'RuPaul's Drag Race' Team Pulled Off Squirrel Games Cold Open in 90 Minutes With Cherry Pies and Cool Whip Jazz TangcayAugust 20, 2025 at 2:50 AM The producers of "RuPaul's Drag Race" know how important it is to top themselves with every season.
- - 'RuPaul's Drag Race' Team Pulled Off Squirrel Games Cold Open in 90 Minutes With Cherry Pies and Cool Whip
Jazz TangcayAugust 20, 2025 at 2:50 AM
The producers of "RuPaul's Drag Race" know how important it is to top themselves with every season.
Between the fresh batch of queens, the celebrity judges and the mini challenges, they're all focused on elevating the show and the franchise. And this season, the team upped the stakes, upped the drag and upped the camp when it parodied "Squid Game's" Red Light, Green Light game.
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"Squirrel Games" was the brainchild of producer and World of Wonder co-founder Randy Barbato. He had just finished an episode of "Squid Game: The Challenge."
"He came in, hot off the first watch, and he's telling us what happens, and how simple and fabulous it is," says producer Tom Campbell.
The production team riffed on what would work in the language of "Drag Race" and the ideas quickly flowed. "Instead of the girl, it should be Lil' Poundcake [a character created by former queens Alaska Thunderfuck and Lineysha Sparx]," recalls Campbell. "It shouldn't be 'Squid Games,' it should be 'Squirrel Games,' and then it came together."
The idea evolved beyond just introducing the new contending queens, instead bringing in theshow's alumni. Victoria "Porkchop" Parker, Trinity the Tuck, Angeria Paris VanMicheals, Morgan McMichaels and Kerry Colby appeared alongside Suzie Toot, Onya Nurve, Jewels Sparkles and the other new queens of Season 17. The ideas continued to come in. Says Campbell, "We usually do photo shoots, so we thought, why not start with this, and make this the unorthodox photo shoot?"
It survived the "Let's sleep on it test," and before they knew it, "Squirrel Games" went full-steam ahead.
The queens would play "Ru Light, Green Light." When the music stopped, they had to pose.
Whoever moved didn't get killed — they got pied.
Producer Mandy Salangsang reveals they explored different options before landing on the pie idea. One such idea was a confetti cannon. "We tinkered with different things. We went down the road of confetti squibs, and we tested [confetti explosions] with a special effects group," she says. "And they were fun and glittery, but it wasn't preposterous enough."
A pie to the face aligned with the language of "Drag Race." But even finding the right pie took experimentation. Salangsang says they wanted something that wouldn't hurt the queens, but had maximum "Vaudeville impact." "We tested lemon meringue pies. We tested cherry pies, blueberry pies and blackberry pies. We tested pies with crusts and without crust," she says.
In the end, the winning pie was a canned cherry pie with Cool Whip.
When it came time to shoot, the art department and special effects had to come together to pull it off. As for the queens, "they knew their wigs and wardrobe would get dirty, beyond the point of repair, but they were so game," Salangsang says.
"It was indeed a one-take with the pies, with the Season 17 queens being the only ones to crossthe finish line."
The whole cold open was shot in 90 minutes — and they pulled it off.
But amid the cold open being a showcase for the art of drag and the delivering on the power of laughter, the "Drag Race" team knows the show remains as important and as relevant as ever, especially in today's political climate. It goes beyond entertainment as the stories of the queens continue to foster messages of acceptance and representation, reaching the LGBTQ+ community.
"What we need to do is defend drag, support these artists and the people, so they can tell their story," Campbell says. "'RuPaul's Drag Race' is a competition show, which is the fun part, but it's a platform and tells stories to open hearts and minds."
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