What Would You Do?
Marc Summers hosting a half hour of pure audience mayhem that was, at its core, an elaborate excuse to pie people. The Pie Pod, the Pie Coaster, the Pie Wash — Nickelodeon built an entire arsenal of whipped-cream machinery and pointed it at anyone standing still.
Premiering August 31, 1991, What Would You Do? gave Double Dare host Marc Summers a looser, weirder playground, with Double Dare's on-camera stagehand Robin Marrella along for the ride. Taped at Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Orlando (a few early segments came from Universal Hollywood), the show skipped game boards and trivia for anarchic audience participation: the crowd voted on hypothetical scenarios, kids and parents took dares, and hidden-camera bits ran between games — all of it cascading toward pie.
The pie infrastructure was the show's true star. The Pie Pod was a hydraulic chair that fired up to five pies at your head. Season 1's Pie Slide sent you down a playground slide into a vat of whipped cream; season 2 replaced it with the Pie Coaster, a mini roller coaster that crashed into a giant pie, and added the Pie Wash — a rotating chair, whipped-cream nozzles, and a car-wash brush. The Pie Pendulum, Pie in the Sky, and Pie Roulette rounded out a Rube Goldberg arsenal of dessert-based indignity. Nobody left dry, and that was the entire promise.
The run was short: Marrella left in 1993 over a pay disagreement, and the show cycled through audience "Co-Hosts of the Day" and, eventually, a chimpanzee named Corey before ending on November 12, 1993 — 90 episodes across two seasons. (No relation to ABC's later hidden-camera ethics series of the same name.) For everyone who watched, the memory is specific: the certainty that within minutes, someone was getting pied, and it might gloriously be you.
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