| Hosts | |
| Matt Brown, Leslie Hibbard, & Cory Tyler (1989) Omar Gooding (1990–1992) Donnie Jeffcoat (1990–1992) Annette Chavez (1990) Jessica Gaynes (1991–1992) Mati Moralejo, David Aizer, & Vivianne Collins (2002) | |
| Broadcast | |
    | |
| Packagers | |
| Woody Fraser Productions Reeves Entertainment Group Nickelodeon | |
OPENING SPIEL (PILOT):
"Welcome to Wild & Crazy Kids, with your hosts, Matt Brown, Leslie Hibbard, and Cory Tyler!"
OPENING SPIEL (1990–1992):
"Welcome to Wild & Crazy Kids, the show that goes anywhere and does anything to find kids having fun, with your hosts, Annette Chavez/Jessica Gaynes, Omar Gooding, (and) Donnie Jeffcoat (and (our) special guest host/star (insert name))!"
OPENING SPIEL (2002):
"It's Wild & Crazy Kids! I'm Mati Moralejo with David Aizer and Vivianne Collins! (insert events of the day)!"
Wild & Crazy Kids was a game show on Nickelodeon in which large teams, usually consisting entirely of children, participated in head-to-head physical challenges.
Games[]
Each episode consisted of three games with one host emceeing each game. The teams were identified by the color of the shirts they wore, which varied from show to show (see below). The games varied in style; many were take-offs on playground games, sports with unusual rules added, or messy games involving pies or slime (the latter was referred to as "blap" beginning in season three). Occasionally, the show taped special episodes at a theme park such as Raging Waters, Wild Rivers, and Six Flags Magic Mountain. There were no prizes awarded at all for unexplained reasons.
Examples of games used on the show:
- Contestants had to find the name of a food on a giant word search board. The contestant who found the word first got to dump a bucket of whatever the word was over the other contestant's head, gunging the contestant. Buckets included raw eggs, chocolate sauce, Spaghetti-O's, flour and whipped cream. One boy also had a bottle of mustard squirted in his hair.
- A large scale pie fight was intended to pit children against their camp counselors, but quickly got out of control and turned into a massive free-for-all, with participants throwing pies at anyone and everyone else, no matter which team they were on. This was due to the fact that both Donnie and Annette wanted to get revenge on Omar after he hit both of them with pies earlier in the show.
- Kids did a long jump and landed in a pit of mud or shaving cream.
- Children and their parents jumped up and down on Moon shoes to break balloons that were filled with paint, water, and shaving cream. A later format was that two different teams bounced on matresses to burst balloons that were only filled with shaving cream. In both cases, whichever team broke the most balloons won.
- A game of Simon Says which looked more like a comedy routine by leader, Brian Seeman.
- Two teams at Six Flags Magic Mountain rode the Colossus roller coaster (now known as Twisted Colossus) while holding cups of water; the team with the most collective water remaining won.
- A game of polo using bumper cars and a very large (about 1m in diameter) rubber ball.
- The playground game "red light/green light" - each player held a cream pie, with which they had to pie themselves if they got caught. If the player reached the other side without getting caught, he/she got to use their pie to hit the grownup waiting there.
- Slip 'n' Slide races, where two teams would be slid to see who could make it first. The farther one would be dumped with cans of stewed tomatoes.
- A modified version of "Steal the Bacon" involving three teams where the object to be retrieved was a bucket of a mystery substance; contestants who lost a round got its contents dumped onto their heads. To win a round, a player had to either steal the bucket without getting tagged by both opponents or tag a thieving player.
- The game most notably repeated was Dizzy Bat Home Run Derby. The game consisted of two teams (one of kids and one of adults) batting in three innings. The kids would attempt to hit home runs off of pitched balls. Scott Bailes of the California Angels was the pitcher for the first game. Hit balls that did not leave the field in fair territory counted as an out. Once the kids had three outs, the adults would bat. During their half-inning, a grownup would have up to three chances to hit home runs off a batting tee; however, the adult was first required to hold his bat upright against his forehead and spin around it three times; furthermore, each adult would only get thirty seconds to hit the balls. Three adults would bat every half-inning. At the end of the original and second versions, the kids, who lost both times, demanded a rematch. Donnie, who hosted these games, then declared a sequel or a part three. In the second game, Marc Summers pitched to the kids and in the third game Bruce Hurst of the San Diego Padres was the pitcher.
- A game was played where kids (two per round) would drive remote controlled cars around in an arena where a construction worker was driving a steamroller. The object, of course, was to not have one's car run over by the steamroller. The player of each round with the last remaining car won; in the final round, the object was the exact opposite: the first player to have their car run OVER by the steamroller won. Variations on this game included a blindfolded player attempting to steer the cars through a gauntlet consisting of opposing team members (also blindfolded) armed with mallets, and a player attempting to steer the cars through a beach obstacle course lined with small explosives buried in the sand. The further the contestant progressed in the gauntlet, the higher his score; the team with the highest collective score won the event.
- Kids sat above their parents holding buckets of slime. The parents had to pick a number, and the kid who had the bucket with the number the parent chose got to pour the bucket of slime over the head of the one seated below them. The last parent remaining would move on to the final round. Kids and parents then reversed, and likewise, the last kid not gunged also got to move on to the last round. In it, the last two players would be seated below two more buckets (one had red slime, and the other had confetti). The parent was slimed, and the one remaining kid won.
- A massive maze with students challenging their teachers. The group with the most correctly finding the exit to the maze won. Ultimately the teachers prevailed.
- Celebrities at Raging Waters San Dimas would ride down a speed slide, with a bucket attached to their head, and would also be wearing a backpack on their front filled with tomatoes. From the top of the slide to the bottom, the object was to remove tomatoes and place them in the bucket. On the same slide, they also had to pop a group of balloons as fast as they could and keep as many ping-pong balls as they could in a cup. At the same park, children would ride down a high speed slide, skim across a pool, and attempt to knock down as many of a row of inflated "bowling pins" that were attached to an overhead cable with velcro, as possible. Earlier games included an obstacle course through the park, which had players slide down a waterslide, climb up a cargo net, and throw a baseball to a teammate on a raft, before untying a string of balloons at the finish line to win, and one where kids went against their parents to see who could peel the most bananas, squeeze the most milk from a bottle, or keep the most ice cream on a cone while sliding down the speed slide.
- A game of "Human Battleship" which is played like the classic board game. When a player was hit, he or she would have a bucket of baked beans dumped over their heads.
- A tug of war which pitted 50 kids against three giant pro wrestlers.
- Kids on a raft with inner tubes, they try to knock the other team off a raft into a swimming pool, while having to freeze every few seconds and avoid getting booted off.
- A contest where Detroit Lions quarterback Rodney Peete threw footballs to the players as they leaped off a diving board into a pool.
- A massive pillow fight where the object was to protect to eggs pinned in a bag to each player.
- A race where kids and their dogs swam across an olympic size pool.
- A track meet where competitors had to throw a ball, long jump, and run a relay race backward.
- A slam dunk competition where a basketball net was set up at the end of a runway over a gymnastics pit.
- Human Space Invaders, where two blindfolded kids threw water balloons from a cherry picker on a giant grid of targets below.
- A mall Olympics event, which featured events such as a root beer chug, a Nintendo Powerpad game to race on skateboards, pumping up pump sneakers to dribble a basketball through the mall, dressing up in neon outfits, and a pie eating contest. A second mall event included grabbing as many items without being tagged, pedaling on tricycles, sending slices of pizza to the other side to make a full one, eating it, and catching parachutes into some oversized pants to kick a beach ball into a goal.
- A roller hockey skills competition where players on two teams shot at a target then tried their luck against a professional goaltender.
- A boys vs girls game where campers saw how many times they could drop their counselors into a dunk tank.
- Kids playing cops and robbers on the set of Miami Vice.
- A massive twister game with at least twenty boards.
- On a lake, four teams in canoes would try to splash water into their opponents' boats with the intent to sink them.
- A ball is tethered on a clothesline, while two teams armed with fire hoses try to spray the ball toward their rivals.
- A game where kids leaped off a diving board into a pool, with the intent of drenching adults stationed on a nearby raft.
- Teams of karate students teamed up to knock down an old ranch house in less than 30 minutes
- A spray painting contest to see who could create the best mural of what they thought "wild and crazy" meant.
- Teams of boys and girls from nearby camps competed to see who could retrieve the most mini bats from a mountain of hay
- A three legged soccer game where the pairs of players had their legs tied together
- A race where girls on horseback competed side by side with boys riding on BMX bikes.
Guest Appearances[]
- During the first and second seasons, there were occasionally adult celebrity guests, and one of Season 2's final episodes held a kids and teens celebrity slide competition game at Raging Waters in San Dimas, California to raise money for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. The entire third season in 1992 featured at least one (and sometimes more) kid celebrity guest(s) every episode. Guests were people like actor and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lark Voorhies from Saved by the Bell, Jonathan Taylor Thomas from Home Improvement and Michael Fishman from Roseanne. A young Tobey Maguire appeared on the show long before he was famous, promoting the short-lived Fox sitcom Great Scott!.
- Marc Summers from Double Dare who appeared in 1990 in a special episode titled "Double Dare vs. Wild & Crazy Kids." He also appeared the following year to pitch in "Dizzy Bat Home Run Derby: The Sequel."
- Detroit Lions quarterback Rodney Peete appeared on the premiere episode throwing footballs to kids jumping into a swimming pool.
- California Angels pitcher Scott Bailes pitched the first "Dizzy Bat Home Run Derby" and Bruce Hurst of the San Diego Padres pitched the third and final installment.
- Michael Bower, Venus DeMilo and Danny Cooksey from the Nickelodeon series Salute Your Shorts appeared on one of the final episodes. This show pitted two teams—one headed by the Salute Your Shorts crew and the other headed by the three Wild & Crazy Kids co-hosts—in an all day showdown.
- While not actually appearing on the show, the B-52s were once the basis of one of the show's games.
- Following his 1992 Olympic run, ice skater Petr Barna guest starred on an episode in 1992.
- As a child, D'Brickashaw Ferguson rode in a BMX vs. Horses race.
- Olympic skier Bode Miller appeared on the revival in 2002.
- Actor and co-star Alfonso Ribeiro of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air (who went on to host GSN's Catch 21) appeared in a game titled "The Fresh Race of Tortoise-Hare".
- Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega of the Spy Kids movies appeared on the 2002 revival.
- Brandon Call from Step by Step was in season 2, and as payback for his Wild & Crazy Kids shirt being in the Goo Pool with shorts and shoes, he took Donnie's shirt, Omar's shorts and Jessica's shoes and ran off to put them into the Goo Pool with the hosts chasing after him.
Rating[]
Additional Page[]
Wild & Crazy Kids/Video Gallery
Music[]
Don Great Music (Season 1)
Alan Ett Music (Seasons 2-3)
Main - Wendy Fraser & Todd Sharp