[quote name=\'TLEberle\' post=\'196950\' date=\'Sep 11 2008, 10:21 PM\']
But I thought they were going for parody anyway. After all, you have the "phrasing" issue, as well as the "big money" question in round one, the security guard toting the jackpot at the end. And Wink Martindale, perhaps the most apt caricature in the business. As a parody of the genre, it works. (If that's what they were indeed going for in the first place)[/quote]
The Gong Show and The Cheap Show were parody. It Pays to be Ignorant and $1.98 Beauty Show are even better examples of parody, because they were completely fictional.
Much like Win Ben Stein's Money did (better), Debt was trying to have their cake and eat it too. Serious Q&A competition with deliberately comic elements is a tricky thing to pull off. Debt had a tendency to drift a little too far to the corny and, yeah OK, parody end of things, but the victory still went to the best player, and the payoff for winning was not insubstantial, especially by 90s cable standards.
[quote name=\'TLEberle\' post=\'196950\' date=\'Sep 11 2008, 10:21 PM\'] It's not as if Jeopardy! owns the categories and difficulty levels mechanic, do they? [/quote]
Legally? No, or else Debt would never have seen the light of day. But hearts and minds? Absolutely, Jeopardy owns that mechanic. It's possible to have a three-person Q&A game that doesn't reek of being a ripoff of Jeopardy. $ale, WWW, Big Showdown, Split Second just to name a few. Debt does not belong in that class.