Game show false memories

[Chelsea Thrasher]

I didn't completely understand reruns - and lived in an area that was willfully a bit behind anyway - so I thought that all of the game shows on USA and Family Channel were new.

[Kevin Prather]

I remember thinking that the trilons on the Pyramid were motorized.

[Casey Buck]

I didn't completely understand reruns - and lived in an area that was willfully a bit behind anyway - so I thought that all of the game shows on USA and Family Channel were new.

This made you the perfect target audience for NBC's "It's New To You" campaign:

[Adam Nedeff]

I also remember an incident on PYL where Peter walked over to the board and asked who was in there, and they tossed out a piece of clothing. I wanna say I thought the Whammy was a real creature who lived behind the board.

I don't think this one's a false memory. I remember seeing this on a USA rerun.

My false memory is probably because of the similar shapes of the board, but I could swear I remember TPIR staging Bonus Game similarly to Give or Keep for a while.

[TimK2003]

Blame it on the dozens of Milton Bradley editions, but I thought the Narz version of Concentration had FORFEIT squares and gag gifts and the Trebek version was the first incarnation that did away with them.

[BrandonFG]

I don't think this one's a false memory. I remember seeing this on a USA rerun.

Oh I remember watching on USA as well, but after that incident, I thought the Whammy was real.

[Chief-O]

-As a little kid, I thought "Blackout" was hosted by Bob Eubanks. I guess the only way I'd have been able to recall his name was from also seeing "Card Sharks" at the time (and not remembering its existence, let alone anything else about it).

-I'm sure I thought at one time that most game shows came from the same studio. Let's see here....TPIR, Combs "Feud", WOF, "Pyramid", Finn TJW...guess I *was* right on that one....

I also remember an incident on PYL where Peter walked over to the board and asked who was in there, and they tossed out a piece of clothing. I wanna say I thought the Whammy was a real creature who lived behind the board.

I don't think this one's a false memory. I remember seeing this on a USA rerun.

And I remember seeing a video or screenshot of this somewhere (I want to say Brad Francini's old site???).

[Bryce L.]

I also remember an incident on PYL where Peter walked over to the board and asked who was in there, and they tossed out a piece of clothing.

I don't think this one's a false memory. I remember seeing this on a USA rerun.

If we're all discussing the same PYL episode, that I believe is the one that had Mel Blanc "call in" because of the faulty "Sylvester" question earlier that day.

[beatlefreak84]

The one that immediately came to mind:  Bullseye was a celebrity only game show because, until I was in high school, I had only seen Celebrity Bullseye reruns on USA.

NBC's TTTT ran on rotating guest hosts because I never saw the same host twice.

The tiles on Scrabble were dropped through a scanner and then into a trash can after being read. 

When I was really young, I thought you won all 8 cars on Classic Concentration after winning the bonus round.  It made perfect sense to my 4 year old brain!

This was a fun thread!

Anthony

[colonial]

Had a lot of false, and some strange memories of game shows when I was a tot ...

-- As Beatlefreak mentioned, I thought "Bullseye" was a celebrity-only show as well until I saw reruns of the civilian version on cable

-- I thought the studio audience/contestants on "Treasure Hunt" consisted solely of people celebrating their birthdays that day, and the concept of the show involved people trying to win a great birthday gift.

-- When "Battlestars" came back as "The New Battlestars" after just a few months off the air, I thought television had a "minor league system" akin to baseball, and the show was sent down to the minors to fix itself before returning to "the majors" (which was regular TV). I was only 6-7 at the time, so I couldn't really explain what exactly "the minors" for TV shows was (maybe a radio program).

-- On TPIR, I swear I remembered Penny Ante involving contestants receiving pennies of three different sizes -- one smaller than a regular cent, one the size of a regular cent, and the third a comically large penny that had to be rolled onto stage.

-- For a time, I thought contestants wore the same outfits every show because they were competing to win more clothes.

-- When I was 5-6, I thought the "celebrities" who appeared on every game show there was did so because they were overqualified to appear on any game show, so their "celebrity claim to fame" was being the smartest people in the room. Forget Einstein and Stephen Hawking -- Betty, Nipsey and CNR were the true cerebral minds!


JD

[chrisholland03]

I would have sworn seeing someone win $10000 on Chain Reaction with the half-a-zero format.

[Casey]

I'm not sure if these are quite in line with this thread, but it seems similar to others.

As a child, I thought each game show taped in its own place in Hollywood, and you'd see the show's signs out in front of where you could go see them, like a restaurant or store sign.

I also thought the mid show break on TPiR where the logo is zoomed out so that the light border was visible again was done because they had to do that so that the light border would be in the right place for the next show.

[BrandonFG]

Forgot a couple more.

-I mentioned in the Remote Control thread that I always got scared when contestants were booted off the show. For some reason, I really thought there were evil people backstage torturing the departing contestants. That article also reminded me that some contestants' chairs were sent upside-down, which equally terrified me as a kid.

-I don't know why, but for some reason I had it in my head that when a contestant hit Bankrupt on Wheel, if they had a prize, they had to do a walk of shame and carry the wedge off-stage.

[Winkfan]

Me? At first I thought that Johnny Gilbert was of Italian descendance. I mean, he looked Italian.....

A "stretch?"

Cordially,
Tammy

[That Don Guy]

I thought that if a player hit zero on $ale of the Century, they were out of the game.

That was the rule on the old Jack Kelly / Joe Garagiola version - at least, before it switched to couples. (On the weekly syndicated couples show, if a couple got down to zero, both couples got an extra $20.)

Blame it on the dozens of Milton Bradley editions, but I thought the Narz version of Concentration had FORFEIT squares and gag gifts and the Trebek version was the first incarnation that did away with them.

I knew it didn't have gag gifts, but did it really not have any Forfeit squares?

I have had quite a few false memories - the earliest one I can think of: I thought Dick Clark hosted the original You Don't Say!.
Some others:

I thought the original The Joker's Wild had a five-game limit, instead of the Joker Jackpot. (That's what happens when you only get to see the first week before school starts - and on a 5" black and white screen without a cable hookup, at that.) I also thought that, after the car was won in the first week, it was replaced by a boat (instead of a trip to Mexico).

Apparently, that "52-day Mediterranean cruise" I remember being on a lot of shows (Name That Tune, Pro-Fan, and some Dealer's Choice) was actually a South American cruise.

I thought the first episode of TPIR didn't have either Bonus Game, but some variation on Clock Game where you get seven guesses to guess the price of a car, plus Grocery Game and Double Prices.

I also thought "Moneymaze" was one word throughout the series. Oh, wait - pretty much everybody else had the false memory that it was two words "except in the pilot."