The Crystal Maze

What I didn't like about Ocean in Ed's series was that it got much darker, and didn't seem as luxury, I know it was meant to be a sunken ship but it wasn't needed.

And I'm sure that was Gladiators.

I see what you mean about the Ocean changes - a more rusty, battered look.

You are right that it wasn't vital to change it, but I reckon it looks pretty great for what it does. I'd say both versions have their pluses.

It pains me, not knowing if there is anything left of any of the sets, it would be good to hear from someone in the know to let us know what happened, when it was taken apart.

Ocean was my favourite too - especially the Richard O'Brien series. I never rated Industrial - but I didn't see those episodes until after I'd seen the Ocean ones.

Yes, pugil sticks/cotton buds were from Gladiators and not Crystal Maze

I always assumed that they changed over to having the Ocean bit because Industrial and Futuristic were a bit too similar

Futuristic certainly has stood the test of time the least out of any of the zones, I'd assume that would look the most different if they did remake it and it might even be a totally different zone.

The Crystal Dome set would also need to look quite a bit different.

it's true that Futuristic Zone looks dated now, just in the space of 20 years. I'd probably argue if a remake did happen and Futuristic Zone did return, it'd be more along the lines of Star Trek/Wars, or major space travel (albeit touched on during the Tudor-Pole era but not developed. For the amount of money that was ultimately spent on Crystal Maze over the years, the set never stopped looking like, well, a set really. I always thought that since Ocean was introduced everything else looked incredibly cheap in comparision afterwards, even watching them out of series order, Ocean still looked much better on screen than Industrial ever did.

As to the Crystal Dome, the more enduring mystery of that was how the heck you got to it looking at the maps:

(images from the Wikipedia)




The original map appears to have a passage that you can get to it from possibly either Industrial or Medieval, though from the latter is anybody's guess how you get to it as it appears only accessible from one of two game rooms, both of which when used only have one door.

The newer map clearly defines solid walls all around Ocean and Medieval.
Complicated by the fact everybody ran off to the Dome the same way they would have come in to that zone if it were the first. How does that work?

Am I being bit a bit "real" here, but surely they stopped and started recording to get the teams to position, faked their "run to the dome" or used wild walls to get to the area they were shooting on, or any other convention used in the recording of a television programme.

That is, after all, what it was.

And unless the stage was kept and paid for by some corporate team-building company, the sets woud have been torn down when the filming stopped. At best they would be put in storage, more likely burned or *possibly* reused.

That's what happens to sets. Bits of the Good Life became Blake's 7, bit of Blake's 7 became Keeping up Appearances, bits of that became bonfires.

It's no secret the dome itself was outside of the main set - but the map wouldn't have looked as good.

In many ways The Crystal Maze as a global brand would work really well today - so many shows now have one main set where teams from across the world film their series. As much as it is the show everyone wants back, it's also the show with the most to lose from a comeback too - and like so much nowadays the idea of the general public playing would be pushed to one side to make way for endless celebrity specials.

Really? I had no idea. The only one I can think of is Wipeout.

Could you name perhaps two others?

Fort Boyard, I'm a Celeb, The Cube, Million Pound Drop, virtually any new game show Endemol come up with. Even recent Big Brother/Secret Story revivals now share houses between two or three countries.