Kriti Mehrotra
Although one of the most unexpected productions Netflix has ever come out with due to its sheer childishness, ‘Floor is Lava’ is a game show that honestly deserves the hype it gets (and more). After all, it essentially takes the concept of our favorite reminisce-able pastime and blows it up to epic proportions to create burning hot obstacle courses unlike any other — quite literally.
If you blend Nickelodeon’s original ‘Legends of the Hidden Temple’ with ‘Wipeout,’ along with a sprinkle of ‘American Ninja Warrior,’ this reality competition series is precisely what you’ll end up with. So now that it has proven to be equal parts silly, endearing, and hilariously entertaining to win over our hearts, let’s actually find out more about the bubbling “lava” it involves, shall we?
How Deep is the Lava?
While it’s no secret anymore that the bright-red “lava” is not real lava — obviously — but rather warm, water-like slime carefully dyed the scary color, its exact depth is a bit unclear at the moment. Just like where the contestants vanish after falling into the goo is kind of top-secret knowledge only producers/teams have, it appears as if so is this, yet we have been able to speculate.
Since we not only know for a fact that the obstacle course rooms are filled with around 80,000 gallons of “lava” but also undeniably see every player that slips make a big splash, it’s evident that it is pretty deep. In other words, with the way the slime completely submerges the contenders — no matter their shape, size, or the angle at which they fall in — it’s safe to say that it goes further than a mere 3 or 4 feet.
Moreover, series creator Irad Eyal once admitted that even though the “lava” is their secret sauce, they ensured the contestants would always be safe, even if they had to be around or inside it for lengthy periods. Safety thus came first at every step of the way, whether during the creation of the substance or the trial runs, suggesting that it also can’t be so deep that it would ever scare away any cast member.
“The reason we’re being so secretive about [the lava] is because it really did take a long time to nail this down,” Irad Eyal stated. “You want the lava to glow. ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ the chemists [we tasked for the job] said, ‘we could just add in some glowing chemicals.’ Well, it turns out those things are carcinogenic. So you can’t have that in there. So it took a long time to figure out exactly how do you make this thing bubble, flow, be slippery, be viscous in the right way, and also be safe that people can be submerged in it for minutes at a time, hours at a time, whatever it is, and come out safely.”
Read More: Is Floor is Lava Real or Scripted?
