Labor-intensive Series

[tvmitch]

I don't recall who it was or what the total was, but somebody here mentioned how deep the stacks were on Joker's Wild.

I would imagine for those B/E shows, that the goal would be to write "x" questions for a given category, maybe the more frequently rotated categories would get more frequent rotation. Maybe it was a focus more on that, than "we need to have 100 questions ready for the next show."

[DoorNumberFour]

I've always thought of "Now You See It" and how difficult it must've been to put together the boards for each round. You'd have to include multiple answer words, plus all the surrounding letters and things......not to mention words occasionally blending with other adjacent words.

Easiest way to do that would be to build your board of word chains, and then pick out which ones you want to write clues around. Honestly I don't think it would be that hard for someone decent at wordplay.

That's exactly how I do it when I write Now You See It boards for the Game Show Gauntlet. Put your board together, Google one of the words in it, find an interesting fact about that word, flip it into a question.

[chris319]

You don't want to play Q&A material against a clock. That's one of the things that killed Whew! You also need to come in with a mountain of material and that requires writers, who don't work for free.

[chris319]

Child's Play had to be pretty labor intensive and expensive with all of that pre-production.

[mbclev]

You don't want to play Q&A material against a clock. That's one of the things that killed Whew! You also need to come in with a mountain of material and that requires writers, who don't work for free.

That's how most high-school quizzes do it, especially near the end of the show.  As for that "mountain of material", for example, I think "It's Academic" has to come up with about over 7300 questions for all of its versions nationwide in a single season.  (Granted, the show might recycle some questions every several years.)  Plus, a lot of the production staff in Washington, D.C. also are question writers themselves (they write the questions for all versions nationwide).

Full disclosure:  I'm now the honorary historian of the entire "It's Academic" quiz franchise.

[Kevin Prather]

Full disclosure:  I'm now the honorary historian of the entire "It's Academic" quiz franchise.

Oh joy.