Total Panic
Nickelodeon's Sunday-morning free-for-all: a studio audience, trivia and Double Dare-style physical games, music videos chosen by applause, cartoon shorts, kid film critics, and previews of brand-new machines like the Genesis and the Game Boy. It ran from April 1989 to September 1990, long enough to move from New York to a still-unfinished Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, and it is where a warm-up comic named Greg Lee got his first hosting job.
Total Panic debuted on April 1, 1989, the tenth anniversary of Nickelodeon's launch, under a working title, Pandemonium, that the network dropped because the word seemed too big for its audience. Producer Andy Bamberger, who had made Nick Rocks and the kid-critic show Rated K: For Kids by Kids, built it as a three-hour Sunday-morning variety block with no fixed format, hosted at first by Molly Scott and Keith Diamond. Diamond was gone by July 1989, replaced by Greg Lee, who had been the show's warm-up comedian. By that July the running time had shrunk to two hours, and from September a Saturday "best of" clip show ran the day before each new episode.
The core of it was audience participation: kids competed in trivia games and Double Dare-style physical challenges for prizes. One game, "Eat-a-Bug," put contestants in front of a chroma-key screen grabbing at animated flies, wasps and ladybugs while dodging giant spiders and bumblebees. It was designed by Dean Friedman and became the prototype for Nick Arcade, which arrived in January 1992 with a dozen Friedman games. Around the games came celebrity interviews, comedy skits, Bananaman cartoons, and "Road Trip" segments that sent Candace Cameron to a Macy's to demonstrate blue-screen effects or Jason Hervey of The Wonder Years to ride the Ninja coaster at Magic Mountain. Guests ranged from Walter Cronkite to Hulk Hogan, and the editor of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment came on to explain the then-new TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis, Game Boy and Atari Lynx.
Total Panic also inherited two jobs. It premiered about a week after the last Nick Rocks and took over as Nickelodeon's music-video outlet, with the studio audience's applause deciding which of two videos played in full. And it folded Rated K, which had ended in December 1988, into a film-review segment hosted by Molly Scott on Rated K's old pastel concession-stand set, where kids from the audience weighed in on Turner & Hooch. Newsday's Andy Edelstein noted the resemblance to Wonderama, the Sunday-morning marathon of an earlier generation.
In March 1990 the show left New York for Stage 20 of Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, which was still under construction and would not formally open until June 7; Think Fast and Double Dare had already set up there. Total Panic ended that September. Greg Lee stayed at Nickelodeon as the announcer on Outta Here!, then became the ACME agent in charge of new recruits on Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and the voice of Mayor White on Doug.
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