The Blue Devils met the Tar Heels in a slimy battle Saturday evening.
Duke beat the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a lead of about 300 points in Double Dare, a revival of the popular game show that originally aired on Nickelodeon from 1986 to 1993. The competition—featuring original Double Dare host Marc Summers—included various physical challenges, trivia and an obstacle course, which often resulted in sliming the contestants. The Duke vs. UNC Double Dare, which drew several hundred audience members to the Intramural Building, marked the first time the game show has been recreated for a competition between universities, said sophomore Shane Stone, programming chair of the innovations committee of Duke University Union.
“It was one of those things you dream about as a little kid watching Nickelodeon, except that it actually happened,” said senior Betsy Klein, a member of the Duke team.
The winning team members—Klein, senior Jeremy Moskowitz, sophomore Jacob Robinson and sophomore Elizabeth Turner—were each awarded a two-day pass to Universal Studios and to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando, Fla., Stone said.
These candidates were selected from a pool of 100 students who each submitted a video, Stone said. The innovations committee then narrowed down the contestants to 12 candidates who ran a Facebook campaign for two weeks. The contestants were chosen based on the number of people who liked their Facebook pages.
Stone declined to comment on the exact cost of the event but noted that both UNC and Duke contributed funds.
Moskowitz noted that the UNC Carolina Union Activities Board’s fun committee, the group in charge of collaborating with DUU, did not publicize the event to the extent that DUU did, giving Duke’s team the edge. He added that approximately 10 students from UNC attended, compared to Duke’s large crowd of about 300.
“[In following years,] UNC should make it more of a competition on their end, so it’s more fun for everyone,” Moskowitz said.
Stone said he was pleased with the outcome of the event, but he was slightly disappointed with the turnout—given that 500 tickets were distributed prior to the event.
“If we are able to recreate [the competition], I want to make a larger effort to publicize the event at both schools and make sure that the people who planned to attend actually do show up,” Stone said.
Recreating a Nickelodeon event for the University had been on the agenda for two years, Stone said. Stone added that planning the Double Dare competition was the first order of business on his list when he joined the innovations committee. The innovations committee was created in Fall 2010 as an offshoot of DUU’s special projects committee, he added.
Summers had been reluctant to join hands with DUU because other universities had attempted and failed to create a successful Double Dare event, Stone noted. After about a year of exchanging emails, Summers finally agreed to host the competition between Duke and UNC.
Stone said he hopes to make the event an annual affair, eventually turning it into a nationwide college tour.
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