Just a little Crush

By | July 18, 2018

We were alerted to a new Spanish format yesterday, Crush. In it, two teams made up four civillians and a celebrity captain answer questions by standing underneath safes. People under the wrong safes get crushed.

Not literally of course, they’re very obviously just hollow boxes and thus it’s not especially shocking, and without any sort of reaction not especially comic either. Here’s the pitch tape:

A run down of the rules: in the first round each team faces three questions, the first one with five choices, then four then three and two answers are wrong each time. They must decide how to arrange themselves to have as many people standing under correct answers as possible – losing players hurts so they need to spread if they’re not sure. Every surviving player earns the team €200 after question one, a further €300 for Q2 and a further €400 on question three, with (as I can work out) a €1,000 bonus if the celeb captain is still alive. Crushed losers are shown in “Limbo”, where they wear angel wings and communicate from a green screened heavenly backdrop. No real idea what happens if everyone on a team gets crushed at the end of this first phase, but it probably won’t make the second phase very exciting. This round is Million Pound Drop A Safe On Your Head, basically.

Before round two it looks like both teams are allowed to resurrect one of their angels. This round features duels, one person on each team will stand under a safe, in turn they’ll be fired anagrams with clues which have to solved within 15 seconds. Doing so correctly hands control to your opponent, not managing it means getting crushed and replaced by someone else on your team. The last team with anyone standing is the winner and presumably get to keep the earned money and go through to the end game. This bit is basically Still Standing Under A Safe, which seems brave given that Still Standing (Ahora Caigo) is still a going concern in Spain, I believe.

The final round has any remaining contestants from the winning team attempt to answer five questions in 90 seconds for €30,000. These questions fall into the numerical (how many minutes in a day?) and the host offers “higher” and “lower” as clues, or reeling off answers to a factual question in the hope you find the right one (who won the Golden Boot in the 2014 World Cup?). This struggles to be especially tense.

As a format it doesn’t do a great deal massively wrong but it is veeeery derivative, and as I’ve suggested the central set-piece to the entire thing isn’t especially great. So there we are. With the dark arts you can watch the first episode here, if you want. It’s very much got the next Money Pump written all over it.

7 thoughts on “Just a little Crush

  1. Malcolm Owen

    The show sounds iffy, but I think that the main conceit of the completely-safe safe drops just doesn’t work. I know it’s to signify they’re out of the game, but it could just as easily be acknowledged with the other team members being sat on the sideline and cheering the remainder on.

    With that in mind, I think the contestant “ejection” system should be just that. An ejection system. Namely the one used on ancient South Korean interview/panel show Dangerous Invitation…
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ1NaUXk2wU
    The sudden thrusting into a swimming pool gives a “real” consequence along with elimination, looks more entertaining to the audience, and any of the “angels” that are brought back will be soaking and mildly apprehensive of taking a second ducking…

    Reply
  2. CeleTheRef

    News from Italy:

    All the old shows have been renewed (AUA!, Still Standing, L’Eredità and Chain Reaction which is on the air currently)

    NOT Pointless 🙁

    Carlo Conti quits L’Eredità, the next host is Flavio Insinna 🙁 groan.

    There’ll be a new show in November, “Open and Win” with Costantino della Gherardesca. It’s one of those “gameshow in your home” formats.

    Ciao Darwin 8, the 20th anniversary edition!

    Reply
  3. Oli R

    Nice Jennifer Paige reference in the title there!

    The gimmick is indeed reminiscent of Ahora Caigo, a staple of my weekday afternoon viewing 6 years ago.

    Reply
  4. Nico W.

    In Germany Thomas Gottschalk’s and Günter Jauch’s Die 2, a gameshow where they competed in quiz and game rounds against members of the audience with a huge jackpot game at the end of the show, has been axed some weeks ago. But there is already a new take on the show: “Denn Sie Wissen Nicht, Was Sie Tun” (‘Because they don’t know what they’re doing’). Instead of Jauch and Gottschalk playing with Barbara Schöneberger hosting, the three of them might play. or they will host. No one knows.
    In the new show they know at least one of them will host and at least one of them will play against members of the audience (though they haven’t been very specific about how similar to the old show these rounds will be). It will be decided in the beginning of the show who will do what.
    I think it could start of okay and then get the ratings the old show had been getting in the end (bad ratings), but unfortunately it will be on against the first Schlag Den Hennsler after the summer vacation and the annual XXL edition of German Chase (still the best quiz show we have around here right now). So all the old people who might watch it will probably tune into ARD and the younger ones might tune into Prosieben. No idea, why they have placed this show on the 18th August. But maybe you guys want to take a look at it while commentating Schlag.

    Reply
  5. Chris M. Dickson

    You know how Word Smash on ROHoG is a round of a show? The people behind You Don’t Know Jack made an entire show out of it back in 2001. You should watch an episode. Do stick with it – it’s not very long, it’s just a little Smush.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.