It was only three pieces of gray foam. Three pieces. One part clearly went on the bottom, one obviously went in the middle, and one was definitely the top layer. (It had a freaking head!) It should have been the easiest thing in the world to put together and to put together quickly. And yet for some absurd reason, the Shrine of the Silver Monkey on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple was more more challenging than brain surgery. How many young kids had their Space Camp dreams dashed by their inability to accomplish such an easy-looking task? Probably way more than you remember, as this video of all their failures shows. And it’s going to have you screaming at them all over again.

The Vimeo channel Everything is Terrible! put together this collection of footage of contestants struggling to put together the infamous shrine—in other words, the most frustrating television moments from your childhood condensed into one maddening montage.

Oh c’mon! JUST PUT THE FREAKING… no… no. I can’t do this again. I can’t experience all of that anger and frustration again 20 years later. In fairness to those contestants, when I spoke to host Kirk Fogg about why so many kids struggled with the deceptively simple task, he had a pretty good defense:

“It’s way down on the end of the Temple. You have to do all that work to get to the Shrine. You don’t understand how exhausted you are. So you get there, you’re delirious, people are screaming, there’s music going on at the same time, you have producers on the ground who are yelling, I’m yelling on the microphone, and it’s confusing. And it’s all silver. You can get the base on, but once you get to the base, it’s that second piece. It’s like, ‘Where does that thing go on?’”

You know, that’s all totally fair and reasonable. But one counterpoint: it was three pieces.

Was there anything more frustrating to watch as a kid than seeing contestants fail at the Shrine of the Silver Monkey? Tell us what else drove you nuts in the comments below.

Featured Image: Nickelodeon

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