If no one did, I'm sure many will agree with it. This is from Matt Roush's 'Ask Matt' page today on TVGuide.com.
Question: At the end of February we lost a legendary game show host, Jim Lange. While he will always be known for fronting The Dating Game, I wish to comment on another game he once hosted, which only lasted during the summer of 1975 and has been ripped by a few die-hard game show fans on a particular forum, but which I feel got the short end of the stick and deserves to be rerun on GSN due to the original tapes having been discovered at CBS 2 in New York. It was a Nicholson-Muir show called Spin-Off and was a draw poker-type game played with two married couples who, by the way, weren't humiliated on the air with embarrassing questions. The idea was to make a Yahtzee-type hand in three tries with the numbers 1 through 6. The winning couple got to move on to the Super Spin-Off where they to try and make a hand in three tries per number in order to win as much as $10,000 for a consecutive straight (6 5 4 3 2, 1 2 3 4 5, etc.). It may have had a flaw or two, but I only got to see it once during the CBS run (my local affiliate bumped it, as did far too many CBS stations), and judging from that one show I saw, I wanted to see the rest of the run — it was truly an exciting show. Isn't there some way these old tapes can be digitized and picked up by GSN for repeating? I never get a response from them. This show deserves a revival despite its failure in the ratings in '75 due to competition and low clearances. In the meantime, YouTube has a complete show posted (audio only) and some promotional clips of the rounds; please go see them. — David
Matt Roush: Thanks for the memory, tribute and recommendation. I'm a game-show fan, but can't say I remember this at all, probably because that summer I was deep into high school marching band geekdom and probably (rare for me) not watching a lot of TV. Seems unlikely that a show with such a short shelf life would get this sort of replay, but if it does, I'd try to check it out.
