Every Wednesday, The Fold will revisit the lost memories of your childhood.

“Legends of the Hidden Temple” (Nickelodeon, 1993-1995)

In the era of children’s physically challenging game shows, “Legends of the Hidden Temple” perhaps exemplified the genre best.

For those completely oblivious to the premise, the show was a multi-part competition between six teams of two, where the winning children received prizes from the folks at Nickelodeon.

The teams each had their own designated color and animal. With names like the Purple Parrots, the Blue Barracudas and the Silver Snakes, one could easily create their own temple-lurking squadron by combining a color and a South American animal of their choosing – so long as it kept with the alliteration.

Kirk Fogg hosted the show, who was most certainly forced to dress in Amazonian-explorer garb for the show’s 120-episode duration.

As a child who looked up to Mr. Fogg, there was nothing quite like watching him swing onto the stage by rope in a haphazard fashion. The only thing more daring than Kirk’s pre-show antics were the games themselves, which were the make or break of the competition.

On their way to solving such intriguing perplexities as locating the whereabouts of Lawrence of Arabia’s abandoned headdress, the six competing teams were first faced with crossing “the moat,” which was a code name for “enormous, yet shallow swimming pool with a dry ice machine nearby.”

The four teams that didn’t drown in the wading pool were sent to “the steps of knowledge,” where they would have to answer various questions concerning the day’s artifacts from giant talking stone-head Olmec (a terrifying thing in his own right).

Once two teams successfully dismissed Olmec’s quips, they moved onto the “temple games,” where they competed for “pendants of life” they could use in the main event known as “the temple run.”

In the temple run, the remaining team had to navigate through the temple’s various chambers, locate the missing artifact and avoid certain gimmicky death – all the while meandering past several men marauding around the rooms dressed as ancient Mayans.

In short, “Legends” was a show every child of the 1990s wanted to be on, yet few ever achieved the glory. Looking past the show’s initial contrivances, it is amazing how fun being a kid could truly be.

Derek Walker is a Web reporter for the Northern Star.