Marc Summers Wants To Bring Back ‘Double Dare’ For The College Crowd

Remember Double Dare, the late 80’s/ early 90’s kids’ game show that helped put Nickelodeon on the map? Its old host, Marc Summers, wants to bring it back, and with a new angle: teams of college kids!

In an interview Monday with Huffington Post Live, Summers said he’d like to see Double Dare brought back.

“Here’s the deal. I would love to do some form or fashion of it. “

But there’s a problem: Nickelodeon won’t return Marc Summers’ calls. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, at least one top executive at Nickelodeon isn’t fond of him, and they’ve shut him out.

“Let’s just say that right now… the people who run the Nickelodeon network and I don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye. I’ve been trying to make nice to those people, but they refuse to talk to me. So I’m putting a call out to the folks at Nick: return the phone calls, have a discussion.”

The original Double Dare ran on Nickelodeon from 1986 until 1993, but not without spawning a couple of spinoffs, including Super Sloppy Double Dare, Family Double Dare, and Double Dare 2000. The format was both simple and yet elegantly perfect for a network aimed at kids: two teams answer trivia questions, with some sloppy and ridiculous physical challenges thrown in.

You can see almost immediately how this format would work for the college crowd: get the boys from Delta Tau Chi at Ohio State to take on the girls from Omega Mu at Michigan, and the jokes write themselves. And according to Slash Film, Marc Summers sees it that way, too.

“I think it would be fun to do it for colleges… think about it. The people who grew up on our show are now in their thirties and forties, and they have kids. So, you could do second generation.”

The problem, of course, is that Nickelodeon isn’t exactly the right place for a college version of Double Dare; but no worries. Nick’s parent company, Viacom, owns other channels that hold their own in the college demographic, including VH1 and MTV.

A re-boot would also ride the wave of nostalgia for 90’s-era TV shows going around these days. For example, Disney recently brought back Girl Meets World, and it’s killing it in the ratings, according to this Inquisitr report.

If Double Dare isn’t brought back for the college crowd, and after reading this article you’ve got a burning desire to see a modern version, don’t despair. All you have to do is go to Philadelphia next summer for Philly Beer Week, and you can watch Marc Summers himself host “Dunkel Dare,” a drunken version of Double Dare. Undoubtedly there will be college kids participating.

Would you watch a version of Double Dare with college students? Let us know what you think below.

[Image courtesy of: Appletini Photography]