I hated it when GSN treated the 1998-04 version of Hollywood Squares as a classic. Plus there was so much tape damage in those episodes, and a lot of skipped episodes.
There...was? I had no idea tape damage would be a problem at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. I am seriously curious as to how that would come about.
I find Supermarket Sweep to be classic, should it not fall into the classification? Being classic should not just be about how old something is (I myself find that
The Birth of a Nation to be an absolute classic that TCM should be running for an entire day
at least once a year!), it should be about its impact upon the genre and its quality.
Yeah, well, how much stuff from the late '90s and up compares to what was being released in the '70s (the decade we'd be describing if I did subtract 20 years)?
There might be a person who is 90, who hates when AMC runs
The Godfather all day and who would rather see
Gone with the Wind,
Meet Me in St. Louis, and
Singing in the Rain run instead. Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and The Andrew Sisters should've shared airtime with the stations that played Led Zepplin, Three Dog Night, and Stevie Wonder. The point is that it is all subjective (and could've been thirty years ago) and it's a trap I fall into myself.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is for some future Internet streaming service that is interested in nitch programming for streaming.
Would you pay Netflix prices for a Streaming game show service? Would you pay a penny per minute for a la carte?
Well, Netflix did pickup
You Bet Your Life recently. I don't know the interest, but picking up some of the public domain episodes of the old '50s game shows certainly would be interesting. And considering that Hulu has
Celebrity Bowling and
Hollywood Squares, I suppose some of the juggernauts of streaming picking up more game shows wouldn't be totally out of the question.
And when it comes to GSN, I'm all for diversity and mixing things up. It'd be fun to watch an episode of Steve Harvey's Feud and then get an episode of 70s Pyramid after it. Then go to an episode of Lingo and follow that with
Super Password, and then head into a
Deal or No Deal/Minute to Win It/Millionaire block. I don't think it would be a crime to really mix stuff in, but then again it isn't about what I would think, it would be about what the other 999,999 potential viewers think. Unfortunately, that possibility won't be known.
