Once upon a time, the hour long Price I believe ran for 44 or 45 minutes with the remainder of the time used for commercials and the 2 minutes at the end before leading up to the next program, whether it was Gambit or the local news or a soap opera.
This allowed for far more time for host-contestant interactions. This also allowed for more involved pricing games to be played.
Now with the advent of Price running for just 37 or 38 minutes, there's far less interaction time, and far fewer involved games being played.
Often now, for the sake of time constraints, there are 3, sometimes even 4 "quicky" pricing games played out of 6. My definition of a "quicky" game is a game that is not traditionally played for a car, and also a game that does not involve pricing of more than 1 small prize (e.g. Bonus Game, Cliff Hangers) and grocery item games.
When a combo game is played, it usually requires one extra "quicky" game. For example if Pathfinder or Hole in One are played, then a third quicky game was needed, and I was okay with that.
What else saddens me is usually when 3 to 4 quicky games are played, at least 2 of them are for just a single larger prize. I do believe time constraints led to the unceremonious retirement of Credit Card, as that was a "quicky" game involving 5 prizes.
Rarely if ever are overbids left in during the One Bid round. There have been occasions where there were 2 or 3 overbids during the One Bid round, and that led to great humor at times. I recall once after there were 3 overbids in a row, Bob asked the first bidder "What is the prize that we are bidding on?" and the player could not remember! Time constraints now rarely if ever show more than 1 overbid.
I miss a lot of the classic music cues that were used during the Barker era, although I do understand that now that the show has been on 5 full decades, them wanting to have some more modern cues. That was probably the only good thing about the '94 Doug Davidson version of "Price", getting some new and more modern music cues.
