[quote name=\'uncamark\' post=\'138474\' date=\'Nov 21 2006, 05:04 PM\']
Another important difference: Neither Kelly or Joe played the mind games with the contestants on Instant Bargains. Most of the time, a player buzzed in as soon as Bill Wendell said what the prize was. If they didn't, the audience started screaming "BUY IT!" and Kelly or Joe would do a little filling until saying "Once..twice...gone!" (No "No sale!") Occasionally, Joe would cut the price, but no offers of cash. (And the plug was only heard if the contestant bought it.)
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Actually, there's a reason the host didn't say "no sale"; it meant something else.
There was a closed curtain; Bill would say the price (for example, "For 14 dollars 95 cents..."), and then the curtain would open as Bill explained what the prize was. Whoever buzzed in first got the prize - unless they buzzed in before the curtain opened. If this happened, the host would say "no sale", whoever buzzed in would lose both the prize and the amount (as a penalty for buzzing in too soon), and I think the other two players were given another chance for one of them to buy it.
Some more notes: in the earliest episodes, they didn't have the Century Round; instead, the final round was 30 seconds at $15 a question; also, in the '70s three-player version, if someone went down to zero, they were out of the game. (I didn't see enough of the couples version to know what happened there. I remember it happening on a couples weekly syndicated episode, and both couples were given another $20, but since that would make it easier for the couple in the lead to win prizes in the NBC version's end game, I doubt that's what the daytime version did.)
(Oh, and whoever mentioned the contestants having a chance to win money in the Audience Sale by guessing which audience player was closest; I think the contestants would win $5 for a correct guess, and since nobody won the prize if all three audience players were over the price, a guess of "nobody" was allowed as well.)
-- Don
