Remember the days of watching your favourite children’s TV game show and wishing you were on it? At least we all had a dream of what it could have been like to be in the audience or a participant.
Thanks to the magic of the internet and personal home video, it can happen with home recordings of time capsules.
The game show A*Mazing which ran from 1994 to 1998 and hosted by James Sherry saw two competing schools battle it out answering general knowledge, spelling out their answers on a giant keyboard, and playing gaming consoles in order to collect time to explore the awesome maze that was the holy grail of crazy mazes, in order to collect perspex letters or silver keys.
There’s been attempts at trying to get episodes replayed or bring it back for a new generation, as well as being active on social media, but these attempts have not been successful. In order to have these memories of the game show preserved, we have to live with bootleg episodes on YouTube.
But in between these bootlegs, sits a golden nugget of goodness. Thanks to Matthew Smith on YouTube, he has graciously shared a personal 15 minute behind-the-scenes video on how the show was produced.
To quote Smith:
I was a production assistant working for Southern Star/Concept Productions. My main roles for the first 2 years were hiding all of the letters and the keys in the maze as well as operating the dry ice and smoke machines whilst the contestants ran through the maze. I then went on to managing the scoreboard and other duties. It was a fantastic 2+ years.
The footage was from the final day of A*Mazing filming after calling Brisbane home for two years, before being moved to Sydney for another two years.
In the video you’ll get to see some shaky camera footage of the production work, such as:
