Recently, Bananas had TJ Lavin on his Death, Taxes, and Bananas podcast. It was a fun walk down memory lane, and the two reminisced on a lot of old Challenge moments. But the show didn’t end with a farewell; it was a see-you-soon.
Bananas claims he’s ready to return to The Challenge. He’s only been gone for two seasons, but he feels that the break should come to an end.
His last season was Total Madness, and even though he won, it was a tough time. Being locked in a bunker is enough to drive a lot of people crazy, and Bananas was no exception. TJ and Bananas both know that the show has changed a lot over the years. Cast members have lost a lot of freedoms, and production does a good job of making the game the center of everyone’s lives. The bunker upped that mentality a notch.
The people on the show now look a bit different. TJ said he loves seeing international cast members on the show. Bananas isn’t so welcoming.
So, Bananas feels Season 38 will have a lot of veterans coming out of the woodwork to compete again. From the language used in the conversation, Bananas made his return seem very, very likely. Nothing is confirmed yet because production has been pushed back, but Bananas seems confident about his decision.
I’m not going to read into this too much, but it would be nice to have some familiar faces on the show. It seems like a lot of old-schoolers have opted for All Stars, but season 4 is still pending. So, they might look to the main series to get back into the competitions.
I’m hoping this is true. I haven’t always been the biggest fan of Bananas, but at this point, I will take any Real World representation I can get.
Stop Being Polite 
Hear hear!! I couldn’t agree more about wanting more real world representation. Basically every season now since Dirty 30 has become an international fresh meat season. And I always thought the reason the fresh meat seasons worked so well was because there was only a couple of them and they were well spaced. If you included bloodlines and called that a fresh meat which is basically sort of what it was, there was three of them between season 11 and 20 what? When was bloodlines? season 27 maybe. So an average of 8 seasons in between. And now all of a sudden basically every season for the last 7 seasons has been sort of a fresh meat, not to mention that the returning veterans are now the people who had been the fresh meat coming from the other properties like are you the one and Big brother Etc. So we’re getting less and less and less real world / road rules representation every season.
Again I’m not against the fresh meat concept but I do wish that they had continued to pull from at least Viacom properties and I’m not a huge fan of the fact that the bulk of the new people continue to be coming from overseas. The reason isn’t that I have some issue with foreign people so much as my issue is that the reason the show was so successful all along is that they were pulling people from properties we were familiar with. So you already had a vested interest in a lot of these incoming people because you had been watching them on MTV already. Well it’s pretty much safe to say that none of us are watching survivor turkey and love Island UK, so we have no vested interest in them so they might as well be fresh meat. And thus the key component that I felt made the show so successful, has been thrown out the window. That baseline familiarity with a lot of these people because they were already a known entity.
Perfectly said. Agree 100%.
I knew Johnny would come back when he broke up with Morgan I think cara Maria too but they need to loosen the rules everybody comes in just too aware nobody’s there for a good time it’s the million dollars
No thanks, anyone but him….
I would like to see Kenny & Evan come back.
Yeah me too, but there’s probably smoke where there’s fire. If producers settled with Tonya, there’s gotta be some truth to the accusations. Which means as much as I think the show was at it’s absolute peak during their run, and I miss the Challenge circa 2005-2010, I can’t condone MTV bringing them back. But part of me still wants to see it.