Close calls....narrow escapes.....

[Allstar87]

Is Nero the only official "Long Shot" block they use?

There's also this one, but I don't know when it was in use.

[nowhammies10]

Right now, my obsessive personality is fixated on the selection of villain portraits as blocks are placed. I've determined that the villain portraits either replace or are placed over the blooper -- individual squares aren't consistent in which villain they contain. But why then, I wonder, will the same villain sometimes show up twice during a round? If the blocks are being attached to the board, then why wouldn't the stagehands have six different pictures in order to avoid duplication?

I built a PowerPoint game controller that does the opposite: the blooper is overlaid on top of the villain. With 7 villains, each one appears exactly 4 times.



The villains are preloaded in their positions as shown above and when the block is placed, the blooper gets removed from behind the "money" slide, leaving the villain to be revealed if that amount is called for. I also made Longshot blocks for each of the villains and have it so that each of the villains on the top row is replaced by a different villain holding the Longshot.

On the real show? They probably didn't care enough about that level of detail. Mathematically there shouldn't be any reason to see duplicate villains in any one round if you're just placing the 6 blocks over top of the bloopers.

[MikeK]

Is Nero the only official "Long Shot" block they use?

There's also this one, but I don't know when it was in use.

That's from the Winc. YouTube video of episode 131.  Today's show is 112.  We'll see that type of longshot within a month.

[Unrealtor]

As we watched the mini-marathon, we figured out that there were actually two game boards. On one board, the backlit 3 on level three was installed upside down and backward; on the other board, it's installed correctly. During the first week, there was also a different bulb out along the right side of each board's chase lights.

It appears that sometime along the way, they figured out how to play the game on just one board. Because the same light bulb has been out on the right side of level 5 for weeks now, and I'm assuming that one random bulb wasn't out in the same location on both boards.

Right now, my obsessive personality is fixated on the selection of villain portraits as blocks are placed. I've determined that the villain portraits either replace or are placed over the blooper -- individual squares aren't consistent in which villain they contain. But why then, I wonder, will the same villain sometimes show up twice during a round? If the blocks are being attached to the board, then why wouldn't the stagehands have six different pictures in order to avoid duplication?

A theory, based on no evidence other than what's been said in this thread: They started out with exactly one of each card for each board with the intent of only using each villain once per board, but it was faster or more efficient to have more than six cards ready behind the board when blocks were being placed so they combined the two sets into one, and the only system for what went where was what happened to come to hand first.

[MikeK]

In case nobody has noticed, the Gauntlet has a current losing streak at 20.  That's one way to make up for the week with 4 Gauntlet wins.

(Spoilered in case nobody has seen the episode that aired Friday afternoon.)

[tyshaun1]

In case nobody has noticed, the Gauntlet has a current losing streak at 20.  That's one way to make up for the week with 4 Gauntlet wins.

(Spoilered in case nobody has seen the episode that aired Friday afternoon.)

I was hoping that I wasn't the only one who noticed. And IMO, an overcorrection. I'm sure it didn't help against its competition.

[Ian Wallis]

I was hoping that I wasn't the only one who noticed. And IMO, an overcorrection. I'm sure it didn't help against its competition.

Is it any coincidence that celebrities were added about a month later?  It was probably somewhere around now in the taping cycle that someone at CBS said that they've got to spruce it up somehow and the producers had to figure out how to incorporate celebrities.

[MSTieScott]

Is it any coincidence that celebrities were added about a month later?

Yes. I'm assuming that Whew!'s ratings were always trouble (as has been mentioned before, one of the show's biggest problems was an overwhelming format that required too much concentration to keep up with). I'm also assuming that the ratings didn't drop suddenly and significantly because of a string of Gauntlet losses, which a viewer would only notice if they watched the show every day.

Friday's episode was the start of a new taping day. They finally fixed that light bulb, there was a new split-screen shot the director was trying out, the list of writers in the credits got much longer (I wasn't able to compare the names, but it looked like the researchers may have received a promotion?), and the questions in the bonus round went from "the contestants have no hope of winning" to "there's at least a small chance a contestant could get close to a win."

[weaklink75]

They’re at about 6 weeks after NBC moved Hollywood Squares to the time slot- From what I read, Whew did decently against All Star Secrets but once Squares moved the ratings dipped, so Whew went the celeb route (and considering Squares got canned 3 weeks after Whew was to make way for The David Letterman Show, you wonder what the ratings were overall; there might have been clearance issues with affiliates wanting to do local talk shows and such- I know DC didn’t broadcast Whew. CBS did sitcom reruns in the 10am hour after Whew ended until $25k Pyramid/Child’s Play started in late ‘82)

[MikeK]

Friday's episode was the start of a new taping day. They finally fixed that light bulb, there was a new split-screen shot the director was trying out, the list of writers in the credits got much longer (I wasn't able to compare the names, but it looked like the researchers may have received a promotion?)

Comparing the credits from ep. 79 and ep. 113, a slew of new people were added as writers, 2 speech bubbles worth, 8 in total--Joel Hecht, Laurie Levit-Ades, Jim Kahlert, and Jerrilyn Klein (all 4 researchers on show 79) got promoted to writers.  Two new writers were added to the staff--Jeff Spielberg and Jill Baer.

[catnap1972]

They also trademarked the "Whew!" logo (or at least noted that it's as such)

[clemon79]

Weird question: the source I am pulling my BUZZR listings from seems to indicate that today's Whew (and indeed, the rest of the month's) are repeats. Was this the case? (Also, the Sunday episodes are the repeats from Monday and Tuesday for a given week, correct?)

[Bryce L.]

Weird question: the source I am pulling my BUZZR listings from seems to indicate that today's Whew (and indeed, the rest of the month's) are repeats. Was this the case? (Also, the Sunday episodes are the repeats from Monday and Tuesday for a given week, correct?)

No, today's episode was fresh. And yes, the Sundays are repeats of Monday and Tuesday. If I may ask, what source are you pulling your listings from?

[clemon79]

No, today's episode was fresh. And yes, the Sundays are repeats of Monday and Tuesday. If I may ask, what source are you pulling your listings from?

Charter / Spectrum, Los Angeles. I take the HTTP stream itself straight from BUZZR, I just need Pacific time listings to populate the program grid in NextDVR so I can set up recordings. Literally don't care WHERE they come from so long as Schedules Direct will feed them to me.

[Bryce L.]

No, today's episode was fresh. And yes, the Sundays are repeats of Monday and Tuesday. If I may ask, what source are you pulling your listings from?

Charter / Spectrum, Los Angeles. I take the HTTP stream itself straight from BUZZR, I just need Pacific time listings to populate the program grid so I can set up recordings. Literally don't care WHERE they come from so long as Schedules Direct will feed them to me.

Oh, gotcha. That I can't help you with, since I record a completely different way (VLC). As far as Pacific listings, I would suggest using this link, but not sure if it would help much...

https://buzzrtv.com/schedule/schedule_by_date/21-10-25/America/Los_Angeles

Just change dates as necessary.