Mike O’Malley of ‘Nickelodeon Guts’ Gives Pardon My Take a Detailed Look Into the Aggro Crag and His Friendly Relationship With Mo the Referee

If you're a 90's kid, you most likely spent hundreds of hours locked into the "Nick GaS" channel back in the day. Personally, I would wake up and fall asleep to a rotation of "Double Dare 2000," "Legends of the Hidden Temple," "Figure It Out," and "Nickelodeon Guts." Luckily for us, Pardon My Take welcomed on Guts host Mike O'Malley to the pod to send us into the weekend and he gave us some awesome insight to what went into this great show. O'Malley discussed some of the competitions on the show, elite contestants, and of course, the AGGRO CRAG! All that, in addition to seeing what the relationship with Mo the referee was on today's show: 

Mr. Cat: Was the Aggro Crag as daunting and cool as I think it is?

Mike O'Malley: Yes, it was giant. it was really, really big. And at that time, it was the biggest soundstage on the East Coast. It was down in Orlando, FL, where we shot at Universal Studios. And so, we're in the biggest soundstage on the East Coast. It was very, very tall, very wide. I think maybe you could tell on television, watching it, when the "nuclear flying crystals" were flying around there, and the smoke, it was very hard to see. And, you know, for the kids, they had those goggles on, think about yourself being 12-13 years old, is telling people, "You gotta do this, you gotta go up there, gotta go up there," there's a lot coming in at you. And so, obviously, it might look smaller than what it looked like on television, but it wasn't small. It wasn't like you come there and go, "Oh, the set is really tiny." It was big, and it was hard to get up Switchback Mountain, I think it was called. And the Actuators that you would have to hit, and people would miss all the time. They were hard to find, it's big.

Mr. Cat: OK, that's a good answer. You wouldn't lie to us, because I don't want my childhood ruined. You're being honest, right? It was daunting.

Mike O'Malley: Just ask me and I'll tell ya. First off, everyone wants to know: Mo [the referee] and I never hooked up. I had a steady girlfriend who became my wife and she had a steady boyfriend who became her husband. We never hooked up, but she's fantastic.

Mr. Cat: You guys had great chemistry. 

Mr. Commenter: Yeah, I'm going to pretend you didn't say that about Mo's boyfriend at the time, because I don't know if you know this, but every boy in American had a huge crush on Mo, myself included. Was she aware of that fact, that she had a simp army of 11-year-olds out there that just absolutely adored her?

Mike O'Malley: Yeah, I think she is aware of it because people do, you know, stop us all the time, still, about that. And, you know, I think for her, what you don't get on the television show is that she's wickedly funny. She's very, very, very funny. And her husband's a funny guy, too. And so that's what was fun about making the show. I think, you know, for us doing the show, I almost looked at it as it's like an acting part, like, OK, we know we're camp counselors we're the big brother, we're the big sister. 

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Most kids would do anything to get a shot at the Aggro Crag back in the day. Unfortunately, all of those Nick GaS shows are now defunct, in addition to the studios at Universal (fun fact: Blue Man Group now performs in that exact building). If they ever made a reboot of Guts, I think it's safe to say we would all watch. Mike O'Malley as the host, and Mo rocking the black and white stripes for a little nostalgia.

PS: There are talks of auctioning off a piece of the Aggro Crag off to charity. Stay tuned for that.