Damon Wayans Jr. is hosting Peacock's Frogger TV show

The Wipeout-like video game adaptation looks a lot like Wipeout

By Sam Barsanti | July 22, 2021 | 7:51pm

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Damon Wayans Jr. is hosting Peacock's Frogger TV show

Damon Wayans Jr. Photo: Peacock

Back in February, Peacock announced that it had picked up a “supersized physical competition series” based on the old video game Frogger, with “outrageous obstacle courses” and a “massive cash prize” and… you know, all of the stuff that the show Wipeout already has, right down to the inexplicable 60-minute runtime, but with cars and alligators and Frogger stuff. It all very much had a “this seems like such a ridiculous idea, we’ll believe it when we see it” vibe, at least partially because Frogger is owned by Konami, a video game company that realized years ago it could make a lot more money by squeezing people with mobile games and slot machines than it could by making video games, and a TV show that was like a real-life version of a video game seemed awfully close to a video game—which, again, Konami hates.

But no, Peacock’s Frogger is really happening, and they both released a teaser image (up above) and announced that Damon Wayans Jr. will serve as the show’s host (alongside Good Morning Football’s Kyle Brandt as co-host). The latest press release from Peacock doesn’t have a ton of other new info, but it does look like the big physical Frogger set is doing a good job of replicating the aesthetics of the video game. We imagine the contestants will be wearing wacky frog suits, though there’s no photos of that, so this actually has the potentially to at least look fun. Also, we asked this when the show was announced, but we need to bring it up again: If you get on this show, please put in the famous Konami code—up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start, whatever the equivalent of that would be in real life—just so we can see what happens. Will you get infinite lives? Will you skip to the final level? Or will it be one of those bullshit cheats that just shows you the credits or whatever? There’s only one way to find out.