Colorado (ITA, December 1997)

 COLORADOOOOOOOO!

Italian television has a reputation for being very hit-and-miss. Bad stuff, such as Passaparola, which we recently watched, gets taken all around the world, but Avanti un Altro goes nowhere. Shame.

Today's review is on Colorado, an Italian format from the late 90s, which was a huge flop in its home country. But it's worth watching just for the banging Abba-y theme tune.

They seem to have mixed up Colorado with Oaxaca, looking at the titles. Or probably New Mexico.

Our episode happens to be a 1997 Christmas special, so there's all the festive duties before we introduce our contestants. More of that theme too. Lovely.

In Colorado, the white team, the yellow team, the reds and the greens, all play a series of minigames to make it to the "Table of Conquest".

There's a special hello to la Rina de la Pyramide - the Pyramid Queen, who seems to be some sort of pantomime villain. She doesn't like Christmas. Boo. She stays as a commanding presence at the top of her pyramid.

We meet Nino and Gianluca. They're asked a question and get it right. Since Nino got it right, it's worth the sum of rolling two random number generators. They get a 2 and a 6, so that's 8 points, so Gianluca moves 8 points on the huge game board which looks like the Strike it Lucky board.

A question is asked to the reds and they also score 8 from a 7 (what?) and a 1. After a quick rendition of Bing Crosby's White Christmas, the yellows score a 3 and a 6, so they're in the lead. The blues get 4 points.

There's now a short ad break, before the band (for there is a band) play Jingle Bells, in English, of all things. Now there's only 1 number generator. The blues get 5, the band sings a song in Italian because Gianluco has landed on a ladder (il elevatore), so he goes up from 25.

I stopped watching here. This was too confusing, too much to handle. The Italians thought the same back in the 90s.

Here's the episode we watched. If you want to see it. Just for the theme tune.