Make the Grade
Nickelodeon's Jeopardy for kids: three contestants, a seven-by-seven board of school subjects by grade level, and the "Fire Drill," the messy physical stunt that could hand your desk, and your lead, to whichever kid ran fastest. Everybody went home in British Knights.
Make the Grade premiered on Nickelodeon on October 2, 1989, at 6:30 on weeknights, created by Michael Klinghoffer and developed by a team that included Herb Scannell and Cyma Zarghami. Three contestants sat at red, green and blue desks facing a split-flap board: seven categories down the side, history to home ec, and seven grade levels across the top, from elementary school through twelfth grade. Answer a toss-up correctly and you claimed the square and lit that category and grade on your desk; light all fourteen and you won. Hidden squares could let you Take a square from a rival or force you to Lose one, and a Fire square triggered the Fire Drill, a sometimes messy stunt all three played at once. The twist was that the desks, not the players, owned the squares: the first to finish the Fire Drill picked any desk in the room, so a kid who had been acing questions could watch a faster runner walk off with the lead.
The champion took $500 into the Honors Round, seven questions in 45 seconds at $100 apiece for the first six, with a seventh correct answer raising the round's total to $1,000 in the first season and earning a trip to Universal Studios Florida after that. Runners-up got $50 and consolation prizes, and every contestant left with a pair of British Knights sneakers. The first two seasons were hosted by Lew Schneider and taped in a small New York studio with no audience and pre-recorded crowd noise; for the third, the show moved to the brand-new Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios in Orlando, gained a live crowd, and swapped in Robb Edward Morris as host. New York disc jockey Maria Milito announced all 160 episodes.
First-run episodes ended on September 14, 1990, less than a year after the premiere, but reruns carried the show through the end of 1991, and Nick GAS revived it from 2000 to 2004, which is why it sits in two generations' memories. It was never Double Dare. It was the quieter, nerdier cousin, the one on at dinner time, and the one that made a grid of school subjects feel like something you might actually want to win.
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