Marc Summers Remembers Highs and Lows of Double Dare On 30th Annivesary 

was broadcast on Oct. 6, 1986. The children’s game show, hosted by the ever-entertaining Marc Summers, quickly became one of the fledgling network’s biggest hits, carved itself into the popular culture and became the template many of Nickelodeon’s other game shows were built upon.

PEOPLE spoke to Summers — who’s retained every bit of his hyper-kinetic charm — on the eve of the show’s anniversary, and he clued us into the show’s origins and some of the behind-the-scenes controversies around it.

“It’s the fastest 30 years of my life,” Summers says. “I never wanted to host a kid’s show. The one thing I never wanted to do was be a host that had a squeaky voice and talked down to kids. I thought I was doing

; in my head, I was Alex Trebek. That’s one of the reasons I think the show worked: I never talked down to the kids. I think they respected me, they thought I was some wacky uncle or older brother.”

It was all by mistake, quite honestly. I had been doing warm-ups on TV shows like Star Search and was working at the Comedy Store and was doing magic; I actually started my career as a professional magician. And I felt kind of stuck, I had been doing the same stuff for years.

I had a friend I went to college with who had a smoked salmon business, and I partnered with him and we started selling smoked salmon. And I was doing great, we sold 30,000 pounds a month to Price Club, which is now Costco, we were selling to Trader Joe’s, and I said to myself, “Well, I guess TV wasn’t meant to be.”

A friend of mine, Dave Garrison, who was a ventriloquist back in Indianapolis, had moved to L.A. and was having a hard time as a performer and decided to become a producer. So he called me one day and said, “I got a call for an audition for a kid’s game show, I’ve never heard of the network; it’s not for me, so why don’t you go instead of me?” So I did. Which you couldn’t even do these days.

So I got there and I said, “Dave Garrison was supposed to be here, but he couldn’t and my name’s Marc Summers. Tell me about the show.” I got some more information that they’d auditioned 1,000 people in New York and didn’t like anybody so they decided to come out to L.A. And I was the first person they decided to audition in L.A. And so I got two different call-backs, and eventually I was told that they had it narrowed down to me and one other guy, but they didn’t know how I was with kids. So I came up with the idea of taking me and the other guy into the studio, running the show with some kids, and you know, may the best man win.

So they flew us to New York, we both went into the studio and played the game and two days later they called me and said, “We hired you.” And I said, “So after 1,000 people in New York and 1,000 people in L.A., why me?” And they responded, “Well, quite honestly, you two were about the same. But at the end of the other guy’s audition, he looked into the camera and said, ‘Do you guys want me to do something else?’ and at the end of yours, you said, ‘My name’s Marc Summers and we’ll be back with more

,’ and we thought that was more professional.” So basically, I threw to commercial, and that got me the gig.

So you’d done a dry-run of the show, you had some idea of how it was going to go?

Well, I had no idea about the obstacle course. So we get to Philadelphia to shoot and I walk in the first day, and there’s all these slides and things and guys taking whipped cream and chocolate and pouring it all over. And I said, “What are they doing?” And they said, “Well, at the end of the show, people can run the obstacle course for a big prize.” And I looked at all this goop and stuff and said, “Do you think kids are really going to want to do that?” And they said, “Oh, yeah.” And they were right.

During the first 65 episodes, I was just holding on for dear life. I did the words, I could never remember the opening prompt; they were on cue cards for the longest time until one day I walked in and the producer tore them up in front of them to make me memorize them. We did 65, and it did really well, and I got my sea legs, and after that, I started to help with tone, I guess you’d say.

We didn’t have anyone telling us what to do at first, really. Nickelodeon was a new network, so after we looked like we were doing all right, they had to move on to 17 other things. We would also test new physical challenges with kids from the New Jersey and Philadelphia area, so they’d come in and if they couldn’t complete a planned challenge three times, we wouldn’t put it on the air. And then after proving it could be done, we’d work on tweaking it.

When we moved filming to Orlando, Nickelodeon came to me and said, “Do you want to produce the show?” And I said “Sure” — I had no idea what the hell that meant. So I become the producer of the show and had to learn quickly what that entailed — the hiring and firing and making sure the editing got done.

DOUBLE DARE, Host Marc Summers, (hosted 1986-94), 1986-present

What were some of the challenges you faced doing

The biggest problem I think we faced was that the attention span of anyone watching TV is about 12 seconds. So we had to make sure people stayed tuned: The course got messier, the obstacles got bigger. And then the competition started, so now you’ve got to deal with rip-offs. So we were always trying to build a bigger, better monster.

What were some of the behind-the-scenes controversies with the show?

Well, once, one of the questions was, “What kind of food item sounds like a hairstyle that a girl would wear?” And the answer was “bun.” And then I ad-libbed, “Unless you’re a Jewish girl, and then it would be a bagel.” So then I get a phone call from the network saying, “Did you do some anti-Semitic joke the other day?” The Anti-Defamation League had called Viacom, and said that the president of the organization’s daughter had come to him the other day and said, “Why do I wear a bagel in my hair?” Well, the father found out it was me, and called me, and started screaming at me. I said, “Sir, with all due respect, you know, my real name is Marc Berkowitz; you know, I’m Jewish.” And he said, “Even worse!”

One time a kid ate a foam packing peanut that we used on the show and told his mom Marc Summers told him to do it, so they had to go back and watch every episode of the show to make sure I’d never told anyone to eat a packing peanut.

When we took the show on the road one year, we did three shows in a day in Philadelphia. And one bit involved a kid throwing a pie at his mom. And he sort of whiffed it, so I said, “That’s not how you throw a pie, this is how you throw a pie!” And I got her. I

got her. And that was a Sunday. And Tuesday, the lawyers from Viacom called and said she was suing us.

Then there were all the mothers who would hand me their telephone numbers during the meet-and-greet after the show and tell me to call them when their husbands weren’t home. There was all sorts of nutty stuff going on.

Well, it was a love-hate relationship. It was the show that put me on the map, but I started when I was 34, and eight years later, how long can you throw pies at 11-year-olds? So, I quit, actually, which most people aren’t aware of. I was gone so much: We shot in New York, then in Philly, then in Orlando and when we weren’t shooting, I was on the road, doing personal appearances. And at one point, I was getting ready to leave, and my son, who was probably 10 or 11 at the time, said, “How come every weekend you’re with other kids but not with us?” And the next day I flew to New York and resigned.

It was just time to go. So from there I went to Lifetime and then History Channel and I ended up over at Food Network, where I’ve been for the last 17 years.

Oh, no. Best thing that ever happened to me. I had a blast, Nickelodeon was always great to me, and it all worked out. I had the longest-running show on Nickelodeon and now I have the longest-running show on Food Network [

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