Out of the six teams Kirk Fogg awarded pendants of life, the “Legends of the Hidden Temple” host reveals that one squad earned a special spot in his heart. “My favorite were the Silver Snakes,” the Nickelodeon icon tells The Post. “It’s not just because they were near me when I was announcing the teams by the moat, but there was something blue collar about them.” Kirk Fogg of “Legends of the Hidden Temple.”Photo: Mathieu Young/Nickelodeon Fogg, who will return to the temple in Nickelodeon’s “Legends of the Hidden Temple” movie, which is set to air on the network later this year, shares that the Silver Snakes weren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves to prove their worth to enter Olmec’s temple. “They just looked like they did all the dirty work. They weren’t afraid to get dirty,” he says. “They didn’t always look good, were always a little sloppy, but I loved it.” While Fogg admits that he doesn’t understand why notorious underdogs the Purple Parrots constantly struggled, the host did express his sympathies for the contestants who were stuck assembling the three-piece shrine of the silver monkey. “The base is easy enough, but first you have to find it in the room,” Fogg explains of one of the many challenges lurking in the temple. “So sometimes the contestants would grab the head, and then they would go, ‘Oh no, but I’ve got to start with the base.’ Then, you’ve got to put the base on the right way and then you’ve got to get the middle part. And the middle part was the hard part because it looked like it fit either way you put it.” Though the daunting task typically took place at the end of the exhausting trek into Olmec’s cryptic abode, Fogg notes that there were additional distractions outside the temple as well. “You also have the bright lights, the live audience screaming and you have me screaming on the microphone telling them how to do it,” he adds. “That and you have the producers down on the ground screaming up at the second floor.” With four to five episodes s on average over a 12-hour day, Fogg dishes that the contestants often didn’t get to practice much before getting thrown into the temple games. “We s the show all in pieces. We s the moat first and then the steps of knowledge, then the temple games and temple run,” he shares. “The first day it took us 18 hours to shoot one show and the kids were delirious by the time we got to the temple.” Running on little energy and a quest to fulfill in retrieving a very specific object, Fogg says that the dreaded temple guards, who would swoop in and remove contestants at random, were occasionally looked upon as a blessing in disguise. “Sometimes the temple guards were a good thing,” Fogg said. “It would work out that some kid was struggling and by the time you get to the room [that the guard was hidden away in] and took them out, the next kid was the better kid.” While Fogg heard “real screams” from the contestants after a terrifying encounter with a temple guard, the host was surprised to discover the difficulty of the temple games leading up to the main event. “I used to try them sometimes if they were easy enough to do and I wouldn’t take too much time doing it. But sometimes they were really hard,” he recalls. “I remember doing this one, I remember saying, ‘I got to try this because this looks really hard,’ and it was that log roll thing where you had to hold on and then it would spin around. Oh my God, the centripetal force. It was so hard.” Twenty-one years after leaving the temple and its tasks for what he thought was forever, Fogg is ready to step back into the world of “Legends.” He calls the idea of a reboot “surreal,” but said stepping onto the set of the upcoming flick felt like a homecoming. “I mean this sincerely, when I showed up on the set the first day I was blown away,” Fogg says. “Coming into the movie, you don’t know what you’re going to find and I have a lot of hope and expectations. But when I walked in I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re going for it.’” Po: NickelodeonWhile longtime fans of the series will see the Orange Iguanas and the Green Monkeys represented in some way in the upcoming film, Fogg also confirms that his relationship with Olmec remains a bit rocky. “Olmec is pretty solid. And I’m trying to say nice things about him because he talks behind my back,” he says. “During the show, it would be funny because we would be shooting something intense and suddenly, he has kind of a sense of humor back there, and he would say these little quips while we were struggling.” Although Fogg did swipe one of Olmec’s many treasures following the show’s cancellation in 1995, his most memorable piece of costuming still hangs in his closet. “I do still have the denim shirt.”
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