This Week's Game Show TV Milestones

[AH3RD]

DECEMBER 30, 1963

Let's Make A Deal, a Monty Hall-Stefan Hatos-produced game show which has been termed "The Marketplace Of America," had its debut @ 2:00 p.m. (EST) on NBC Daytime. One of the most popular television game shows of the 1960’s and 1970’s,  Let's Make A Deal is the show where contestants buy, sell, or trade anything and everything from Aardvarks to Zithers. Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and even Beverly Hills housewives dressed as kumquats and turnips hoping to trade a hard boiled egg for a Cadillac. What would be behind the Curtain… A Car or a Zonk (a worthless, ridiculous prize)? Sometimes when a Trader had decided to “take The Curtain,” emcee Monty Hall offered to buy it back again… $1,000… $2,000… $3,000 not to take The Curtain!

Traders never knew how high he would go. Prizes were disguised so that Traders were never sure whether a garbage can, for instance, contained a mink coat or just garbage, or which of three envelopes contained $1,000. The decision-making was exciting and suspenseful. Would it be a Car or a Camel? A First-Class Trip to Hawaii or a Live Cow dressed in sunglasses and feather boa? Would model Carol Merrill point out the features of a new Refrigerator or would announcer Jay Stewart be dressed as an old granny in a Giant Rocking Chair?

Part of the time, contestants played various games relating to the price of small items, pricing items of greater and greater value or matching the prices to the items, for example. Contestants began playing those games on Let's Make A Deal in the 1960’s.

Near the end of the show, Monty asked those who had already played if they wanted to keep what they had, or trade it for a chance at The Big Deal Of The Day. The first two Traders who decided to risk their cash and/or merchandise for a chance at a grand prize got to choose between Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3. There were no Zonks in The Big Deal, but it was possible to trade down. After the Big Deal until time ran out, Monty just couldn't stop making Quick Deals! One of the most famous... “I’ll give you $50 for a Hard Boiled Egg.”

Run-throughs for Let's Make A Deal began in November of 1962. The Pilot Episode was taped for NBC on May 25, 1963 and was for presentation purposes and never broadcast (until GSN unveiled it in 2003). The series went into production in late 1963.

At the beginning of the series, contestants were dressed simply in street clothes, but that would change quickly, according to Hall: "About a month into the show, a woman came to the show and brought a sign that said ‘Roses are red/Violets are blue/I came here/To deal with you,’" Hall told author Jefferson Graham. "And I picked her. Well, for the next couple of weeks we had signs flourishing like crazy [the show was probably live early in the run], and then somebody started wearing a crazy hat to attract my attention. Then it went crazy. They all started wearing all sorts of things." Thus, the concept of wearing costumes on LMAD was born.

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[AH3RD]

LMAD completed a magnificent 5-year run on NBC December 27, 1968, and defected to ABC Daytime the following Monday, exactly 5 years to the date of its premiere on NBC and in the same timeslot, too! The Peacock Network would soon regret its decision to drop LMAD; the game was a huge cash cow for NBC, and its cancellation resulted in a loss of revenues and ratings for the network.

Let's Make A Deal has the distinction of siring three primetime spinoffs: one on NBC (May 21 - September 3, 1967), one on ABC (February 7, 1969 - August 30, 1971), and one in syndication (September 18, 1971 - May 28, 1977), which helped coin the phrase "Primetime Access" and lay the groundwork for several other network daytime game shows to spin off nighttime syndie spinoffs (weekly or daily). The ABC Daytime run of LMAD ground to a halt on July 9, 1976 (after The Alphabet Network made a fatal mistake in moving it to 12 noon); one of the shows to debut the following Monday was Family Feud! The nighttime syndie version lasted a season longer, having switched from ABC Television Center to the gambling capital of the world, Las Vegas (at The Riviera Hotel), with the addition of a Super Deal, which gave The Big Deal winner a chance to trade up even more. A total of 4,700 shows (according to Monty) was produced for Let's Make A Deal.

But, like the old saying goes, a great game show never dies (or stays dead for long):  Let's Make A Deal saw many resurrections: in Canada in 1980, in syndication in 1984 (as The All-New Let's Make A Deal Show), and on its old network, NBC, in 1990 (emceed by Bob Hilton at first, then a very grey [blond?!] Monty Hall afterward). Classic episodes of LMAD have seen repeats on The Family Channel in the 1980s, and in 2001,  Game Show Network retained the rights to air 1,300 surviving classic episodes (undoubtedly from the 1971-77 syndie version), beginning with 35 of the best LMAD episodes in a Let's Make A Deal-a-thon, a five-day launch media event from Monday, August 27 through Friday, August 31, from 8:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m. ET., and with shows in a regularly scheduled air time of 8:30 p.m. ET, Monday through Saturday, beginning Saturday, September 1. In March 2003, yet another revival aired in primetime on NBC which was hosted by Billy Bush and produced by Monty Hall Enterprises and Renegade 83; sadly, it failed to pan out with TV audiences.

Anyway, a happy, healthy 40th annivarsary to LMAD!!!

(Sources of info: The Let's Make A Deal Homepage)

 

DECEMBER 31, 1962

The Match Game, a new celebrity game created by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, had its debut live @ 4:00p.m. (EDT) on NBC, hosted by Gene Rayburn and announced by Johnny Olsen.

The original MG bore little resemblance to the version we would all come to know and love. Two three-member teams competed, each consisting of a celebrity and two civillians. Gene would ask a simple question, such as "Name the word you think is used most often in everyday speech" or "Fill in the blank: To a rich man, ______ dollars is nothing." Each member of each team would write down an answer. If two members of a team matched, they recived 25 points; should all three match, 50 points were awarded. The game continued until one team reached 100 points or, if both teams tie at 100 or more, whenever the tie is broken. The two players of the winning team split $1 per point won.

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[AH3RD]

The winning team then played the "Audience Match," where they tried to predict how a previous studio audience (or, occasionally, special groups like 100 men, 100 teenagers, etc.) answered similar questions. Each member had a guess at each question, with the team winning $50 for each match (for a top possible payout of $450).

The debut celebrities were Arlene Francis and Skitch Henderson. Sometimes during the run, six celebrities (hint-hint!) would face off against each other for charity; the first such occurrence happening during the week of January 6, 1964, with stars Henry Morgan, Bennett Cerf, and Robert Q. Lewis playing for The Boy Scouts, and Joan Fontaine, Peggy Cass, and Betty White playing for The Girl Scouts.

The Match Game went on to its reward on September 20, 1969, after a hefty 7-year, 1,760-episode run on NBC. Sadly, what with it being a live show, a mass inventory of the videotapes became a tragic victim of The Peacock Network’s unfortunate inability to preserve many of its daytime shows, and as a result they have been wiped clean; only 11 episodes, including an original 1962 pilot featuring Peggy Cass and Peter Lind Hayes, are known to still exist today: 9 in The Library Of Congress, 1 in Museum of Television and Radio, and 3 in the trading circuit.

Fortunately for us faithful viewers, the last was not heard of Match Game, and so it has resurfaced in many updated incarnations many, many times over the years…the most popular and beloved one, as we well know, being its second, Match Game 7X,  beginning on CBS Daytime July 2, 1973 and remaining on for 9 years, in daytime and nighttime!

(Sources of info: Match Game.org and The Match Game Homepage: The '60s)

 

DECEMBER 31, 1987

The $25,000 Pyramid experienced its first of two cancellations on CBS Daytime, following a 5-year, 1,339-episode run, with guests Anne Marie Johnson and Robert Hegyes. When its replacement, the Bob Goen-hosted Jay Wolpert Production Blackout, left much to be desired, The $25,000 Pyramid, by popular demand, returned to CBS after 13 weeks, thus making it the only game show in TV history to be replaced by another game and then in return replace that same game!
 

JANUARY 3, 1975


Jeopardy!, that fun-filled Merv Griffin-created quiz show wherein questions, not answers, paid off, aired its 2,753rd and final telecast on NBC Daytime. The final Jeopardy! episode featured highlights of past shows, including a few clips from the 2,000th episode in 1972 featuring Mel Brooks as The 2,000 Year-Old Man, and a clip of a college tournament telecast wherein a student won over $5,000 in a single game!

The last Final Jeopardy! category was "Fictional Heroines" with the answer "At end of novel, she says defiantly, 'Tomorrow is another day'". (Well, we all know what the question to that was!) Host Art Fleming, who was present for Jeopardy!'s full duration of 11 seasons and 2,753 tapings, capped the whole thing off with a sad farewell. (He would return to host Jeopardy! on NBC in 1978, though.) But the loss of Jeopardy! would be the gain of another, more impressive Merv Griffin creation the Monday afterward...

[Don Howard]

The $25,000 Pyramid, by popular demand, returned to CBS after 13 weeks, thus making it the only game show in TV history to be replaced by another game and then in return replace that same game!

Unfortunately, this return was short-lived as 13 weeks after that, off it went from CBS to make way for Family Feud. When I learned The Feud was coming back, I was sure Card Sharks was going to be a goner with Dick Clark et. al. moving to 10:30 or Ray Combs taking the 10:30 spot. Sorry, CS fans, I didn't get into the CBS version as I did with NBC's edition. I thought the theme music was awful and that Bob Eubanks was too much of a goofball.