Back in June, a lot of people around my age freaked out.
Nickelodeon, MTV and Mountain Dew did a promotion in New York City that involved allowing people to climb the “Dewggro Crag,” a resurrection of the Aggro Crag challenge that was the key to the Nick show Guts.
As someone who spent many hours in the basement playing Guts-style games with my siblings, I get the excitement. But I fear people participating believed it was the real thing, and that is just not the case.
I’m not saying this isn’t great. People had fun and if I were there I totally would have done it. But for years I have wondered what exactly happened to the original when the show went off the air in the ’90s. My working theory is that the real one is in some Silicon Valley billionaire’s house, and we just haven’t heard about it.
A few years ago, I made a very small effort to find the answer to that question. If not in billionaire custody, the other two likely options seemed to be a dumpster or in storage somewhere.
The show was filmed at Universal Studios in Orlando, so I emailed them asking if they knew anything about it. Their response was the most wonderfully earnest thing I could have expected from such a request. It came in a voicemail from a guy named Cameron.
“I did do some research and talked to some people in our production department, and they said that any show if it’s filmed by a separate company, which Nickelodeon now is, they would take all that implement with them. So you’d have to contact someone at Nickelodeon to find the whereabouts of the Aggro Crag. It is nowhere on property at Universal Orlando.”
I put in a similar amount of effort contacting Nickelodeon, but nobody ever got back to me and I got busy with other things. Maybe 2017 will bring us the answer we all need.
And may I enjoy a slightly cleaner desktop without the txt file of that voicemail message hanging around anymore.