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Former ‘Double Dare’ Host Marc Summers Walked Off ‘Quiet on Set’: ‘They Ambushed Me’
Former Double Dare host Marc Summers walked off the set of Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV after he realized what the docuseries was putting a spotlight on some of the alleged inappropriate behavior that happened behind the scenes of some of Nickelodeon’s most popular shows in the early 2000s.
“I got called by these folks saying they wanted to do a documentary on Nickelodeon. So, I said, ‘Sure.’ I went there and they asked me what I thought of Nick, and the first 10 to 12 seconds, from what I understand, in this documentary is me saying all these wonderful things,” Summers, 72, said during an appearance on “Elvis Duran and the Morning Show” on Friday, April 5. “But they did a bait-and-switch on me. They ambushed me.”
Summers continued, “They never told me what this documentary was really about. They showed me a video of something that I couldn’t believe was on Nickelodeon. And I said, ‘Let’s stop the tape right here. What are we doing?'”
Summers said he received a phone call “about four weeks ago” and he was told, “Well, you’re in it, but you’re only in the first part of it because you only talked about the positive stuff of Nickelodeon.”
“What they didn’t tell me,” Summers continued, “and they lied to me about, was the fact that they put in that other thing where they had the camera on me when they ambushed me. So, now we get into a whole situation about who’s unethical?”
The former What Would You Do? host only appears in the first episode of Quiet on Set, and he recalled some of his memories from his time hosting the kids game show, Double Dare, from 1986 to 1993.
“Nickelodeon wasn’t there to educate you. We were there to have fun, to get slimed, to be entertained,” Summers says in his interview.
However, producers of Quiet on Set then showed him some clips from Nickelodeon shows like Victorious and Zoey 101, which were run by Dan Schneider. Summers seemingly becomes somewhat appalled and asks, “Did that air on Nickelodeon?”
Several other former Nickelodeon stars appeared in Quiet on Set, as well as former employees of Schneider, 58. Much of the series focuses on the allegations made by former employees of Schneider who claim he created a toxic work environment where he pestered female employees for massages and was prone to angry outbursts.
Just two days after Quiet on Set premiered, Schneider addressed the allegations and issued an apology.
“Watching over the past two nights was very difficult, me facing my past behaviors, some of which are embarrassing and that I regret,” Schneider told BooG!e – who played T-Bo on the hit Schneider show iCarly – in a YouTube interview published on March 19. “I definitely owe some people a pretty strong apology.”
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