Deep inhale...
[quote name=\'Kevin Prather\' post=\'209038\' date=\'Feb 27 2009, 11:02 PM\']
They were referring to the One-And-Done way of handling contestants in the 70s. If you get a bad celeb, too bad.
[/quote]
There was an article in TV Guide once by a contestant who was the victim of "one and done" because, in a tiebreaker, the celebrity giving the clues said, repeatedly, "It tilts, and it's in France" for the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'209076\' date=\'Feb 28 2009, 09:51 AM\']
[quote name=\'GameShowGuru\' post=\'209063\' date=\'Feb 28 2009, 10:15 AM\']You just answered a question that I had for years regarding the remaining 1 in a main game round: If a 1 is the last number remaining on the board, it is essentially a tie game. The toss-up question serves as the tie-breaker whereby whoever "wins the question" will win the game by default.[/quote]
In the spirit of full disclosure, I can't say I ever saw it happen.[/quote]
I did, and that's how it was handled - whoever controlled the next roll automatically won.
(Leaving just the 1 in Big Numbers was not as big of a problem in the show's earliest days, when you won a car for removing 8 numbers.)
[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' post=\'209131\' date=\'Feb 28 2009, 04:40 PM\']
IIRC, On Fleming J! you'd usually hear someone ring in as soon as the card was pulled.
[/quote]
Even before it was pulled, on occasion, at which time Art would remind the contestants not to ring in until the question had been revealed.
[quote name=\'alfonzos\' post=\'209278\' date=\'Mar 1 2009, 04:41 PM\']
Celebrity Sweepstakes started as a three-player game and then became a two-player game. A contestant started with $20 and could bet $2, $5 or $10 on which celebrity could answer a trivia question correctly. The flaw was if a contestant ended a round with no money both contestants were given $20 to continue the game. The result was that every bet was for $10 because the contestants would just get their money back if they were wrong twice. The producer's solution was restrict bets to $2 if a player's score was $10 or less. My solution would have been to start the contestants with $19.
[/quote]
It might have been done that way in the earliest days - or perhaps you're confusing it with the couples version of Sale of the Century, where this did happen (at least on the syndicated version) - but every time I saw a contestant down to zero on Sweepstakes, both contestants were given $2. (If one was down to $1, both were given $1 because of the $2 minimum bet.)
I remember one show where the score was something like 350 to zero after the Homestretch Round, so both contestants were given $2; they both picked celebrities who missed the All or Nothing question, and the $2 contestant bet nothing while the $352 contestant bet it all (in part because the prize for betting everything and losing it was usually worth over $1000 in the days of $3000 cars), so the contestant won $2 to $0 - and won something like $12,000 the next day.
Speaking of Celebrity Sweepstakes, I can think of two flaws:
One - the "$2 maximum bet if you have $10 or less" rule when the players began with $20 (note that when they first switched from three players to two, and again in the last few months of the show, the starting amounts were $50), which meant that the players tended to bet $5 on their first bets.
Two - in the last few weeks, the celebrities didn't have to write down their answers, so there was no guarantee that anybody had the correct answer.
[quote name=\'BillCullen1\' post=\'209436\' date=\'Mar 3 2009, 01:59 PM\']
Having gone to see the show fairly often, three other weeks feauturing two male celebs on $20K Pyramid were:
Sal Viscuso vs. Billy Crystal
Tony Randall vs. Jack Klugman
Tony Randall vs. Dick Cavett - the one week Clark was afraid they'd do - and they did
[/quote]
Randall vs. Klugman was also on the CBS 10K version. I'm fairly certain that on one of those shows, they had three $10K wins (if a tiebreaker ran long, they played the WC at the start of the next show), all with Klugman.
[quote name=\'wdm1219inpenna\' post=\'210592\' date=\'Mar 17 2009, 05:19 PM\']
Way back in the day, when Chuck hosted Wheel of Fortune, the wheel had a "Buy a Vowel" space on it. I believe if a player landed on it, but had less than $250, they lost their turn. If they had $250 or more, they were forced to buy a vowel. I wonder if someone landed on it when all the vowels were already revealed? That would have probably caused them to lose their turn. Subsequently, that space was ditched very fast!
[/quote]
You remember correctly about the "lose your turn if you don't have the $250". I never saw a situation where somebody landed on it after all of the vowels were gone.
Here are a few more flaws:
On Password Plus (and possibly Super Password as well), the producers took their time in deciding whether or not a clue was illegal. As a result, a player would guess the word before being informed that the clue was illegal, and as a result, the other team was given the chance to solve the puzzle.
On Cullen $25,000 Pyramid, in early episodes, it was possible for nobody to have the chance of winning the $25K; if they ran out of time to have another tiebreaker and a Winner's Circle, the players would split $2500.
And don't get me started on all of the TPIR games where, even if you know every price, there's a chance you won't win the main prize (back in the days of "Hole in One (Just One)", I saw two contestants miss from the closest line).
-- Don
