YMMV / The Crystal Maze

• Awesome Music: The main theme, "Force Field", by Zack Laurence.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Michael Underwood was one of the contestants and the captain of his team in the first episode of Season 2. Give it another twelve years, in 2003 and he became the longest running host and leader of Jungle Run, a gameshow with a similar format.
• Nightmare Fuel: From the 2016 version, the knights in the Portcullis Maze challenge in the Medieval Zone. Their faces are covered by full-face helmets, they don't say a word, look generally intimidating and if they touch you, you're automatically locked in with them. No wonder one contestant had a panic attack within 45 seconds of starting the challenge!
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In series 1, a game in the Futuristic zone involved a bomb which had to be defused by connecting wires. If the contestant failed the challenge in time (and they all did), the bomb would "explode": for this, the room was suddenly lit up in white, and there was the sound of an explosion.
  • In series 2, a snake slithering across the sand in the Aztec zone is clearly a rubber snake pulled by a string. There were many other occasions when cameras were in shot.
• That One Level:
  • For some, the Crystal Dome itself; while the set is certainly impressive, the actual game is more of a Luck-Based Mission and from a visual perspective closely resembles five or six adults prancing around like morons grabbing at bits of foil with absolutely no indication as to whether they're actually making any progress. Compare to the final challenge from the similarly formatted show Jungle Run, which involved a lot of varied challenges using different skill sets, with a larger emphasis on teamwork and time management, and was generally much more interesting to watch.
  • The moat puzzle in the Medieval Zone is the most notoriously hard puzzle in the show. The task is simply to walk across a moat, choosing stepping stones in a logical pattern. Each stepping stone has a simple sum on it, which will be something like "Musketeers + Colours of the Rainbow". Solving the sums is easy; the hard part is figuring out that the solution is the first term in the equation on the next stone. Very few contestants manage to make that connection, and those that do inevitably run out of time.
  • With some of the games in the first series, the object of the game was so unclear that the contestant would invariably spend a long time working out what to do, let alone have a try at actually completing it. This was averted in the later series, where most of the games had a very clear "legend on the wall", such as "make two words to find the crystal".
    • Defuse a nuclear warhead, by connecting coloured wires to pictures. (Futuristic)
    • Step on illuminated tiles, forming a mathematical progression, which was not explained.
    • Get balls in little holes in a dome to be tilted; no contestants came close to completing this.
• Tough Act to Follow: Tudor-Pole was nowhere near as popular as O'Brien as presenter. He wasn't bad, but he had an impossible act to follow.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Industrial Zone has been seen as this by its original set designer by the time it was revived stating that "there's so few elements from the original in daily life now. So much industrial landscape has disappeared, we don't do industry so much in this country anymore."

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