Mark Goodson

[chris319]

[quote name=\'tvrandywest\' date=\'Oct 20 2003, 12:26 PM\'][quote name=\'chris319\' date=\'Oct 20 2003, 12:50 PM\']Goodson didn't create the Milky Way, penicillin or modern jurisprudence so Frank was free to claim those as his. We would have the Rossi theorem today if Pythagoras hadn't already put his name to it.[/quote]
OUCH![/quote]
Oh come now, you've heard hyperbole worse than THIS!

I happened to like Frank, like the way he would grumble about Goodson doing radio shows on television -- to Goodson's face! (Frank never got over the fact that Goodson didn't like Beat the Clock.)

[The Ol' Guy]

So Frank openly complained about Goodson doing radio shows on tv? Sounds like my theory holds....

[chris319]

Your theory absolutely holds. When I was pitching games to NBC and others in the mid-80s, I was told that they put game shows on in the morning so that housewives could "watch" them while doing chores, and that they wanted games which were essentially radio shows for the same reason: that a housewife could listen to the audio portion and follow the game while doing other things. This would not explain shows such as Scrabble or Classic Concentration which required the viewer to pay attention visually.

That said, during my tenure at G-T we didn't develop games with this in mind; Puzzlers and Blockbusters both had strong visual elements, as did Beat the Clock.

[uncamark]

[quote name=\'chris319\' date=\'Oct 20 2003, 12:50 PM\']Nobody got the reference to Horn & Hardart.[/quote]
Oh, I did--I lived in the Philadelphia ara as a younger kid and wanted to go to Horn & Hardart Automats, but my parents never wanted to take me to the ones in downtown Philadelphia.  There was a Horn & Hardart cafeteria in one of the shopping centers in South Jersey (perhaps even the pioneering Cherry Hill Mall), but it didn't have the Automat machines, so it wasn't the same.

And now that I'm an adult, they're not around any more.

ObGameShow:  Some of Frank Wayne's "mechanical" pie-dispensing stunts on "Beat the Clock" could've been inspired by an Automat (I know, I know...)