"Ven a jugar *quak quak* al juego de la Oca! Ven a jugar *quak quak* con nuestra oca loca!"
Oh boy. How to describe the three hour slice of insanity that is an episode of the Spanish game show El Gran Juego de la Oca. Well, something like this.
Imagine if It's a Knockout was filmed in a single live slot, and was designed by a member of Generalissimo Franco's secret police. Then add a baying studio audience, Spanish lovelies parading around and dancing in a state of scantily-cladness, and geese roaming around the set apropos of nothing. That's El Gran Juego de la Oca.
It was based on the older than dirt board game The Great Game of the Goose, as its title suggests. The idea was that you had four colour-coded in jumpsuit contestants, who were normies that had volunteered for this great happening, and they would roll an electronic remote-controlled dice and move from spaces 1-63 around the periphery of the studio. They would be given a sum of pesetas for each space they passed over, and the winner was the first player who landed exactly on space 63. Some spaces contained geese icons, which caused a little dance number as the Oquettes would transfer them to the next goose space and give them another go, and others had dice, which let them roll again. Sounds fairly inoffensive, right? Well, no. Because every other space not a goose or a dice would result in the host, an affable dinner-jacketed gent called Emilio de Aragon, or one of his co-hosts, to introduce to them a prueba or a challenge. They would have to bet a certain number of pesetas from their score that they could surmount this challenge. A success ("Prueba superada") and they doubled their money. A loss, and they, well, didn't.
The challenges were invariably one of the following:
- Humiliating
- Fantastically dangerous
- Both
For example, one was called Keep under 100 and in it, you were forced to sit on a chair while a very attractive member of your preferred sex gave you a three-minute lap dance. You were also strapped to an EKG and if your heart rate went over 100 beats per minute, you lost. Or another one involved being strapped to a wheel while having to throw knives through a gauntlet of flamethrowers at a moving target. Or another involved being put in a snorkel and trapped in a box barely bigger than you are with a padlock on the inside, which was filled with water and eels, and with all the eels having different keys taped to them, and having to find the right key to escape the box against a time limit. Or having to mudwrestle someone to escape a cage. Or - and this was a very popular one - having to beat a master quizzer at a trivia quiz, with the punishment for getting a question wrong having a hideously ugly woman snog you (if you got it right she snogged the opponent). Basically, if it involved fire, water, knives, unpleasant substances, or personal humiliation, or preferably all of the above, the producers were able to find a prueba that fit. And all this was in front of a baying studio audience and even members of the crew who would mug into the camera and make reaction shots, and also broadcast live to the whole of Spain. Fun!
So, you probably think you could get away from an episode of this programme untraumatised, didn't you. If you were willing to gird your loins enough, and just be skilled or very, very, lucky, you might be able to get through it and win some cash. Well... no. You see, some spaces were fixed and contained certain objects and were known as punishment spaces. In these spaces, you didn't have to do a prueba. Instead, you had to undergo something appalling, on pain of losing all of your score. The most notorious of these was space 57, which contained a barber's chair. If you landed in this, the baying studio audience would start chanting, "FLEQUI! FLEQUI! FLEQUI!" until the man appeared. Flequi was an insane barber, and at this point Emilio the host would appear and ask you three questions. If you got them all right, you were safe. If you got any of them wrong, Flequi would give you a hideous, appalling haircut. And the third question was always something utterly impossible like "how many grains of sand on the beach at Seville?" or similar. And yes, that electronic dice that generated the numbers of your roll? If you started an episode with particularly nice hair, the producers would fix the dice rolls so that you would end up landing on Flequi's space. Oh yes.
If after all that you were the first to land exactly on square 63, you won, and were offered a shot at that week's star prize. Usually a car. To do this you had to complete the Re-Oca, which was where you had to do a particularly large scale prueba between now and next week's episode. The pruebas for the Re-Oca were generally involving trying to rally a large number of people or organise something enormous, for instance, crowdsurf for a mile through the middle of Barcelona, or similar things that required outside help. I think with one exception, everyone succeeded at this, partly because the people of Spain probably took pity on them for the on-air abuse they'd had to undergo to get that far, and partly because it helped kick things off reviewing last week's show with a nice loud "si senor, prueba superada!" to get everyone in the mood and feeling good and ready to applaud the downfall of the next group of victims.
El Gran Juego de la Oca lasted three serieses from 1993-96. It had multiple changes of host between series and sort of died a death because of excessive executive meddling. The first series is the best by far. Even if you don't really understand Spanish it's worth looking up. It also didn't really get shown much outside of Spain, although it was shown on repeat in some Spanish language TV channels in America and also was popular in Italy as well. Here in the UK, we had The Crystal Maze instead, where the challenges were less nuts and more based on peoples' total inability to complete fairly easy puzzles under extreme time and expectation pressures, and Noel's House Party for the humiliation aspect, and that was generally reserved for celebrities who more likely deserved it. While in France they had Fort Boyard in which French adrenaline junkies were forced to do things that terrified them as well as fail at uncomplicated puzzles against the clock. Also dwarves.
Incidentally, the Spanish also like those Japanese obstacle course shows as well, such as Ninja Warrior and Takeshi's Castle, which is called "Humor Amarillo" over there. I suspect it's because they are the next best thing to EGJDLO.
Also nowadays we have reality shows that are even more humiliating to the people that go on them. Anyone for Love Island, which is responsible for three (and counting) suicides?
(IN24/6)