The course was learning all the basics of caring for children in New Jersey - safety, health, when to report child abuse, how to handle infants. I didn't think I'd need to know the last-named - I was working in an elementary school - but it's nice to know. The course took so long, I was still doing it while eating lunch. In fact, I was only 90 percent done with it when I called Uber. I partially wanted to get there on time, and I partially wanted to figure out where Thomas Sharp Elementary is. It was the only school in Collingswood that I didn't have an inkling of where it was. The driver thankfully arrived in even less than the 9 minutes listed and got me there in less than 5.
Listened to See How It Feels while I worked. Apparently, this would be the only recording the Brubeck Lavender Trio made. I can't find a listing of any others. It's too bad. There's some good material here. "Central" and "Aqua" on the first side and the title number on the second were especially good.
Thomas Sharp Elementary turned to be a small older brick building in West Collingswood. It took me a few minutes to figure out which door I was to go into. After that, I settled down right away to help with the kids and play dinosaurs with them. I won't go much further into it, but let's say I had a marvelous time. The kids were great. They were absolutely hilarious. I hadn't laughed so much in ages. They were all really good, too. One of the girls said they were in preschool, so some of them getting loud made sense. It's their ages. The head manager came by to help me with some paperwork that needed to be downloaded. Other than that, it was a very good first day.
I was so happy, I treated myself to dinner at one of the few restaurants on the White Horse Pike open on a Monday. The White Horse Pub was surprisingly quiet for the dinner hour. Most people were at the bar, watching Shrek or the news. By the time I was digging into a delicious turkey and bacon wrap and sweet potato fries with syrup, they'd switched to the Cardinals-Phillies game. The Phillies were just up to bat in the 1st when I left. (Alas, I found out later the Phils lost to the Cards 3-2.)
Yeah, I ended up walking home. I wasn't in a hurry, and I did want to eat out. As the other teachers remarked, it was sunny, hot, and humid earlier in the day. There was, however, a nice breeze that kept it from getting too hot. By the time I was heading down the White Horse Pike to East Clinton, the sun was gone, the wind had picked up, and it was a bit cooler.
When I got home, I took a shower, then finished up the safety/child abuse course. Finished the night with fantasy and stunt game shows for kids on YouTube. Probably the top kids' stunt show is still Double Dare. It's not only been Nickelodeon's premiere game show since 1986, it's the basis behind the vast majority of their subsequent games. By 1988, they were popular enough to bring in the occasional celebrities to play with the kids, like Jeremy Miller of Growing Pains and Candace Cameron of Full House in the episode I have here.
I loved Fun House even more in some ways. It was pretty much the same idea as Double Dare with no daring and a final "stunt" that had the kids racing each other and grabbing rings on some strange vehicle. (They push each other on colorful beds in the episode I have here.) I still prefer the run through the Fun House to Double Dare's difficult Obstacle Course. With the Fun House, all but the slowest kids were guaranteed to come out with some cash or good prizes, as they do here.
Nickelodeon upped the ante in 1993, crossing goofy Double Dare stunts with the extreme sports popular in the 90's and a fantasy storyline to create one of their best-regarded game shows, Legends of the Hidden Temple. Six teams attempt to get across a "moat" (pool of water). The four with the fastest times will face the giant talking stone head Olmec, who relates a tale of some artifact lost in the Hidden Temple. The kids then head down "The Steps of Knowledge" as Olmec asks questions about the story. The two teams who make it play mini-games to see which one will run through the Hidden Temple and rescue that artifact! No wonder this was a three-year-hit for Nick and was so well-remembered, the CW would briefly revive it for adults in 2021.
The Secrets of the Crypt Keeper's Haunted House traded fantasy for horror during its run on CBS Saturday mornings in 1996. The Crypt Keeper of Tales from the Crypt cackled and made catty remarks as two teams of kids dodged a giant skull shooting fireballs, grabbed letters to complete words in a room that's falling down, tried to pass basketballs in a wind tunnel, and ran along a corridor where floating objects would suddenly come into view and their partner would have to guess the phrase. Very weird, with its obvious early CGI, but the horror theme alone makes this unique.
Fantasy shows came from other lands, too. The Canadian Splatalot was inspired by the stunt show Wipeout, but it had more in common with Knights and Warriors. Kids competed on three different courses to capture the crown and become the King or Queen. As in Knights, there were actors dressed in stock fantasy trope costumes spraying the kids with water or slime balls and trying to take them down. It was a lot of fun to watch the kids try to storm the castle, even if hosts Jason Agnew and Matt Chin get a little annoying after a while.
The British really loved their fantasy-themed game shows. Knightmare had three kids describing rooms in a castle to a fourth now wearing a helmet. They have to use their heads and work together to get their friend away from obstacles that include an ogre and a demanding older witch. It's slow-moving and the green screen tech is pretty obvious, but this was state-of-the-art when it debuted in 1987, including one of the first uses of virtual reality on a TV show.
The Scottish show The Raven took the medieval competition back outside. The mysterious title host leads six apprentices through three challenges based on knight tests. Every couple of weeks, one kid would be eliminated, until a young knight was declared the Ultimate Warrior! I can definitely see why this was a smash hit from 2002 to 2010 on the CBBC. It was so authentically medieval, romantic, and steeped in lore, it had three spin-offs that went further into its mythology.
Live the ultimate kid fantasy of being a knight, an explorer, or a paranormal investigator with these imaginative games!
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