Penny Arcade (game show)

Penny Arcade is a Kuboian children's game show created by Lilian Pond, Sofie van Halen and Arthur Benning and hosted by Caroline Weaver. The show was loosely based off the American game show Fun House, though has noticable differences compared to it. It premiered on Vision Network as part of its Bumper's Block Saturday night programming strand in 1995. A second series also aired as part of Vision's normal branding in 1997.

Format
Each episode featured two teams, a red and a blue team consisting of a boy and a girl each, competing in a series of games to win prizes.

The first three games were generally based around classic arcade games and had some sort of scoring system where teams scored ten points each time they cleared an objective (for example, a "hook-a-duck" game involved teams winning ten points for each duck they collected). Usually one member of each team would compete in each game whilst their teammate would help them in some way. The fourth game upped the stakes and allowed more points to be won compared to the other games, and also typically involved gunge.

After the fourth game the final scores were calculated, the losing team was eliminated and the winning team would progress to the final round, The Great Maze. If there was a tie for points, whichever team won the fourth game was deemed the winner, and if that game also featured a tie it would go into overtime until one of the teams gained an additional point.

In the Great Maze, the remaining team would have three minutes to traverse through a large soft play-like maze collecting three objects that resembled the games played earlier in the show and bringing them back to the starting gate. In order to win the show's "Grand Prize" all three items had to be brought to a large barrel caused the "Prize Barrel" before time ran out. Additionally, several Mystery Tokens were scattered around the maze that the team could bring back for extra prizes. Regardless of the results, the winning team always won a goldern trophy.

Production
Penny Arcade was intended as a spring replacement for Rat Labyrinth, which normally aired in the autumn and winter. Although the show was merely meant to be a Kuboian version of Fun House, TVVC executive Arthur Benning suggested to make their own show instead, as this gave TVVC more creative freedom when coming up with ideas and the premise. Benning hired Lilian Pond and Sofie van Halen to come up with new ideas.

One noticable change was that unlike Fun House, where team members represented a school, the team members in Penny Arcade did not know each other before being assigned to be in the same team. All four players of each episode were also given time to socialise with each other before recording the episode. Van Halen said these changes were put in place to help the help the children make new friends. According to former contestants, the criteria to be considered for appearing in an episode was strict, and were rejected if they were over a certain weight.

In order to save on tape and in order for everything to be "natural", all of the footage for Penny Arcade was usually expected to be filmed under one take, unless there was a particularly good reason for a scene to be restarted. Weaver claimed in a 2021 interview that the children were often nervous during filming episodes because they were worried that anything embarrassing that happened to them might be aired on television.