My DVR Hates Me: Nick Arcade

Oct.20, 2006 in Media Mockery

“My DVR Hates Me” takes a live-blog look at the terrible/old shows you may not remember. Since I’m off from work today for my birthday, I give back to you, dear reader, by suffering through the stylings of Nick Arcade.

Our host for this show is Phil Moore, who somehow combines both “shucking and jiving” with “homosexual flailing.” He’s also in his mid-30s when this showed aired, despite the fact that he looks like 18 year-old Omar Gooding, but with a flat top. It’s kind of unnerving to learn that. It’s also kind of unnerving that I actually looked him up on IMDB to find that out.

The kids on the show today are as, always, a team of two white kids (the girl on the team looks like a jack-o-lantern), and a team with one enthnically ambiguous guy (the male), and a black person (the girl).

The two girls play in a game of pong to decide who gets control of the hero of the game, Mikey. It’s sort of like a board game, but in real life. Involving animated characters.

One of the teams wins (it’s inconsequential, really). Mikey (pictured above, in space…he really gets around) is going to be in the much-less-exciting than space mall atrium. He’s always also avoiding his arch-nemesis, Game Over, the bully.

The team moves Mikey around and he immediately runs into Game Over. Game Over declares that Mikey should “Hold it right there bean brain!” Then he throws a pie at him. Edgar wonders whether Game Over just steals the pies from his mom, leaving the house carrying mountains full of pie to torture his school chums with. He also has a t-shirt with his name on it. So bullying seems to be working out well for him. It’s lucrative I guess if you can afford custom tees and armies of pie.

After some random games as they move Mikey from space to space (including one in which they had to name round objects in a series of fast moving pictures and the jack-o-lantern girl said a wrench was round), the red Ethnically Diverse team finally gets to play an actual video game (there aren’t many video games played in Nick Arcade, ironically enough). They choose the game “King of the Monsters” and the black girl wagers points on her AC Slater-looking teammate’s success. He wins pretty handily.

Anyway the yellow team ends up winning the round somehow (liveblogging is hard). We advance to round 2 and Mikey is now in the mall’s plaza and Game Over is still after him, waiting menacingly with his Pies O’ Doom.

I should also note that Phil Moore continually blurts out random sounds like a child with Tourette’s, then awkward flails limbs around in a way that might be misconstrued as “dancing.” He also throws in random words to go along with the show’s background music.

Also Mikey doesn’t have a nose.

OH BOY THE KIDS CAN NOW WIN A CASIO KEYBOARD AND A MAGNAVOX BOOMBOX! Does Magnavox even make boomboxes any more? Does Magnavox even exist? Boy Nick gave away some terrible prizes. They gave away a Commodore on another episode. These aren’t really things you cherish long after your appearance on the show.

The jack-o-lantern girl gets to play a game called “Snow Brothers,” which looks vaguely familiar to me. It involves throwing snowballs at monsters and then rolling them off the screen until they explode. Games were so simple and illogical back then. Brings a tear to my eye.

Oh boy the yellow team (our whitebred American team) has now won themselves a couple pairs of British Knights sneakers and Willy Wonka Candy! Nickelodeon spares no expense. The red Ethnic team has been vanquished and rightfully so. Phil Moore is all the embarrassing ethnicity we need.

We’re now up the portion of the game in which the winning game has to play a virtual reality game for big prizes (A Zenith VCR, A trip to Universal Studios Florida, and I dunno…a pet monket). The three games are some game in the jungle in which you have to collect bananas, a food fight game in which you have to collect books, and a boss level with some guy throwing fire in which you have to get orbs. They quickly get through the jungle and food fight levels, then die twice on the fire boss level. Ugh. NO ONE EVER WINS AT THIS GAME.

And we end with Phil Moore saying, “Hey, well at least they got those British Knights.” Then he tries to give the boy a pound, but misses. This show is somewhere between terrible funny and terrible “I’m embarrassed to be writing about this.” I guess that’s why My DVR Hates Me! (See how it all ties in!)