Alfonso Ribeiro is a household name thanks to his character “Carlton” on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” but now he’s going to be entertaining a brand new set of households with ABC Family’s upcoming game show, “Spell-Mageddon.” The show, airing July 24 at 9/8c, will have contestants compete to spell words correctly while facing intense (and hilarious) obstacles. Here’s the exclusive scoop ShockYa got from Ribeiro during a scheduled conference call.
What types of obstacles to expect: “We’ve got ‘Whack-a-Mole,’ which is basically when…when it gets down to three contestants, we put them in a machine that basically has a big hammer that comes down and whacks them on the top of their heads. Remember that game where the frogs would come up and you have whack them down to get points, it’s kind of inspired by that…We’ve got pies in the face, we’ve got water shooting at them at the same time, we’ve got people off on the side shooting them with hoses of water, we’ve got a fake fire extinguisher coming up right underneath them, which is pretty crazy.”
“We’ve got a game where we put them on a board and we spin them around, upside down. We’ve got these cannons that just, basically, shoot food at them, so it’s just food hitting them in the face and in the body as we’re spinning them around…We’re dumping honey on them, we’re doing a lot of physical stuff with them. So, we put a contestant up there and they have to spell as many words in 60 seconds as possible while all of this stuff is happening to them. There are many different games–each episode doesn’t have the same game. There are some that we do every time and some that we do differently in each show. Our final game isn’t a physical game–it’s all mental. There are sounds and letters; it’s all going off in their face while they’re trying to spell the words, thinking of the letters, but the letters are being shown in their face and sounds and all kinds of crazy stuff going on. We’re coming at them in every different way possible.”
Favorite moment: “My favorite moment is in our opening game, which is ‘Buzzed In,’ which is our obstacle course, we have this log that gets swung down from the ceiling. There was this one little blonde girl, about five-foot-two[-inches]. As she came over one of our humps, the log came down and caught her in the chest and literally lifted her up off the ground, spun her in the air and she landed on her back. She was safe, she was okay, but then it happened again. And then the next time, she made it underneath the log and…she stood back up and the log came and wiped her out the third time. It was a great series of events that happened to this lovely young lady.”
