Continued from Part 1...
The first episode of The New Price Is Right, which came on directly after, saw Sandy Florinar, Paul Levine, Connie Dunnall and Myra Carter, beckoned by Johnny Olsen to \"stand up!\" and \"come on down!\" as its first four contestants. The first Item Up For Bids on this new TPIR was a $592 fur coat!!! Connie Dunnall won it and the chance to play the very first pricing game on The New Price Is Right: Any Number, for a $2,746 Chevrolet Vega, which she won, too. Other pricing games to show up on the NPIR debut were \"Which Is The Right Price?\", where a player selected one price from two possibilities (also won, courtesy of Paul Levine), and \"Higher Or Lower,\" where an item was shown with a price and the player had to decide whether the real price was higher or lower. Paul and Connie faced off in the very first Showcase at the end of the first TNPIR (The Showcase Showdown wouldn't exist for another 3 years), which offered, for the first one, a week's vacation in Acapulco, an Kimball organ, a gas range, and floor tiles; and a second Showcase consisting of roller skates, a stationary bycycle, and a Mazda 808 sedan. The actual retail price of Connie's showcase was $2,307, she bid $1,750; while Paul's showcase was worth $2,500, he bid $2,504 missing the ARP by $4!!! (The Double Showcase rule didn't exist yet either, so Paul just made history by winning the first Showcase ever offered on TNPIR.)
And--well, nothing is known about the debut of Heatter-Quigley's Gambit on CBS, as many of the tapes containing its episodes (save for a precious few!) were erased for reuse...
All three game shows had different degrees of success. The Joker's Wild concluded its 3-year, 685-episode run on June 13, 1975 (superceded the following Monday by Nicholson-Muir's Spin-Off), only to find new life in repeats and a return to TV in firstrun syndication in 1977 for a 9-year run. Gambit's 910th and last episode aired on CBS December 10, 1976, after 4 years (Goodson-Todman’s Double Dare replaced it the following Monday), and was brought back by NBC for another year in 1980 under a new moniker, Las Vegas Gambit. (Its host, Wink Martindale, would gain greater fame on Barry-Enright's The New Tic Tac Dough.) Of these 3 shows, The Price Is Right (the \"New\" having been removed from its title in June 1973) has lasted to this very day, with the current CBS Daytime edition still hosted by the unconquerable Bob Barker (Tom Kennedy, Doug Davidson and the late Dennis James having emceed various other editions)!
