The two-part documentary Pee-Wee as Himself, now available for streaming on HBO Max, chronicles actor Paul Reubens’ unexpected rise to fame as the character Pee-Wee Herman. As the documentary explains, game shows had a small role in the rise of Reubens and his bizarre alter ego.

Reubens’ earliest shots at the big time came from The Gong Show. He and actress Charlotte McGinnis appeared on the daytime show as contestants, calling themselves “Betty and Eddie’s Sensational Sound Effects,” in which they acted out an old-time radio show and performed all the necessary sound effects with their mouths. They won the grand prize of $516.32 and were invited by the show’s staff to appear on the nighttime version of The Gong Show; they performed the act again and won the grand prize again.

While many game shows have rules prohibiting contestants from returning, The Gong Show creator/producer Chuck Barris ran his show very differently. There was no limit to how often a person could be a contestant. The only restrictions were that returning contestants had to audition just like anybody else, and that returnees had to do a different act for every audition that they attended. Reubens would perform on The Gong Show, then devise a new act, and call the show to make an appointment for the next audition. By his own count, Reubens appeared on the show 14 times.

Reubens credited the show with giving him unexpected financial security at an unstable time in his life. Chuck Barris courted members of SAG and AFTRA, two performers’ unions (they have since merged) with the promise that he would pay union members “scale”—an established minimum guaranteed payment for a television performance. At the time it was about $250 for each of those 14 performances. Barris also promised royalty payments and delivered when he sold Gong Show reruns to local stations. Reubens received a windfall check for royalties covering the next several years’ worth of Gong Show reruns. Reubens later said that he called off his search for a day job, living off Gong Show money while he was developing material for his theater show.

Reubens created the character of Pee-Wee Herman for a Groundlings performance. Originally, the premise was that Herman was a bad stand-up comic who had trouble remembering the punch lines of his jokes. But Reubens kept adding extra details—playing with toys, throwing candy at the audience, doing bizarre things with his voice—until the character became completely different.

America first met Pee-Wee Herman on another Chuck Barris game show, The Dating Game. Shortly after Reubens developed the character, he was looking through classified ads; Chuck Barris’ staff had placed a large ad seeking people to be contestants on their shows, and Reubens had the inspired idea to audition for The Dating Game, fully in character as Pee-Wee. Reubens, sporting the now-iconic gray suit and red bowtie, walked into the room among 200 dashing young studs and immediately realized that all the attention was on him.

Herman, introduced by host Jim Lange as a comedian whose interests included bird watching, trapeze, and tightrope walking, is still in something of a “beta testing” stage as a character. Watching The Dating Game now, a Pee-Wee Herman fan would notice that the voice isn’t quite right, and that he has thick hair pressed tightly against his head with a gob of grease, as opposed to the short haircut he sported later.

 Reubens actually successfully made a date on his first appearance. As with The Gong Show, he was encouraged to return to The Dating Game a few more times. Unlike The Gong Show, he was not asked to change a thing for The Dating Game. He returned as Pee-Wee Herman. Even if it is not quite the character you know, it’s easy to see why Chuck Barris’ staff was enamored with him. The bachelorette flirtatiously asked, “What do you think of when you hear the word ‘go’”? Pee-Wee responded with an awkward story about driving his Volkswagen Bus to traffic school, and even the other two bachelors get caught on camera chuckling at his odd behavior.

As a follow-up, she said she didn’t like it when a date made things “too easy” for her and asked Pee-Wee how he’d make things a little tough for her. He pledged to wear a tight-fitting bodysuit under his clothes during their date. Jim Lange audibly lost it, guffawing and taking a second to collect himself.

In the seven years following his last shot at The Dating Game, Reubens as Pee-Wee Herman had launched a successful theatre show, adapted that into an HBO special, made 11 show-stealing appearances as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman, starred in a feature film, and launched his own Saturday morning network kids’ show. As Pee-Wee fans and keepers of game show history, we take a little pride in the role that Chuck Barris and the game show genre played in his rise to stardom.

The post Pee-Wee Herman…the Game Show Star? appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

A new movie coming out on April 4, The Luckiest Man in America, chronicles one of the most famous (some would say infamous) moments in game show history. Paul Walter Hauser stars as Michael Larson, an ice cream truck driver who made history in the strangest of ways as a contestant on Press Your Luck in 1984. If you want to be surprised by what happened, stop reading now, enjoy the movie, and come back for the full scoop. If you want the details now, though, keep reading this edge-of-your-seat story.

LET’S GO TO THE BOARD
It probably holds the distinction of being the most famous game show of all time, at least that the average TV viewer can’t remember the name of. Mention Press Your Luck and you might get a glimmer of recognition or dazed look. Mention “the game with Big Bucks and Whammies,” though, and faces glow with memories of the larger-than-life game board with every color of the rainbow, surrounded by the frenetic flashing lights, and the whimsical cartoon characters that popped up every now and then to ruin everyone’s fun.

Press Your Luck was a dream combination of “game” and “show.” Sure, there was a flashy set, noisy contestants, blaring electronic music and sound effects, but contained in that eye-popping package was a game perfectly designed to build to a thrilling climax every day, infused with so much fate, so many unpredictable elements, that it seemed there was no such thing as a “runaway game.” Every moment, every turn counted, right down to the very end.

Press Your Luck originally began life as Second Chance, an ABC game show that survived for only 17 weeks. Host Jim Peck welcomed three contestants each day. Peck would read a trivia question and the contestants would write their answers. Peck would then read three possible correct answers and give the players a second chance to write an answer. Writing the correct answer on your second chance earned a “spin.” Sticking with your first answer and being correct earned three spins.

After four questions were played, everybody redeemed their spins on a looming eighteen-square game board. A blinking frame of lights flashed from square to square on the board, almost faster than the eye could see it. Some of the spaces contained cash, some spaces had gift boxes; when landed on, the gift boxes would reveal prizes. The players built up their scores with all those prizes and money. But three of the eighteen spaces were Devils. Landing on a Devil cost the player everything; no matter how far they were into the game, a Devil always cost players their whole haul. A player also had the option of passing spins to the opponent with the highest score. A second round was played, with higher money amounts and more valuable goodies on the board, plus a big money space that could be worth up to $5,000 and an extra spin. No matter how far behind a player was, that available extra spin meant it was always mathematically possible to catch up. Combined with Devils that could wipe out an entire score at any minute, and you had a game that could not possibly decided until the very last spin.

Despite the show coming and going in 95 episodes, creator Bill Carruthers and ABC daytime boss Michael Brockman were confident that he had hit a winning idea. In 1983, Brockman, now at CBS, was looking for a new game and asked Carruthers if he could tinker with Second Chance. The tinkered version was called Press Your Luck. The question round was scaled back considerably to a simple ring-in-to-answer game that sped up proceedings considerably. The spin board was now stuffed with slide projectors that alternated between three options each, for a total of 54 unique possible results on each spin. There were more spaces that offered extra spins, which meant more time spent hitting the button and collecting goodies…or “Whammys,” the funny red blobs that replaced the original Devils. The penalty was punctuated nicely in Press Your Luck. When a contestant landed on a Whammy, there was a brief time-out for an animated Whammy cartoon, with the Whammy mocking the contestant, activating weapons (which usually backfired), or referencing trendy songs and TV commercials.

Carruthers also made a slight aesthetic change to the board; the flashing light now blinked from square to square a bit slower. It still moved fast enough that contestants couldn’t really make sense of where the light was until they hit their button to stop it; it just wasn’t moving with the strobe-like speed of Second Chance’s light.

Early in the developmental stages of Press Your Luck, Bill Carruthers made it known to CBS that he wanted the lights to be controlled by a computer system that could handle 12 patterns in which the light could flash. With the technology available at the time, a computer system that could truly randomize the light would have been prohibitively expensive, but Carruthers thought that a computer alternating between a dozen patterns could create the illusion of randomness convincingly. CBS agreed to the suggestion initially.

When the Press Your Luck pilot was shot, Carruthers was given a system that had five patterns. Carruthers said that would do for the pilot, but if CBS picked up the series, he needed a dozen of them. But when CBS put Press Your Luck on the schedule, Carruthers went to his new network bosses and reminded them of his request.

“We just don’t have the money for it,” he was told. “We can only give you five patterns.”
Carruthers, in a prescient moment, warned the network, “I want to go on the record right now, I believe if we only have five patterns, we’re going to have a situation where a contestant memorizes the board.”

The retort came from another staffer in the room: “We should be so lucky if we get viewers who care about this show enough to watch it every day and memorize the way the lights flash.” Carruthers’ warning, was forgotten about until May 19, 1984, a day when Carruthers, who served as his own director, watched the game in the control room, saw what one contestant was doing, and pulled off his headset in exasperation.

“He’s done it,” Carruthers announced.

HERE COMES THE ICE CREAM MAN
Michael Larson was an eccentric Lebanon, Ohio, native whose mother optimistically described him to the Cincinnati Enquirer as “…[E]xtremely smart and very intense. Once he gets his mind set on something, nothing deters him. He follows through on anything he sets out to do.”
His brother, James, had a grimmer assessment, later telling Game Show Network, “He was doomed to self-destruction.”

In his younger years, he seemed musically inclined, playing the organ and singing with a jazz band. But by day, Michael Larson worked various odd jobs during his adult life, never concerned with finding a career and far more interested in finding a get-rich-quick-scheme that would set him up for life. He spent the better part of ten years driving an ice cream truck, which meant that he was rendered unemployed every year when autumn and winter struck Ohio. Larson spent his days watching a bizarre arrangement of multiple televisions and VCRs in his living room. It wasn’t a matter of vegging out, his common-law wife later remembered; he seemed to be watching all of the sets as if he was searching for something; he just didn’t know what it was.

Larson found Press Your Luck shortly after it bowed on CBS in September 1983. He became fascinated with it, to the point of watching it and recording it daily to re-watch the games later, and after a few months, Larson figured out Bill Carruthers’ big secret. Larson spotted the patterns.
Larson bought a plane ticket and took a journey to Los Angeles to visit the Press Your Luck production office. There, he met contestant coordinator Bob Edwards and show creator Bill Carruthers. Larson, a natural born salesman, won over Carruthers quickly with his tale of flying out to Los Angeles just to be a contestant on his creation.

Edwards was wary. After Larson left, he voiced his concerns. “There’s something about this guy that worries me.”

Carruthers liked Larson, and admitted later that he should have trusted his contestant coordinator’s gut.

ATTACK ON THE SHOW
Larson’s memorization efforts were focused mainly on two of the eighteen spaces of the board. One square would cycle between $1,000, or $1,250, or $1,500 in round one, and then $3,000, $4,000, and $5,000 in round two. The other square cycled between $500, $750, and $1,000 in round two. And in round two, all of those cash values had extra spins attached to them. Larson didn’t necessarily know WHAT he’d land on when he pressed his button, but as long as he landed on those two spaces, he knew that, #1, he would never hit a Whammy, and #2, his turn would never end because he’d keep piling up those extra spins.

Behind the scenes, chaos erupted. The control room was packed with staffers and CBS executives who had all figured out exactly what they were watching, but nobody could grasp for a reason to stop it from happening. So even after Carruthers declared that Larson had gamed the system, everyone recognized that the only thing they could do was keep tape rolling, even though Larson was about to take his 30th spin and that the taping for this 30-minute game show was approaching the 45-minute mark.

Larson had already set a CBS daytime game show record when his score reached the $80,000 mark, but he kept going until he crossed the $100,000 mark. Larson would later admit that he suddenly went blank when he hit six figures and couldn’t remember the patterns anymore; the past hour left him mentally spent. He passed the spins to his opponents. Disaster almost struck when they passed spins back to him, but Larson survived on pure luck and finished the game with $110,237, almost entirely cash. (He also got a sailboat and a vacation in his till.) CBS executives and lawyers desperately searched for something or evidence that Larson had cheated. They wanted to find a rule to say that he wasn’t entitled to the winnings, but the efforts were in vain. Larson had played the game perfectly ethically and just beaten the system.

Robert Noah, another venerable game show producer, told TV Guide, “What everyone was finally forced to acknowledge was that what he did was legitimate. It was like being a card counter at blackjack. After all, nowhere in the rules did it say that you couldn’t pay attention.”

CBS edited the game and spread it out over two days, but the network was so embarrassed that a contestant had beaten their system that they aired it with no fanfare. In the coming years, reruns of Press Your Luck would go into syndication and on USA Network, but Larson’s games were never included in the rerun packages. His amazing performance evolved into something of an urban legend; he was errantly blamed for the show’s cancellation. In some circles, the story went that CBS cancelled the show because Larson drained the network of so much money. It was actually just the opposite; word of mouth triggered a ratings spike for Press Your Luck in the months following Larson’s performance, and the show stayed on the air for two more years.

AFTERMATH
For obvious reasons, Bill Carruthers finally got his wish, and then some. CBS enhanced the computer system and added 20 more patterns to the game board. A short time later, Larson curiously called Bob Edwards’ office and asked if the show was planning on having a tournament of champions any time soon. Larson’s inquiry was politely ignored.

But amazingly, tragically, the reason Larson wanted to come back was because his money was already gone. After paying income taxes, he still had a pretty good chunk of money left, about $70,000. As Larson’s common-law wife later recalled, things went seriously wrong because of a “radio contest,” although the contest she described sounds suspiciously like something another game show, Sale of the Century, did later in 1984. The show offered a $40,000 cash jackpot to contestants who mailed in $1 bills with serial numbers that matched a pre-determined series of digits. Larson went to the bank, withdrew a significant amount of money in $1 bills and brought it home in grocery bags, so he could go through the whole pile every day. One night, he and his wife left the house. When they came back, the grocery bags were gone. Whatever was left after the burglary, Larson lost in a failed real estate investment.

Larson’s life would take some mysterious and bizarre twists in the coming years. Larson, who admitted to Peter Tomarken after the game that he couldn’t afford to buy his daughter a present a few days earlier, promptly bought some toys and sent them off to her. And then he vanished for a while. When the area newspaper tried to write a story about the local boy who made good, they couldn’t reach him.

His mother told the paper, “He just took off Sunday night by plane on a vacation. I have no idea where he went but I’m sure it’s towards the west coast.”

Over the next decade, most of his family had no idea where he was even living. FBI agents contacted his brother one day asking if he knew Larson’s whereabouts. Larson resurfaced briefly in 1994 after the release of the film Quiz Show. The film’s focus on the quiz show scandals of the 1950s reignited interest about the noteworthy contestant of 1984 who had swindled a game show. Larson appeared on a few news and talk shows and granted an interview to TV Guide, enjoying the 15 extra minutes of fame that the movie afforded him. But the movie left theaters, the interest faded away, and so too did Michael Larson. On February 16, 1999, Larson died at age 49 from throat cancer. When his family was notified, it was the first time any of them learned that he had been living in Florida, more or less hiding from the FBI and the SEC, due to his possible involvement in a telephone-related con game.

Larson’s triumph and tragedy were chronicled in a 2003 Game Show Network documentary, titled Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal, a project overseen by NAGSH co-founder Bob Boden.

In April 2025, the wide release of the film The Luckiest Man in America, starring Paul Walter Hauser as Michael Larson, will immortalize the story on the big screen.

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER MOVIES INSPIRED BY GAME SHOWS?

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002): Based on Chuck Barris’ “unauthorized biography” about his claims that he was a CIA assassin during his years of producing and hosting shows.
Legends of the Hidden Temple (2016): More than 20 years after the original series ended, Nickelodeon unleashed a delightful made-for-TV movie about a group of kids who wander into an abandoned amusement park attraction and discover it’s Olmec’s temple.
Quiz Show (1994): A dramatization of the turmoil at Twenty One during the quiz show scandals, and how contestants Herb Stempel and Charles Van Doren were affected.
 

The post “Luckiest” Man in Game Shows appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

The most prolific name in the history of game shows was a man who once admitted to TV Guide, “I’m certainly not the man who appeals to women ages 18-35.”

Bill Cullen was right about that. He appealed to everybody. For 40 years, he appeared on one game show or another; often one game show and another. His gigs overlapped and he had no qualms about taking on whatever work he was offered.

Born in Pittsburgh on February 18, 1920, Bill Cullen was stricken by polio as a baby and devoted his youth to conquering it. Despite being slowed down by a prominent limp, he took boxing lessons, he played sandlot ball, and even gave auto racing a try. Once out of high school, he got a job at his father’s garage, repairing engines and driving the tow truck. He would entertain customers by impersonating radio stars while he made his repairs on their car. When a salesman from local radio station WWSW came to the garage one day, Bill’s father talked him into giving the boy a job.

Bill, only nineteen years old, made the most of the opportunity. He secured a commercial endorsement deal for a local business and local newspapers would quote some of the jokes he made on the air. He developed something of a reputation for being WWSW’s on-air class clown. Convinced nobody was listening to the dull records he had to play sometimes, he would play the records backwards or toot a toy whistle. He would give wildly wrong accounts of the game in progress when he called play-by-play for sports, or ignore the game altogether and read the comics to listeners instead. Fearful of falling into a rut, Bill moved to New York City when he was 24 years old to see if he could get hired by one of the major radio networks.

As Bill would modestly point out himself, polio had kept him out of the military with World War II raging, but that prominent limp made him very employable. Many announcers in New York had left their jobs to serve in the military. Bill served as announcer for seven different shows during his first two years at CBS, and supplemented his income as a joke writer.

A fellow joke writer, Bill Todman, was looking to get out of the writing end of show business and focus on show development and production. When Todman and business partner Mark Goodson sold a show, Winner Take All, to CBS, with Bill Cullen as announcer. After only three months, Bill got the promotion to host. He never looked back.

More shows would follow: Catch Me If You Can, Hit the Jackpot, Beat the Clock, Act It Out, Meet Your Match, Quick as a Flash, Fun for All, Professor Yes ‘N No, Walk a Mile, Place the Face, Bank on the Stars, Stop the Music, Name That Tune, Down You Go, The Price is Right, Eye Guess, Three on a Match, Winning Streak, The $25,000 Pyramid, Blankety Blanks, I’ve Got a Secret, How Do You Like Your Eggs?, Pass the Buck, The Love Experts, Chain Reaction, Blockbusters, Child’s Play, Hot Potato, and The Joker’s Wild.

Did you get all that? A total of 29 game shows as permanent host. He also served as guest host for a few other games, Strike It Rich, To Tell the Truth, He Said She Said, and Password Plus. It’s a resume that overshadows even his closest contenders, Wink Martindale (17 game shows) and Tom Kennedy (15 game shows).

Over the years, Bill would talk at length about the skills required for a game show host. His modest attitude betrayed the actual work that he put into it. While he would repeatedly insist it was an easy job, the more he talked about it, the more apparent it was that Bill cared a lot about the art of hosting a game show, and that he put a great deal of thought into it day after day after day.

“Being a master of ceremonies? An easy job. Whenever the networks have a new job, they always complain that all the MCs are working and they can’t find a new one. That’s nonsense—anybody in show business can be an MC. All you need is to be reasonably okay in appearance and to have a good voice. The rest you pick up as you go. The hardest things to learn are pace and anticipation. And the only way to learn them is through experience. You’ll learn how to pace a show so it builds to a climax, and how to anticipate the good things and the possible problems. When you have job security, that helps. If you know you’ll be back on the next day, you don’t have to press so hard. When a contestant says something funny, you don’t have to try to top him.”

“[I am] dependable to a fault, never late, always reasonably amusing without insulting my guests or doing anything to them I wouldn’t want done to myself. The contestants who come into my arena have one shot at it, and I think they should have their day. Me, I’ll be back the next day and the day after that.”

“I know my trade…I absolutely never let anything upset me—on the air, I mean. If an error is made, I figure there’s always tomorrow. I refuse to get aggravated. To me, that’s the secret of my success—no, better say longevity. And it shows. I’m not one for making a big deal of it.”

Bill’s greatest successes were a nine-year tenure as host of The Price is Right; those nine years were contained entirely within his 15-year run as a regular panelist on I’ve Got a Secret. They were, by far, the two most popular game shows on television during Bill’s golden era. At the same time, he was New York City’s #1 disc jockey, dominating drive-time radio for six years.

Bill’s success during those years would either help or hinder him later, depending on how you look at it. His phenomenal success during that period ensured that he could continue working for years afterward, as long as he wanted, and that he’d be handsomely paid for it. But he never hosted another show that achieved the heights of success that he achieved with Price and Secret.

Candidly, it was because in many cases, Bill was being used to prop up weaker games. Bob Stewart was the creator of Eye Guess, the first show Bill hosted post-Price. Stewart bluntly referred to his own creation as “third-rate” and said that the success of the show was entirely thanks to Bill Cullen. Later shows on Bill’s resume would have extraordinarily short runs—Winning Streak in 1974 lasted six months, and Blankety Blanks ran a paltry ten weeks in 1975.

After the cancellation of Blanks, Bill said, “I’ve been fortunate…The passage of shows hasn’t hurt, because I don’t get blamed for it.  It does hurt me in another way, though, because I feel a certain amount of responsibility.  But you make yourself realize that nothing more can be done about it.”

But to his credit, it was probably because of Bill that those shows got on the air in the first place. He could give extra luster to a rusty concept, and game show director Bruce Burmester theorized that if a viewing audience liked a person on their screen enough, they’d be willing to go along with that person. Bill could win over viewers enough that they’d at least give the show a few chances before switching the channel to something else. Even to the very end of his career, he was more than a bargaining chip for a weak format; he could be salvation. One of his final shows, 1984’s Hot Potato, was pitched to NBC executives, who said that they would specifically buy it if Bill Cullen was hired to host it.

Bill would continue hosting game shows until 1986, at which point he retired without any fanfare and settled for a quiet happy retirement of swimming, reading, and long naps in a big comfy chair. He even did retirement perfectly.

Adam Nedeff is the author of Quizmaster: The Life and Times and Fun and Games of Bill Cullen, published by BearManor Media. The new 2nd edition of the book went on sale on February 18. National Archives of Game Show History co-founders Bob Boden and Howard Blumenthal both provided interviews and research for the book.

The post Bill Cullen: The Man Who Hosted 29 Game Shows appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

While going through some filing cabinets filled with memos and paperwork from the CBS game shows of the 1980s, we found a marvelous document titled, “I Heard It on the Pyramid-Vine.” The authors, Jerry Martz and Tom Buchanan, were CBS audio technicians. Both of them worked many tapings of The $25,000 Pyramid and The $100,000 Pyramid. As a refresher on these shows, celebrities and contestants teamed up for a game of word association. One player had to describe a series of seven answers that their partner couldn’t see, and the partner tried to guess as many as possible in under 30 seconds.

The pressure of performing under the clock in front of a national audience was enough to turn many minds blank over the years. At some point, to entertain themselves, Martz and Buchanan began noting their favorite bad answers at the tapings they worked, usually noting the episode number for each one. In 1987, they compiled them into “I Heard It on the Pyramid-Vine” and made copies for staff, crew, and executives. The first section of the document was called “Wonderful Clues that Just Wouldn’t Work.”

• BEAVER
  “Busy as a…” “…Seal.”
  
• PRAIRIE
  “Bury me not on the lone…” “…Range.”
  
• SHRIMP
  “A little crustacean is a…” “…Vegetable.”
  
• ALL ABOARD
  “A train conductor says…”  “…Bye-bye!”
  
• HARNESS
  “A racehorse wears a…” “…Helmet.”
  
• PEACOCK
  “The NBC mascot is a…” “…Ostrich.”
  
• CARDIGAN
  “A sweater that buttons down the front is called a…” “…Scarf.”
  
• HIVE
  “Bees live in a…” “…Hut.”
  
• A CLUB
  “A robber knocks you out by hitting you on the head with a…” “…Jackhammer.”
  
• TANK
  “You go to a gas station to fill up your…” “…Trunk.”

The next section is from the Winner’s Circle, where one player gave a list of items, and their partner had to name the category that those items fit into.

• PLANTS
  “Diffenbachia…Pathos…” “…Greek gods!”
  
• TYPES OF CHEESE
  “Edam…brie…” “…Breads!”
  
• WHAT A WIG MIGHT SAY
  “Eva Gabor is going to put me on her head again.” “…What Johnny Carson might say!”
  
• TYPES OF TEA
  “Orange pekoe…Constant Comment…” “…Cleaner.”
  

The next section is titled “Ridiculous Clues That Elicited the Right Answer Anyway.”

• SUBMARINE
  “An underground boat with a periscope.”
  
• A MOAT
  “The thing over the alligators.”

• A SNORKEL
  “The thing that sticks out of the water when you SCUBA dive…”
  
• A PICKLE
  “A dried cucumber.”

• JULIA CHILD
  “She’s a television.”
  
• A ROPE
  “Very fat string.”

• LOBSTER
  “A fish with claws.”
  
• A DINOSAUR
  “A rhinoceros is one.”

Hope you enjoyed a good laugh!

The post Hilarious Game Show Answers appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

“We surveyed 100 people. The top six answers are on the board…”

You probably easily guessed those iconic lines come from Family Feud. But have you ever wondered who those 100 people are?

Writing material and building each episode is plenty of work for any game show. When Family Feud started production in 1976, the staff took on an even bigger challenge. Not only would they write the material (the questions), but they would also collect answers from scores of people, tabulate the results, figure out what would and would not play as entertainment, and then build each show. Here’s how they did it…

In the weeks leading up to the first tapings, when surveys had to be taken for the earliest episodes of a not-yet-seen game, the survey respondents were audience members for other game shows from Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions. Studio audience members at Match Game, The Price is Right, and To Tell the Truth would be given pencils and asked to fill in their answers to the list of questions that they were given.

The system worked pretty well. The show was able to avoid “regional bias,” which can affect polling results. For example, if a national survey asks people to name a fast-food restaurant, but a disproportionate number of respondents are from southern California, “In-N-Out Burger” might end up being a very popular answer, even though the regional chain is unknown in most of the country. Fortunately, people who attend TV tapings in Los Angeles were rarely residents. They were usually tourists from all over the country. So, no regional bias.

Once production started on Family Feud, the staff needed to build a mailing list to collect survey responses, but they were uncertain whether the idea would produce the responses they needed. For the first few weeks of Family Feud on ABC, episodes included an announcement giving an address for viewers to write to if they wanted to fill out the surveys that would be used in the game.

The response was tremendous. Thousands of people wrote in to be one of the 100 people surveyed.

With so many eager volunteers, the show figured out how to use the help most effectively. They divided a map of the USA into four sections. To prevent the regional bias, every survey they mailed out was sent to an equal number of people living in each section. Each week, the staff prepared a list of 50 new questions. Those 50 questions would be mailed out to a total of 200—not 100—people.

Producer Cathy Hughart Dawson (host Richard’s former daughter-in-law) explains, “Sending out 200 surveys was a way to guarantee that we’d get 100 responses. If we just sent out 100, we might not hear back from everybody.”

The surveys were opened in the order that they were returned to the office until 100 surveys had been collected. Next, a staff member called a tabulator would gather the 100 answers given for every question. The tabulator was not allowed to editorialize or make judgment calls—instead, they simply counted the results, word-for-word, letter-for-letter, exactly as each respondent had written them.

The questions and the tabulated answers were then passed along to Cathy Hughart Dawson. She would pore through the individual answers and combine answers that expressed similar ideas. For example, let’s say a question was “Name something you buy at a pawn shop.” If 11 people wrote “jewelry,” 9 people wrote “necklace,” 6 people wrote “earrings,” and 5 people wrote “bracelet,” she might combine those answers to show that 31 people said “jewelry.”

As Feud viewers know, an answer not said by anybody in the survey group gets a “strike” in the main game, or a big fat zero in the scorekeeping in the Fast Money bonus round. But even answers given by multiple people could end up on the chopping block.

Cathy Hughart Dawson explains the logic, and the process. “For the Fast Money round, we want the contestants to have every opportunity, so every answer that was said by at least two people counted if the contestants said those answers. For the main part of the game, here’s what sometimes happened. We would get questions with a long list of answers given by two or more people. It would just work out that once I had combined all the similar answers, it would still be something like 15 answers that had been said by two or more people. Playing a round with 15 answers would mean it would take a prohibitively long time to play. When that happened, I would make a judgment call about how many answers we wanted on the board.” 

The reason the show has the freedom to do that is because of the language used to introduce each question—“We surveyed 100 people, the top 6 answers are on the board…” Five people may have said a given answer, but if those 5 people were only enough to make it the 7th most common answer in the survey, it’s fine for the show to omit that answer, because they’ve explicitly stated that they want the top six.

The only restrictions that the show had to adhere to in that situation was that they couldn’t skip over answers. If the Feud staff liked a particular answer that was given by 11 people, and they liked one said by 6 people, they couldn’t skip an answer given by 8 people. The answer given by 8 people would have to be included on the show, too.

One quirk of Family Feud—the game is about guessing what many people think, not necessarily what people know. Factually incorrect answers are given the same consideration as correct answers, and an answer that’s somehow “wrong” could appear on the board if enough people said it.

Because the show had so many volunteers (compensated with souvenir bumper stickers and buttons reading “I’m a Family Feud Pollee!”), the 200 people who received a particular survey were moved “to the back of the line” on the mailing list, and another 200 people were mailed the following week’s survey questions.

Volunteering for the show’s surveys didn’t mean you were giving up your chance to win money. People who responded to the surveys were still eligible to be contestants if they could round up four family members to join them as a team. Potential contestants weren’t even asked if they were part of the survey mailing list.

Dawson says, “I don’t think that ever came up, but if it had, I would have felt that there was no conflict of interest or unfairness in having a survey taker be a contestant on the show. We had a massive number of survey takers that we rotated through, and we conducted new surveys every week, so if you were a survey taker and you became a contestant on the show, the odds were already astronomical that you would get a question that you yourself answered. But let’s say you did. You still have to come up with answers that the other 99 people said. And maybe you were the only one to say your answer, which means it’s a strike, so even if you give your own answer, you might hurt your team instead of helping them.”

Richard Dawson’s version of Family Feud ended in 1985. When the show was revived in 1988 with new host Ray Combs (until Dawson returned for the 1994-95 season), they continued using the same mailing lists and continued building them the same way. Josh Guers, who supplied the sample surveys seen with this article, wrote to the show for a school project and ended up on the mailing list.

When Family Feud returned in 1999, a third-party company was hired to compile the surveys for the show using methods of their own design. Today, it’s as simple as picking up the phone when it rings. Family Feud starring Steve Harvey has a research firm, Applied Research West, call 100 people on the phone and compiles their answers for many questions used on the current version of the popular series.

The post Survey Says: How Family Feud Gets Its Answers appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

It seems strange that game shows have a signature microphone. If you watch a comedy sketch spoofing game shows, then the host character is usually holding a long, pencil-thin microphone. Watch reruns of classic game shows, or even the game shows of today, and you’ll see that same long, thin microphone. What happened? Why did the game show genre develop an affinity for such a specific microphone design?

The early days of television produced sound through bulky microphones; overhead boom mics were used for drama and comedy shows. Talk shows and game shows used large microphones, often models like the giant, pill-shaped RCA 77-DX, usually attached to a base on a desk.

Handheld microphones were only occasionally used. Bud Collyer made use of a handheld microphone on Beat the Clock, a clunky model with a heavy cable that Collyer would often have to tug and unravel throughout each episode to allow him more slack. Monty Hall had a bulky handheld microphone for Let’s Make a Deal that connected to a battery pack in his back pocket, eliminating the issues with slack and the risk for tripping.

There were also microphones that could be worn, called lavalier microphones. Inspired by the jewelry of the same name, a lavalier microphone had a cigar-sized microphone in place of the pendant, attached to a necklace worn by the emcee. These were usually used by emcees on game shows that didn’t require much movement. Allen Ludden wore a lavalier microphone on Password. Bill Cullen used one for the original Price is Right, and Gene Rayburn wore one for The Match Game on NBC. The only drawback was that if the emcee moved around a little too much, the microphone could waver or rub back and forth on the clothing, causing interference. This could be ameliorated by anchoring the microphone onto a small plate and having the emcee wear them together. It solved the technical issues but created the obvious problem that the plate attachment was distracting and a bit silly-looking; the host appeared to be wearing armor. Gene Rayburn would occasionally use the plate & cigar-sized microphone combo as a handheld device, which looked awkward.

In 1969, Sony rethought the design of lavalier microphones and introduced a significantly scaled down model, the Sony ECM-50. The microphone shrunk down from a cigar to about the size of a thumb tip. Instead of being worn as a necklace, it clipped onto clothing, rendering the name “lavalier” inaccurate, although it remained the common term for such a microphone.

Although the Sony ECM-50 was tiny, that microscopic microphone was a big advancement for sound production. It was more sensitive, and it responded strongly to bass tones, which gave anchormen, game show hosts, and talk show hosts a satisfying richness to their voices that other microphones couldn’t provide. The Sony ECM-50 almost immediately became industry standard.

Sony quickly introduced a variation on the design, the Sony ECM-51, which took the tiny thumb tipped microphone off the clip and onto a thin rod, akin to the antenna on a portable radio. The rod expanded like a radio antenna, too, allowing the user to nearly triple its length just by pulling on the sturdy tip. Concealed from a viewer’s sight was the tiny button at the base labeled “cough,” which allowed the user to mute the sound with one press of the thumb.

The Sony ECM-51 popped up on TV news in the 1970s; they were popular for press conferences and in-studio interviews; but because the microphone was so sensitive, and because it was so receptive to bass sounds, the ECM-51 was almost completely useless for field reporters; the slightest breeze would render a man-on-the-street interview inaudible.

Since game shows didn’t go into the field that often, there were virtually no disadvantages to the Sony ECM-51, and the microphone became ubiquitous on game shows during the 1970s and 1980s: Hollywood’s Talking, The $10,000 Pyramid, Now You See It, Tattletales, Celebrity Sweepstakes, High Rollers, Wheel of Fortune, Musical Chairs, Hot Seat, You Don’t Say!, Card Sharks, The $128,000 Question, Double Dare, and Celebrity Bowling all made use of the Sony ECM-51, but the game shows that would become most closely identified with the mic were The Price is Right starring Bob Barker, and Match Game starring Gene Rayburn.

The Price is Right and Match Game were the games that most aptly showcased the benefits of the Sony ECM-51’s design, too. The pencil thin design allowed for multitasking. Bob Barker could open an envelope and read the actual retail price without having to put the microphone down. He could reach for props and hold onto a nervous contestant without giving concern to where the microphone was drifting while he was taking care of all that business.

Over on Match Game, Gene Rayburn almost always kept the microphone extended to maximum length (he eventually had a custom mic built, based on the Sony ECM-51 design but with no variance in size, it was just permanently fixed at that maximum length). He could talk to contestants without moving his arm around. If a technical problem rendered the panel’s microphones or the contestants’ microphones useless, it was nothing for Gene to tip the microphone forward to make everyone’s voices heard; he didn’t even have to reach out to do that. And in the case of Gene Rayburn, a born ham, the Sony ECM-51 was a perfect prop for physical comedy. He threw it like a javelin, played it like a flute, waved it like a wand, conducted invisible orchestras, and dueled invisible fencers.

Like any other technology, microphone designs kept improving and evolving in the decades to come. But The Price is Right, year in and year out, saw Bob Barker walking around the stage with the Sony ECM-51. Even when wireless microphones became the norm, Barker, wary of interference issues that sometimes plagued the early wireless models, insisted on his wired Sony ECM-51. When the microphone finally just plain wore out in 2002, he got a new microphone, but not a particularly different one. He was still using a long, thin model, similar to the Sony ECM-51, and to the very end of Barker’s tenure in 2007, he hosted The Price is Right with yards of microphone cable dragging behind him.

When Drew Carey took over in 2007, a lot about The Price is Right changed…but the style of the microphone stayed the same. Carey finally brought the show into the wireless era; his microphone had a battery pack at the bottom, storing a single 9-volt. But it was still that long, thin design that Bob Barker unintentionally made a trademark over the preceding 35 years.

An NBC executive once explained the importance of a microphone as a part of a show’s visual language. When The Tonight Show first launched in 1954, host Steve Allen, a former radio disc jockey who sometimes interviewed guests during his radio shift, had a desk with a large microphone on it, mainly because, number one, it was the set-up he was accustomed to, and number two, with the limited technology at the time, the show pretty much needed a large microphone on the desk.

By the 2000s, with Jay Leno at the helm and everyone wearing lavalier microphones, the large microphone on the desk wasn’t needed anymore, and yet, it had been there for five decades. Someone recommended removing the unnecessary desk mic, but the NBC executives shot down the suggestion because it was part of “the visual language” of the show. People expected to see that microphone on the desk.

Likewise, the long, thin microphone had become visual language for game shows. In the summer of 2016, Alec Baldwin insisted on a Sony ECM-51 as a condition for signing on to host the new Match Game. As silly and strange as it sounds, it wouldn’t feel right if Match Game used any other microphone.

The post How *That* Microphone Became a Game Show Staple appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

The National Archives of Game Show History has been fortunate to have many eager contributors donate their prized possessions to be preserved. Among the many treasures that have been donated: set pieces, handheld props, question cards, photographs and slides, tickets, and scripts.

“Wait a minute, scripts? Game shows have scripts?” you might be asking.

Game shows do have scripts, but not in the sense you’re thinking. It’s important for everyone to be on the same page, literally and figuratively, with how the game is played; the terms the show uses for specific parts of the game; and where on the stage the host and contestants should be for each part of the game. So yes, a script is necessary for a game show.

What makes game shows different from any other genre, of course, is that most of the “performers” have never seen the scripts for a game show. The contestants are real, everyday people who have been briefed on the rules before going onstage, but now, they’re on their own, with only the host to guide them through the next 30 minutes or so.

Here we have a look at two types of scripts that game shows might use.

The first is a script for Let’s Make a Deal, hosted by Monty Hall in 1984. Let’s Make a Deal has always presented a broad and perpetually changing array of “deals” and mini games. Each deal and each game involves many different possibilities—the announcer walking out with something concealed in a box on a tray; an enormous box on the display floor; three curtains or three doors, any of which can be hiding anything; etc. Many deals also have built-in variables. “If the contestant chooses option A, then thing 1 happens. If the contestant chooses option B, then thing 2 happens.”

Because of the broad variety of elements and possibilities, every one of the thousands of episodes of Let’s Make a Deal had a unique script.

Many game show formats are more consistent than Let’s Make a Deal. Family Feud, for example, is a series of survey questions where families try to guess the answers that the survey group gave, until reaching a goal score. The winning family plays Fast Money. It’s the same every day. For game show formats that are so straightforward, the show uses what’s often called a “shell script.”

A shell script is a single script that covers everything that could ever possibly happen during the game, and the same script will be used for every episode until some change is made to the way that the game is played. A shell script could be used for years on end. Here’s a look at a shell script that Family Feud was using in 2001, when Louie Anderson was hosting.

Feud would be considered by many viewers as a “simple” game, which is why it’s so surprising to see how intricate this shell script is. Broadly, it’s an easy game to explain, but there are a lot of tinier mechanisms that could potentially come up in each game, and the shell script needs to cover each of them. Over time, the host will become so accustomed to explaining these details that explaining them will sound more natural than it reads on the printed page.

So there you have it. Yes, game shows do have scripts.

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It all starts with Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the undisputed kings of TV game shows. Their success started in 1946 with programs including What’s My Line?  and their influence continues on television today. One of their shows, Match Game, enjoyed a successful run from 1962 to 1969 and returned in 1973 incorporating a newly-added bonus game, the “Super Match.”

“Super Match” earned television’s greatest mark of success—a spinoff in the form of the 1976 game show Family Feud. After testing as a single-player game and as a game for celebrity and civilian pairs, the Family Feud format evolved to feature a competition between two five-player teams comprised of family members related by blood or marriage. Where the Match Game bonus round rewarded contestants for guessing any of a recent studio audience’s top three responses to a fill-in question, Family Feud gave players the opportunity to offer responses to questions in the hope of matching any of numerous answers given by participants in a random sample of Americans. The most-popular responses garnered the highest point values for the contestants.

The most engaging element of Family Feud created the greatest production challenge. The Fast Money round posed five questions such as “Name something you take with you to the beach.” With players able to give any answer, popular or not, logical or not, there needed to be a way to instantly display any and all of their possible responses to the multiple open-ended questions. Pre-printed art cards couldn’t work for displaying responses as they had on Match Game, as there were answers to multiple questions to keep track of, and the contestants’ answers would be thoroughly unpredictable. Hand-written or typewritten notations created in real time on-set were judged to be antiquated as well as impractical, as they were unreadable from halfway across the stage. Other similar methods for visually recording responses were discarded for their lack of impact for the home audience. After research into the state-of-the-art in display and exhibition, a Canadian company was identified for a magnetic flip-dot signage system patented in 1964, and Ferranti-Packard of Ontario sold the first such display to the Montreal Stock Exchange for $700,000 (equivalent to more than $6 million today.) The unit was extraordinarily expensive because of the intricacy of the flip-dot components that required manual construction—hundreds of electromagnets which, when energized, switched the field in either the positive or negative direction. And when the direction changes, the dot flipped.

A decade later, the mechanics for flip-dot displays were being perfected and Goodson-Todman was among the early customers when they ordered one of the largest such units built to date, at a cost far in excess of any display system ever utilized on a television show. Although significantly advanced from the units marketed ten years earlier, the Family Feud board still proved to be susceptible to extremes of humidity, so care was taken on-set to maintain a constant airflow around the unit. With that accommodation, the big board operated reliably through long consecutive days of production.

Modules of the display were each capable of displaying 10 alphanumeric characters utilizing 35 flip-discs for each character. The Family Feud board consisted of 24 modules in a 6 by 4 array, capable of displaying eight lines of text, each 30 characters long, for a total of 240 characters comprised of 8,400 flip discs. The technology proved to serve Family Feud’s production needs perfectly. The ability to easily program words on a QWERTY keyboard that could be revealed instantaneously, on demand, with a kinetic flourish just seconds later, in bright contrast capable of registering on television cameras with high impact, earned the massive unit a place of great prominence, center stage on every Family Feud episode between 1976 and 1995. The Ferranti-Packard display also attained iconic status over the course of decades through its subsequent use on foreign versions of the TV series in as many as 80 countries.

Now, decades later, this signature piece of technology has come to The Strong Museum through a generous donation from game show veteran Randy West. But we quickly recognized that the signature sign would have limited use if it couldn’t be brought back to operational status. What to do? Fortunately, as in so many parts of life, the solution was all in who you know. Fortunately, we were able to connect with Corey Cooper, the wizard behind game mechanics for multiple shows over the years, including Big Brother most recently. In December 2023, Corey made the trip from sunny Los Angeles to chilly Rochester and applied his insights and troubleshooting experience to the matter. As Corey explained on Facebook:

Spent a week getting this old Lady up and running again, after many years of neglect. Thanks to Randy West for donating it and Bob Boden for introducing both of us to the National Archives of Game Show History at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.

I originally created software on an Apple] [+ computer to run this lady’s older brother in ’82 or ’83, and then I did the software to run this one on an IBM AT computer in ’88 for the “Ray Combes version.” I worked from that software to figure out the protocol again, since we had the hardware manuals but not the software manual anymore (I had the hardware manuals, and was undoubtedly the one who lost the software manual).

I was pleasantly surprised that she came to life as soon as we hooked her up and gave her power. The Museum staff had it all set up for me when I arrived, and dealt with the tedium of all the missing and not-working dots, and she is now in their excellent hands!

With some physical care and technological ingenuity from Cooper and members of the museum’s Conservation and Exhibits team, the historic Family Feud digital signboard is now back in working condition and waiting safely in the wings to return to public visibility when The Strong opens its major exhibit on game show history in 2027. Survey says, the sign’s going to be a hit!

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On September 4, 1998, ITV network in the United Kingdom premiered a one-hour primetime game show called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It featured one contestant, sitting across from host Chris Tarrant, answering up to 15 multiple choice general knowledge questions of increasing values, from £100 to a top prize of £1 million. As long as the player answered questions correctly, they could remain in the “hot seat”, or they could walk away at any level and keep their winnings.  If they delivered a wrong answer, their winnings would often be reduced to one of several milestone amounts (£1,000 or £32,000) or to zero if the failure occurred in the first four questions.

The show, created by David Briggs with Steven Knight and Mike Whitehill, went on to become a ratings powerhouse, and it was soon adapted for U.S. audiences by an ABC executive, Michael Davies, who left his network position to executive produce the series. (Davies is now the executive producer of the U.S. version of Jeopardy!). Who Wants to Be a Millionaire premiered domestically with host Regis Philbin on August 16, 1999. At the time, summer primetime programming was almost exclusively reruns. Millionaire instantly soared to the top of U.S. ratings and has proven to be a very durable format.

There have since been numerous versions on broadcast TV, including four additional primetime series, one of which, featuring celebrity contestant pairs, currently airs on ABC with host Jimmy Kimmel (and is still executive produced by Davies); in addition, more than 3,000 half-hour episodes have been produced for syndication with hosts Meredith Vieira, Cedric the Entertainer, Terry Crews, Chris Harrison, and a variety of guest emcees. 

To date, more than a dozen players have earned $1 million (or more) in the U.S. The first was IRS agent John Carpenter. His million-dollar question: Which of these U.S. Presidents appeared on the television series “Laugh-In”?

1. Lyndon Johnson
2. Richard Nixon
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Gerald Ford

(answer below*)

What was perhaps most notable about Millionaire was its groundbreaking scenic, lighting and music design, which emphasized drama in ways that no game show had done before. In stark contrast to most of its predecessors, Millionaire featured a set in the round, with lights focused mainly on two people (a host and contestant) center stage and heart-thumping music providing a soundtrack for the entire show. These elements have radically redefined the look and feel of most contemporary prime time game shows. 

During the recording of each episode, contestants were allowed unlimited time to ponder their answers, which resulted in many drawn-out, nail-biting moments. The high-tension environment was relieved, somewhat, with “Lifelines” that provided help from the audience, a hand-picked “phone-a-friend” awaiting a call remotely and reducing the number of multiple choices; each lifeline could only be used once by each contestant.

As the show evolved, different formats, money ladders, and lifelines were introduced, but the epic “shiny floor” spectacle remained intact. A famous catch phrase, “Is that your FINAL answer?” had its origins on Millionaire. The show has won numerous accolades, including two EMMYs for outstanding Game/Audience Participation Show, one for Philbin and two for Vieira.

Before Millionaire’s debut 25 years ago this month, the presence of game shows on U.S. prime time TV was very limited, largely a result of the rigging scandals of the 1950s. The enormous overnight success of Millionaire provided numerous new opportunities for game show formats in the evening; today the airwaves are populated by many original and revived titles that have found new life and given broadcast networks an appealing alternative to more expensive and less popular products. In the fall of 2000, ABC programmed Millionaire an unprecedented four nights a week; this over-exposure ultimately led to the original version’s prime time demise.

In the mad rush after its monumental debut performance, networks fast-tracked many other prime-time attempts to create similar immersive series and capture advertiser gold, none of which approached the success of Millionaire. Among them was a FOX series simply called Greed, featuring a $2 million top prize, which went from pitch to air in 10 weeks and lasted for nine months. (I co-created the series with Dick Clark, and we both served as Executive Producer for all 44 episodes.) 

Other short-lived attempts included CBS’ Winning Lines and a new version of the notorious format that had previously been tainted by scandal, NBC’s Twenty-One.

Eventually new prime time formats would catch on and last, including The Weakest Link and Deal or No Deal, and reimagined versions of iconic legacy shows like Celebrity Family Feud, The $100,000 Pyramid, Match Game, Press Your Luck, To Tell the Truth, Card Sharks, The Price is Right at Night, Let’s Make a Deal Primetime, Celebrity Jeopardy!, Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, among many others. 

In the 25 years since Millionaire’s U.S. premiere, the series has been produced in almost 100 other territories across the globe. It was also the subject of the 2008 theatrical film Slumdog Millionaire, which garnered eight Oscars including Best Picture. 

*The answer to John Carpenter’s question is Richard Nixon, who, while campaigning for President, famously uttered the phrase “Sock it To ME?”

CAN YOU CORRECTLY ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS THAT WON PLAYERS $1 MILLION ON THE ORIGINAL U.S. VERSION OF WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? (answers at the bottom)

The earth is approximately how many miles away from the Sun? (won by Dan Blonsky in 2000)

• 9.3 million
• 39 million
• 93 million
• 193 million

Which insect shorted out an early supercomputer and inspired the term “computer bug”? (won by Joe Trela in 2000)

• Moth
• Roach
• Fly
• Japanese beetle

Which of the following men does not have a chemical element named for him? (won by Bob House in 2000)

• Albert Einstein
• Niels Bohr
• Isaac Newton
• Enrico Fermi

Which of the following landlocked countries is entirely contained within another country? (won by Kim Hunt in 2000)

• Lesotho
• Burkina Faso
• Mongolia
• Luxembourg

In the children’s book series, where is Paddington Bear originally from? (won by David Goodman in 2000)

• India
• Peru
• Canada
• Iceland

What letter must appear at the beginning of the registration of all non-military aircraft in the U.S.? (won by Bernie Cullen in 2001)

• N
• A
• U
• L

ANSWERS:

1. C. 93 million
2. A. moth
3. A. Albert Einstein
4. A. Lesotho
5. B. Peru
6. A. N

The post Birth of the Modern Game Show appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Board games and television don’t seem like they would go together. It would be hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in regularly to watch people play a game of Risk or Settlers of Cattan. But 40 years ago this month, viewers across the country had a six-year-long daily habit of watching people play Scrabble every day on NBC.

The Scrabble game show originated with Exposure Unlimited, a prize brokerage that game shows commissioned to acquire merchandise from vendors. Exposure Unlimited ventured outside their usual business and made a deal with Selchow & Righter for the rights to produce a television version of Scrabble. They got the rights on the cheap because S&R wasn’t even considering doing such a thing at the time. Exposure Unlimited then reached out to all the major game show packagers in Hollywood to ask if they wanted to try developing a Scrabble game show.

Reg Grundy Productions, an Australian firm which had just gained a foothold in America with Sale of the Century on NBC, expressed interest, and a team headed by long-time game show producer Robert Noah whipped up a format.

The host of Scrabble was a surprisingly apt choice. Chuck Woolery, who had hosted Wheel of Fortune on NBC for seven years before departing in a salary dispute, was suddenly back on the network just a bit more than two years later, hosting yet another NBC game show based around picking letters and solving mystery words. The pilot for the Scrabble game show, shot in 1984, was a harrowing mess. The set included a larger-than-life revolving cube that housed monitors, projectors, neon, light bulbs, and an electronic timer, all in service to various parts of the show. The NBC electricians who wired all of the equipment had warned the Scrabble team that the cube should only be turned 180 degrees. Eager to display the spinning marvel on their dazzling set, the crew in the studio made six complete 360-degree turns of the cube, severing every wire inside the cube and requiring production to shut down for major repairs. The pilot episode, which ran only 17 minutes, took a full two days to tape. But NBC saw something in the game, and a focus group for the pilot responded enthusiastically. Scrabble debuted on NBC on July 2, 1984, and compared to the disastrous pilot, the next six years were smooth sailing.

If you’ve ever pulled your hair out after seven minutes of listening to your opponent mutter “I don’t have any good letters…” you’d probably be surprised that anybody could make a game show out of Scrabble. You would be equally unsurprised to learn that the secret to success here was that the Scrabble game show wasn’t really Scrabble. In execution, it was the classic game of Hangman with Scrabble-based trappings.

Two contestants faced a gigantic Scrabble game board, drawing numbered tiles two at a time, and dropping the tiles in an electronic eye scanner to find out what letters they represented. Contestants would try to place the correct tiles in the word, while attempting to steer clear of “stoppers”—the tiles with letters that weren’t in the word.

Viewers loved the brain-tickling game and Chuck Woolery’s earthy, affable hosting style, all packaged in an elaborate setting. The set, operated properly, was a thing of beauty. An array of 14 unique sound effects helped viewers keep track of twists and turns in the game. The show even added some extra charm to the excitement of a cash bonus being awarded. The game made use of the pink and blue squares on a Scrabble board by awarding bonus money for letters placed in those squares. On the air, contestants were paid out in “Chuck Bucks”—blue and pink bills bearing Chuck Woolery’s picture instead of Ben Franklin’s.

What truly made the game special was the brilliant clue writing, supervised by former Hollywood Squares writer and future Jeopardy! head writer Gary Johnson. Each puzzle opened with a misleading, often punny, clue that made contestants scratch their head while amusing viewers and often bemusing Woolery.

A five-letter word: “She lives in the White House”—VANNA

A six-letter word: “It makes kids smile”—CHEESE

A seven-letter word: “It keeps your feet on the ground”—GRAVITY

An eight-letter word: “A man who likes people”—CANNIBAL

A nine-letter word: “After years of only seeing his own, Robinson Crusoe was shocked when he saw Friday’s”—FOOTPRINT

Scrabble enjoyed enough success that Selchow & Righter adapted it for a home version, officially titled TV Scrabble —a board game based on a game show based on a board game. A revival briefly popped up on NBC in 1993, while reruns of the original series were a hit on USA Network. The Hub cable channel managed to come up with another twist on Scrabble with an entirely different game show format; Scrabble Showdown ran in 2011 and 2012. This fall, the CW network will unleash another all-new Scrabble game show in prime time.

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER GAME SHOWS BASED ON BOARD GAMES?

TABOO (TNN cable channel, 2003): Contestants played a game similar to Pyramid, with the caveat that each word came with a list of five “taboos,” seemingly obvious clue words that couldn’t legally be given. For example, a player conveying “PRISON” might be told that they weren’t allowed to say “jail,” “arrest,” “inmates,” “bars,” or “warden.” Chris Wylde was the host.

BALDERDASH (PAX, 2004-05): Contestants heard celebrity panelists answer various questions, having to decide each time if the panelist had given them “truth” or “balderdash.” Elayne Boosler hosted.

THE GAME OF LIFE (THE HUB cable channel, 2011-2012): Families drove their cars along the virtual game board, having to answer trivia questions every time they came to a fork in the road.

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