I think ABC by this time felt that their soap operas would do even better in the afternoons than game shows, so Break the Bank (which aired from 2:30 to 3:00 P.M. ET) got the axe to make room for 15 additional minutes each for One Life to Live and General Hospital, both of which were previously half-hour shows. Then the $20,000 Pyramid was later moved from its previous 2:00 to 2:30 P.M. time slot to make it possible to expand both of those soaps to an hour.
As for the show itself, I felt it was a good concept, but ABC was really trying to create a \"celebrity showcase\" game show along the lines of Hollywood Squares, and their effort to do so hurt the show's game element. My problems with it:
1. The questions on the show were, in effect, two-answer multiple choice, creating the high likelihood that they would be answered correctly (even a guess by a contestant that didn't know the correct answer to a question had a 50% probability of being right). Thus, contestants were usually reluctant to keep the \"money bags\" if they turned one up on the board during play, ultimately resulting in too few \"big money\" wins during the show's run to keep attracting an audience. (You had to get three of the five \"money bag\" boxes on the board to win the game's top prize of $5,000 plus $500 or $250 for each game that had been played without a top-prize win since the last one.)
2. After a contestant selected a box on the game board and the emcee read the question for that box, the two question's possible answer choices would be given by two of the show's guest celebrities, one of whom would be the one sitting at the top of the column that the contestant's box selection was in, and the other one being the celebrity sitting to the left of that box's horizontal row, which tended to make the game drag in comparison with Hollywood Squares (on which the selected celebrity would just give the one answer to a question, which a contestant would either \"agree\" or \"disagree\" with).
I know that GSN still has at least most of the episodes of that show in their vaults. Perhaps they might consider reviving it with these suggested changes of mine:
1. Eliminate the celebrities and ask the questions for the cash-amount boxes directly to the show's contestants, requiring a correct answer from the contestant for the capture of that box and continuation of the contestant's turn. Also, make the questions at least three-answer multiple choice or \"straight answer\" (no \"multiple choices\").
2. If the contestant misses the question for a cash-amount box, he loses his turn to his opponent, as on the 1976-77 edition of the show. However, the opponent must correctly answer the question that was missed by the first player in order to also capture the box (on the 1976-77 edition, except for its first few weeks, the opponent captured the box automatically after a missed question by the player who selected that box, unless so doing would result in a win for the opponent). If the opponent also misses the question, the affected cash-amount box would remain available to both players, but the opponent could then either re-select that box and attempt to answer a new question for it, or select any other available box on the game board.
Michael Brandenburg
(and tell Natalie Maines that I'm not ashamed that our President is from Texas -- that's why I'm heading there tomorrow for my church's annual Fall Festival celebration!)
