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A Day in the Life
© Loco Nunca Enterprises.
All Rights Reserved.
I easily spent five or six years of my life wondering where Nickelodeon got the kids who were on their shows. Trust me, I watched them all, and it always fucked me up that nothing separated me from the cast members and audience participants on shows like Wild And Crazy Kids, Salute Your Shorts, What Would You Dare, Hey Dude, Double Dare, Pete And Pete, Are You Afraid Of The Dark, Legends Of The Hidden Temple, Nick Arcade, and All That. The fact that some of those child actors went on to greater fame aside, no one can look at any of those shows today and honestly say they would’ve been worse off if the casting director had stuck their random asses on them. There was simply a time when Nickelodeon could do no wrong, and that time was the mid 90s. We should all praise them for it, because in a way we were raised by their heyday. However, I still feel pained by the fact that I was never invited to star in or compete on any of those fantastic shows.
Still, the greatest thing that Nickelodeon ever produced was GUTS. Essentially, GUTS was the Olympics of the channel’s programming. Sure, Legends Of The Hidden Temple required athletic skill, but that shit was mostly impossible to win. It didn’t matter if you were the Purple Parakeets or the Red Dragons, Olmec was set to fuck your young ass up with some Temple Guards popping out behind secret walls to steal your pendants before you were even able to earn yourself the four-speed bike, let alone the family vacation to Orlando (which, oddly, was where the show was shot. Isn’t that absolutely redundant?) 
No, GUTS was where the real shit was. At the very least it presented a trophy that you had a one-in-three shot of winning a piece of -- the show’s notorious galantine, the Agro-Crag.
Considering that all the athletes on the show weren’t even teenagers, GUTS has to be viewed as eleven times rougher than the old school American Gladiators ever was. GUTS challenged absolute children to compete in utterly ridiculous events such as the one where they jumped on spinglines to dump basketballs into absurdly high hoops, or swimming competitions that I still hardly grasp the rules of. But really, the specifics of the games never mattered to anyone. What was important was the opportunity to physically compete on the highest platform of childhood athleticism that existed so that all your friends would be jealous as shit the next Monday at school. Within the darkest depths of the souls of everyone I know, this untended to desire still haunts them all.
Of course, what we all wanted was a piece of the Agro-Crag. But we’ll get to that. First we need to talk about the hosts: Mike O’Mallay, a complete douche who hosted three or four Nickelodeon shows and somehow got cast on a horrible sitcom I don’t know the name of but consistently end up flipping past reruns of, and Mo, a British referee who I spent much of my younger years oogling over. I’ve never entirely understood my attraction to Mo. Some of my gal friends assure me that I was drawn only to her accent, but I’ve always hated the English, so that can’t be it. No, Mo was sexy, not in a conventional way, but in the same manner that Naomi Klein or Ani Difranco is sexy. Mo was hot because she was the boss. She was the one who counted up the points, she was the one who decided if players were disqualified for cheating. Also, Mo was the one who interviewed the athletes while they were still inhabiting the spirit of the sport. Many times at night I would dream of Mo interviewing me after I had just wrecked ass on some goofy event, sweating like a true Adonis, as masculine as a boy of 11 could ever possibly be. I honestly considered the possibility that I could win her into bed with my physical prowess during several lonely night during my youngest years.
Mo wasn’t the only reason I begged my parents to vacation in Orlando though. Honestly, she wasn’t even near the top. Sure I was in love with Mo, but I would’ve gladly taken being slimed on Double Dare over trying to make a grab at her ass. The real reason that GUTS still haunts my mind is that I wanted a piece of that Agro-Crag. Because really, the point system never mattered on GUTS. As long as you were first to the top of the Crag, it was pretty much assured that you were going home with the gold. Looking back, the Agro-Crag seems stupid. In reality, all you have to do is climb a semi-steep metallic hill while punching at a series of lights as confetti grenades shoot off all around you. If I had to take on the Crag today, I doubt it would take me more than 20 seconds to rush up that climatic challenge. That’s looking at it with hindsight though. Remember yourself at 11 years old. Think back on that retarded shitstain that you used to be. Hell, a girl crossing her legs used to distract me back then. I can’t even imagine being that age and having furiously blinking lights and confetti rockets going off all around me as I tried to climb some abomination while trying to keep my focus on the athletic feat before me. Take this to heart, every poor boy and girl who struggled up the Crag was embarking on a treacherous journey that none of us now in our post-adolescence could even begin to comprehend. Trust me, all of those young athletes who braved the climb, they were truly heroes.
All of us can remember the competitor that we favored falling short when it came to the Crag. Some of them watched their leads disappear when they had to go back to the bottom of the metal mountain to hit a station that they had somehow passed by, and some simply couldn’t keep pace with the boy from Georgia who would not be denied. Our hearts all fell when the one we 
imagined as our own failed to come away with a half-hour’s victory, and yet we celebrated madly, shoving it in our friends faces when our competitor was crowned champion of the episode. His or her victory became our own. We felt the bask of their glory, knowing that we lived far away and our parents wouldn’t take us to Orlando to take on the pieces of shit from Alabama or Mississippi to gain a title of our own, and so we had to cherish the accomplishments of those who had parents that understood the sense of pride that came with competing valiantly on Nickelodeon’s glorified gridiron.
I hadn’t thought about GUTS for at least a year or two, not since I watched it with a living room of drunkards some time ago. Then a few weeks ago my girlfriend came back from the bar one night telling me that she’d met someone who’d won a piece of the Agro-Crag. I was quite disappointed in the gal of mine when she told me that she asked to go back to his place so that she could see it. Turns out that he told her that Nickelodeon hadn’t given him a piece of the Crag because he had been disqualified for some vague reason that he hadn’t taken the time to explain to my lady. I instantly called bullshit on him. That potential girlfriend-stealing motherfucker was completely full of shit. I have to give it to him though, it is a good line. Every true red-blooded American youth has a soft spot for the Crag, and the very mention of it is sure to lure some ill-witted girl to go to bed with them. However, this douchebag’s lies belied the fact that a piece of the Agro-Crag is supposed to represent the greatest heights of youthful athleticism. That plastic trophy once represented all of our idealistic hopes, and so I find it horrible that someone would try to twist it around like they were some white knight when obviously they weren’t. For me the Agro-Crag represents pure glory, and so we should all be horrified that some asshole is out there trying to rob our old aspirations so that his worthless ass might get laid for once. Seriously, that dude is a total dick, and if you find him at some bar trying to claim to some hot girl that he once won the Agro-Crag without anything to show for it, I hope you all do your duty and hit him hard in the dick for me.