Meet the stupidest people you have ever seen (Crystal Maze, The)

Member Name: annette_tr9

Product:	Crystal Maze, The
Date:	01/10/02 (653 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny, good presenters

Disadvantages: not on any more

We are unfortunately no longer blessed with the Crystal Maze on our television screens. In it’s time, Crystal Maze was a great game show, one where you could join in and yell at the television at the contestants for being so stupid.

Crystal Maze started off being presented by Richard O’Brian. I thought that he was the best presenter, there’s nothing funnier than watching some skinny little bloke running around like a lunatic to add a bit of humour into your life. Afterwards Ed Tudor Pole took over who was funny but you can’t beat Richard O’Brian.

Every week a team of contestants worked through the four zones, Industrial, Future, Medieval and Aztec (in the later series the Industrial zone was replaced with the Water zone). In each zone there are lots of different rooms, each with a different puzzle. The leader of contestants gets to choose which sort of game they want to play (mental, skill, mystery or physical) and which person will play it. The player then gets a certain time limit to play the game and try and win a crystal. If they don’t get out of the room in time (with or without the crystal) they get locked in and the only way to get them out is to sacrifice a crystal. At the end of the show their crystals are added up and for each they get 5 seconds in the crystal dome where they are blasted with gale force winds and have to try and catch 200 gold tickets. To make things even more complicated there are silver tickets as well and for each silver ticket they collect, one gold ticket is taken off the total. If they get their 200 gold tickets they win big prizes and if they don’t they are sent packing with a lovely crystal in a box.

The novelty of Crystal Maze is the stupidity of the contestants. The games are all easy, very easy (well, they look it anyway) but still they find it impossible to complete them. They get in the room and start yelling, “there’s a kettle, a teab
ag and a cup…….I don’t know what to do, I’m coming out!!!!!!!!”. Useless. Even stupider, when their fellow contestants are yelling at them to get out of the room because the time limit is nearly up they just stand in the middle looking vacant until they are locked in.

It probably was a lot different on set but on the television all of the rooms and zones were set up really well. I did hear that they did just one zone at a time, set one up and films everyone for the entire series, which would make sense. The Futuristic zone was all computers and technical looking, the Aztec was set in a desert with pyramids, medieval was in the dungeons and the Industrial was all machines. In later series with Ed Tudor Pole the Industrial zone was replaced with a water zone which was set on a ship.

Choosing great presents made this show, both added humour into the program making it great fun to watch. Unfortunately the only was you will get to see the Crystal Maze now is re-runs on uk gold or something! Because the programs are that old now the dress sense in them has something to be desired as well but you can laugh at that as well as the contestants trying to working out how to get the crystal.

Summary: