But what's the difference between a rerun from 1977 as opposed to 1987 or 1997? After all, isn't that what GSN is in the business of? Reruns?
We'd like to think so...and I'd love to see 30-year old reruns in primetime. If it still has some sort of audience, why not? (Just ask Andy Griffith!)
I wonder about those USA days. Do you think they held onto shows like
Hot Potato,
Face the Music and Pat Finn's
Joker's Wild for so long because licensing old titles was tougher at that time? When many of those shows were on USA, it was when cable was just starting to take off. Probably nobody knew if it would be a hit, and
what would end up being a hit. Maybe they just tried a few lesser titles to see how they would do. They didn't get into the bigger titles (like
Press Your Luck or
$25,000 Pyramid) until a few years later. Just speculation...
Interestingly, CBN had reruns of
Blockbusters around that time. If they could license that, I wonder why they didn't try for more Goodson stuff back then. Maybe our ideal GSN could have started sooner.