcom. There I was hosting a television show where people were throwing green buckets of goo on each other, and I was having a good time... If you watch the first 65 episodes, I never got a drop on me." He wrote a full account in his 1999 book Everything in Its Place: My Trials and Triumphs with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. By the 2016 oral history his framing had turned protective of the show: "All that OCD stuff has been blown out of freakin' proportion," he told Thrillist. "I wasn't going to let my OCD screw up my opportunity to host the kind of show I had always wanted to host. Yes I have it, yes I lived through it, but I never let it affect the show in any way, shape, or form."

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 1997, The Oprah Winfrey Show. Summers goes public with the central irony, that a man with contamination-focused OCD hosted a show built on goo, and volunteers the detail that he kept himself clean through the entire first 65-episode season.
• 1999, Everything in Its Place. Summers publishes a book-length account of the disorder, moving the story from a talk-show confession to a documented, first-person record.
• 2013, Slimed!. Mathew Klickstein's oral history of Nickelodeon's golden age assembles the creators and crew in one place for the first time, establishing the Nabisco pitch, the open-office creation, and the Mouse Trap origin as the canonical account.
• 2016, AV Club and Thrillist. The 30th-anniversary oral histories, both drawing on the same principals, add the production texture: the under-$10,000 promise, the death-smelling floor, the blister-inducing set, the rejected armpit obstacle.
• 2018, revival press. With the Koshy-hosted revival, Summers returns to the OCD story in interviews tied to the new show, now as a survivor's account rather than a revelation.

The drift worth naming is in Summers himself. His OCD telling moves from candid in 1997, when he described avoiding every drop of slime for a full season, to defensive in 2016, when he insisted that he "never let it affect the show in any way, shape, or form." Both are true statements from the same man about the same years, and the distance between them is the story. The creation lore drifts more gently: Darby cannot say for certain whether Dee LaDuke first named Mouse Trap, and Summers openly flags the Soupy Sales and Dana Carvey casting tale as "the story I got," not a fact he witnessed. The dates and episode counts in the record are settled. The memories around them are not.

The honest bottom line

Double Dare was a cookie company's marketing idea, built for less than the cost of a used car per episode, shot in a public-television building because it was cheap, on a set that smelled like a dumpster by Thursday. Its obstacles were foam and Cheez Whiz, its trivia was an excuse, and its host was quietly at war with the exact kind of mess he stood in front of for a living. None of that diminishes it. The show got one thing exactly right, that a kid should never be punished for not knowing an answer, and it turned that small mercy into the loudest, gooiest, most joyful half hour on cable. It handed a fragile network its identity, and it is still the longest-running game show Nickelodeon has ever made.

Sources

• Thrillist, "An Oral History of Nickelodeon's Double Dare," 2016 (interviews with Geoffrey Darby, Gerry Laybourne, Michael Klinghoffer, Bob Mittenthal, Marc Summers, and Mathew Klickstein).
• The A.V. Club, "'It smelled like death': An oral history of the Double Dare obstacle course," 2016 (interviews with the creators, crew, Marc Summers, John Harvey, and Robin Russo).
• The Oprah Winfrey Show, 1997, Marc Summers interview (quoted in the Thrillist oral history).
• Marc Summers, Everything in Its Place: My Trials and Triumphs with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999.
• Wikipedia, "Double Dare (1986 game show)" (air dates, version timeline, production locations, episode count, and network record, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the complete history of Nickelodeon slime and how the Double Dare obstacle course was built. BobbyAndJason.com covers the show in Double Dare: The Messy Game Show That Defined 80s Kids TV.

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