[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' date=\'Jan 28 2004, 02:12 PM\']Goodson saved a lot of his 50's output, but I've never seen this show. Was Goodson working for Cowan on this show, or was it a partnership or did Cowan start it and Goodson take over the package? This seems to be one show where Todman was not involved.[/quote]
Supposedly, Goodson was Cowan's employee on this show. On radio, the show was a smash hit for ABC, becoming so popular that Fred Allen, whose NBC show was up against it, announced that if "Stop the Music" called someone listening to his show, he would award the listener whatever was in the jackpot when they called.
(Quickly, the basic format of the show was that Bert Parks and various musical performers would sing songs, replacing the title with "la la las," while contestants were randomly selected from phone books. When they got someone on the line, either Parks or announcer Kenny Williams would shout "STOP THE MUSIC!" and whoever was on the phone was then asked to identify the song being performed right then. If they were correct, they won a jackpot of prizes, many of them appliances and other goodies not necessarily in every American home back then, even in post-war prosperity. Just like "WWTBAM" in our time, the possibility of quick riches grabbed listeners and made others fume, like Fred Allen.)
Anyway, according to Maxene Fabe, Goodson supposedly left Cowan and "Stop the Music" because he didn't like how that Cowan manipulated and screened the calls to juice up the drama--something similar to the way Cowan's staff on "The $64,000 Question" on television tailored the questions to the contestants' strengths and weaknesses in their chosen categories. He then hooked up with Todman and the rest is history.
"Stop the Music" did transfer to television from radio without Goodson, but its popularity had already begun to fade (and "T or C" mocked "Stop the Music" with its own giant jackpot contests like Miss Hush and the Walking Man, most of them designed as charity fund-raisers without being illegal lotteries). The show's bandleader, Harry Salter, instead came up with his own idea for a music identification game show that was much more successful--"Name That Tune."
