The Crystal Maze

The one where they used to pull ropes that never worked so they had to climb over the top!

Can anyone refesh my memory how they got from zone to zone, some have already been mentioned but not all of them?

Those women are awful, I know one who works at the Bainbridges beauty section (now John Lewis), and one who used to work in the Fenwicks section. They are scary women, with faces which are caked in so much make-up and they seem to model themselves off...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/fastshow/characters/images/no_offence2.jpg
'I'm guessing you're divorced, if you've let yourself lapse in the feminine hygiene department. No offence'.

Any way the Crystal Maze is a great family show that can be watched by people of al ages. It also sold quite well abroad. I prefered the original Maze, I wasn't too keen on the sunken ship and the rest. I hope they do bring it back.

Aztec --> Industrial - pipe.
(Aztec --> Ocean - passageway type thing and kicking a cover grill out)
Industrial --> Medieval - Um... :
Medieval - Futuristic - Wood over some water
Futuristic --> Aztec - the hydraulic lift, speeded up in later series as well

Oh yes, i forgot about how the industrial zone connected - where did the pipe come out in the aztec zone? And does anyone know how they got to Aztec from Industrial?

The Crystal Maze Yahoo! group has the links to the pages that can give you this info:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thecrystalmaze


Also there a few months ago I launched THE CRYSTAL CHALLENGE, which was based on creating a new look Crystal Maze.



And this was my effort:

I used to think it was funny thinking back...Richard always just used to push that hatch from Ocean to Medieval when changing zones with his finger tips and it used to glide gracefully open. When Ed did it, he pretended to put so much effort and strength in trying to open the same hatch groaning and grunting at the same time, even though it was freely mobile!

I also used to like Ed's "Cosmic Handshake" if the contestant won a game...that was wicked!

What do people think about the Ocean Zone...in Richard's era, it was brightly lit and fully restored with the wood gleaming and polished. When Ed came along, it was a complete wreck with dust and old furniture and muck about the place with more water leaking in. I wasn't very comfortable with this at first but after a few shows, it began to grow on me and I liked the Ocean zone the most overall.

If the Ocean zone was to return, would you like it nicely lit or dark and dingy as it was when Ed was at the helm?

Anyone have a favourite individual game ? I always liked the one in Aztec where there was a room with loads of compartments in it and they had to climb a rope into each one and look amongst the dust and stuff on the floor for the crystal. They were generally pretty crap at that one, always good for a lock in.

I liked the one in Medieval with Mumsy in it with the brain teaser type question, her crystal ball would open up with the crystal in it.

I used to like that one that was a living room in a house where the door wouldn't open and they had to climb through the window and cut electrical wires. Sometimes they took ages to fathom how to get in the house and read the note in the milk bottle by the door!

And there was the one with loads of metal doors that you couldn't tell which opened

And that one where they had to make the King's Seal, but remember to do the mirror image!

The ones in Ocean were awfully wet though!

So did people who got automatic lock-ins really stay there on their own for the rest of the game?

They used to have a number of variations with the remote control car / boat / buggy thing. Moving that boat around the course and then having to get the crystal on the magnet was notoriously difficult.

I think my favourite ones were:

The Ocean ones where you had to fire at the battleships through the periscope.

Mumsie's crystal ball games where you had to answer the riddle.

The Futuristic ones where the contestants had to crawl through a massive wire mesh cage and set timers to various things.

Also in futuristic where you have to investigate the death of a scientists. IIRC a more wetter version of this was introduced in Ocean.

The memories are so distant. What would you say the most common game was?

The Flags on the wall little drawers in ocean? or that tilt-table thing where you had to role out the crystal in medieval?

I do remember that the ropes to the gate into Medieval did work once or twice (may well have been a children's special if they thought it was too dangerous/difficult an entrance to make?).

And I remember the final entrance into medieval from one of the zones involved running down some spiral steps.


The main game I remember from industrial is the doorbell one with the oversized battery and bell push. Possibly the simplest game ever and yet so many people didn't work it out. I always remember that a few episodes into a series when you'd seen most of the games they had to offer, that the fun would switch from working out the game yourself, to seeing how long it takes the contestants to work it out.

As to the remake, well it's a nice idea but I do have some concerns about it. Firstly, that Flextech will be involved. The original show was necessarily expensive to produce, and I just can't see that Flextech will divert sufficient finances to make it look as good as it used to. The budget of the original was called into question during it's original production; now the purse strings are held even tighter. I'm not envisaging it as being a huge set built in an aircraft hanger any more - I can imagine the physical space it would be produced in to be quite small; maybe just a generic zone set with a 'zone change' section at the end of it, a dome set, and all sorts of dodgy computer generated footage to create the different zones - it could well end up looking more like Knightmare than The Crystal Maze. And then there is the matter of who will present it. Personally, I can't see either Richard or Ed returning. But who else would do it in the same completely OTT way that Richard O'Brien pioneered? And apart from anything else, Challenge's track record of reviving old game shows isn't that good - about the only success I can think of is 100%, and that's only because it was cheap to start with and they kept it exactly (no pun intended) the same as it was on C5.

And of course the biggest problem at all is that revivals tend to kill off the original. The original episodes are unlikely to be shown alongside the old ones because they'd want people to watch the new ones (especially if budget constraints make the new series less visually spectacular - they wouldn't want a brand spanking new production to be directly seen as inferior to something made 10 years (closer to 15 years for some episodes) earlier), and if the new format isn't succesful and the show is pulled, reruns of the original series are unlikely to be forthcoming since they would be reruns of a failed show. This is exactly what happened to Blockbusters (and dare I say it, Crossroads).

I'd love to think that The Crystal Maze could be a hit again, but I don't know if the very real possibility that the original series (which lets face it, is very unlikely to be topped) will be killed off in the process makes it worthwhile.

Yes thats right. that connected Medieval to Ocean. You went up the stairs and through a small grate / hatch into the ocean zone boiler room, and then down some rigging. or vice versa of course!