Boyardland

By | April 20, 2019
Artist’s prediction of this year’s logo.

Thanks to Setsunael for tipping this off for us, there’s a Fort Boyard spin-off set in an abandoned theme park happening this year. Here’s the translation of the story:

It’s been more than a year since the teams of the ALP production company, directed by Alexia Laroche-Joubert, secretly work on this new concept, inspired by the 30th anniversary of the show.
This one will be entirely built around the previous life of Father Fouras (incarnated by Yann Le Gac), that is before 1989, when he was not still in the lookout, nor in the entrails of Fort Boyard. 
In the imaginary of production, the famous character with long white beard has made career as director of an amusement park, left abandoned since his departure. 
The idea is to reopen it today.

An old disused amusement park near Paris
This new story will plunge us into a completely different world. 
Exit the stone cells of the fort, ALP has found an old disused amusement park near Paris. It will serve as a film set in early autumn. 
The production has imagined new characters specific to this creation, but kept the fundamentals: candidates and tests. 

Les Parisien

This is both a) exciting and b) worrying.

Cast your mind back ten years to 2009, the show’s 19th anniversary (which is also its twentieth series). They went big on it, new graphics, new music, Eva Longoria as a contestant and about 40 daily best-of compilations. It felt a bit like overkill and the numbers divebombed.

This year for the 30th series (29th year, cough) it looks like they’re going all-out again. We have this exciting spin-off show. It sounds like there’s going to be a live discussion show after most of the episodes this year – does anyone really want three hours plus on a Saturday night? They’ve already started the celebrations, Fort Boyard was a location on La Carte aux Tresor this past week.

Still it looks like they’re pulling out the stops. Patrice Laffont, the show’s first host, is coming back as a character with a time machine to play old tests. And it sounds like they might have a proper A-List celeb playing this year, but they’re keeping their cards close to their chest.

They start filming next month for presumably a June broadcast. Summer’s coming back, but I hope they aren’t watering down the brand too much.

6 thoughts on “Boyardland

    1. Brig Bother Post author

      It’ll be interesting to see what they do with an easier production location. Fort Boyard is already quite theme park-esque, it’ll be interesting to see what they can do in an actual theme park than on the fort. Also I wonder how big it is? It surely won’t be the same show even if it’s likely to have a similar sort of feel, so how are they going to make it different?

      So many questions. Presumably this will be to the winter what the Fort is for the Summer. Intrigued to see if there’s international potential, presumably they could keep all the challenges and just rebrand it for whoever wants to use it.

      Reply
  1. Brandon

    The theme park thing sounds right up my street, I’ve always loved the vibe of an abandoned theme park and it will be interesting to see how they adapt the games.Personally, I would want at least some of the games to be traditional carnival games but with a devious twist. It could be similar to main Fort Boyard in the same way The Crystal Maze is technically the same format.

    The whole 30th series thing is reminding too much of the 20th series celebrations, let’s hope they’ve learned from their mistakes or it will fail enormously.

    Reply
    1. Matt Clemson

      Wasn’t there some sort of theme park or circus or something-based followup to The Crystal Maze being bandied around at some point, or am I misremembering?

      Reply

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