A Problem I Have with Lori-Beth Denberg
it’s late, so i’m going to try and make this quick.
our tv here in new mexico only gets about twenty channels. fortunately, it gets abc and nbc, which allows mark and i to fulfill our weekly Lost and Office obsessions. but whenever people just want to relax for a bit and watch some tube, there is rarely anything good on.
except of course, for our new favorite network: Nickelodeon GAS. the “GAS” stands for “games and sports,” which is fairly descriptive considering that the only thing this network shows is reruns of old nickelodeon game shows. it took us a while to realize this, but in fact this channel only shows six programs at any given time of day. those six are: legends of the hidden temple, GUTS, figure it out, nick arcade, get the picture, and double dare 2000. no matter what hour of the day you tune in to nick GAS, you are guaranteed that one of those shows is on. it is a sad truth that more often than not, whatever nick GAS is showing is much better than anything else on tv.
that being said, we have been watching a lot of early- to mid-90s nickelodeon game show programming. it is to the point where i can immediately identify any episode of legends of the hidden temple as belonging to season 1, 2, or 3 (for example, they didn’t implement the real-time map of the contestants’ progress through the temple until season 3. pathetic, right?)
what is more depressing about this network, however, is the fact that it is obviously completely automated from some barren control room. a nice aspect of nick GAS is that it has no commercials; instead, there’s original sports and games-related content that was produced at least 5 or 6 years ago. how do we know this? one of the segments features the tennis player maria sharapova, and her age is listed at 15. she is 21 now.
anyway, as i mentioned above, one of the six shows on this channel is figure it out, hosted by the lovely summer sanders (whom we now all have a crush on – her and moira quirk, the ref from GUTS). far less lovely is lori-beth denberg (of All That fame), who is one of the panelists on figure it out. in case you don’t know how this game worked, here’s a description from wikipedia:
Kids with special skills or unique achievements compete as contestants on the show while a panel of four Nickelodeon celebrities compete against the clock as they try to guess the predetermined phrase that describes the contestant’s talent.
now, if the panelists DON’T guess that predetermined phrase, the kids get a bunch of prizes. if the panelists DO guess that phrase, the kids do NOT get any prizes. follow me? okay. so basically my problem with lori-beth is that she ALWAYS guesses the phrase, thus robbing these innocent kids of their well-deserved prizes. you can tell that the other panelists (with the possible exception of danny tamberelli – the younger brother from pete and pete) are purposefully NOT trying to guess the phrase. why? because the other panelists are decent human beings who are okay with the kids getting a prize. lori-beth, however, is clearly not okay with this.
i hope that in the several years since this show went off the air, lori-beth’s karma has finally caught up with her. maybe she was in some kind of situation where she could’ve won something cool, but was robbed of that chance by a mean friend. one can only hope.
oh, and we also saw an episode of legends of the hidden temple tonight where the parting gift for the teams who couldn’t complete the first challenge was: tuna. that’s right, a few cans of tuna. 10 year old kids don’t even LIKE tuna. it was an insult.
LOTHT Producer: “Oh, you couldn’t cross the moat in time? Here, have some cans of tuna you stupid little kids.”
Losing contestant: “Ow, that can hit me in the face! Now my face has a dent in it. A dent shaped like a can of tuna.”
LOTHT Producer: “And don’t come back!”
