While going through some hard drives of old gold, I found some VHS tapes with a series I created/ hosted for MenTV back in the early 2000s’ called ‘Ultimate Destination’.
The show featured me and two Canadian ‘models’ traveling to the Caribbean to take part in some very fun spring break parties, and young revelers getting ‘UD’d’ in vacay.
Not surprisingly, I don’t remember much.
How it Started
In 2002, after having split with a long-term girlfriend, I tasked myself with wanting to create an epic adventure for myself to celebrate this newfound single feeling.
I booked an all-inclusive trip to Cancun, Mexico, and brought along my trusty Mini-DV cam to capture all the craziness.
For a week I partied, met loads of strangers, new friends, and filmed people doing crazy, fun things in this Mexican party city.
You have to remember that in 2002, people didn’t have phones with cameras in them, so filming on the streets was generally done by those with TV cameras, or professionals.
Thus me pulling out a pro-looking camera, brought out loads of boob flashes, and lascivious behaviour that arose from the noughties.
After returning home to Canada, I edited together a pitch of a TV series that saw me taking a few pieces of arm-candy to the tropics, to see how the kids partied.
Given that ‘Wild On’ and ‘Girls Gone Wild’ were already cultural gateways at this point, ‘Ultimate Destination’ seemed like an easy sell.
And it was.
‘Ultimate Destination’ was commissioned by MenTV for 13 x 30 rambunctious episodes. Hampered by a budget befitting of a new, Canadian digital channel, I was forced to make up some of the funding my tapping tourism boards, airlines, and local tourism commissions to prop up the production wallet.
Despite not having a digital presence like today’s multi-media offerings, all of the brands were in, provided we showed some kind on the show.
UD’d
To entice the kids on vacation, we gave them a bunch of free stuff to persuade them to engage in antics, or just chat with us.
UD thongs were on display across many locations, as many young ladies seemed to lose their undies on vacation.
We also got the young’uns to say ‘We Got UD’d at…’ so that we could not only reinforce the brand, but also have us something to transition to.
I have no idea what ‘Getting UD’d’ even means, but it was catchy, and the kids said it.
Reaction
So how did the network react to the final product of Wade’s drunken adventures across the Caribbean? Not so good.
Despite being told by them that it ‘missed the mark’, I was able to take some of the clips from the series and put them on a new digital service that came out in 2005 called ‘YouTube.’
Turns out it caught on, as did the videos bringing in millions of views across my channel.
Some were flagged, some removed, but mostly what happened is that my views dwarfed the viewing figures of the actual show on the network by 100 fold.
(top viewing figures for MenTV at the time were in 2000-5000 range)
Due to the fact that audiences can only really see short form offerings of UD, I decided to upload a full episode so that you can see how much magic was actually stuffed into that hat.
Sure, some of the content is rather cringey in its current form, and many things I say in it would probably get me cancelled as well.
Oh well, I am an old enough man now that I don’t give a hoot, plus no one probably reads this anyway.
So enjoy a trip to the past to a more innocent time in TV, like when people were actually watching it.
