What you saw was the final televised season of what's listed in the EOTVGS as \"Texaco Star National Academic Championship.\" I don't know why the Walberg-hosted year isn't included in the book. But yeah, you're right, it would have been very similar to the earlier ones. They may have lost the Texaco sponsorship and tried to go on without it, but I'm not sure.
The mastermind for that operation is a fellow named Chip Beall, whom viewers know as the host of all the earlier versions. He's actually the operator of a business called \"Questions Unlimited\", one of the first operations that would sell quiz bowl questions directly to schools for their own competitions. He also franchised a format that was typically known as \"High School Challenge\" (described briefly in the EOTVGS listing) which popped up here and there around the country. (Flint, Michigan may be the last remaining market where his game is still televised.)
Beall still holds an annual national tournament, it simply isn't televised anymore. He's even asked me to take part in hosting some of the preliminary rounds, but it falls too close to the end of our school year for me to get away. As for the Walberg year, people who were in attendance for some of the games told me that he was spectacularly inept at handling the hard-quiz format (they got the impression he was reading the tricky material cold) and that some of the players became openly hostile with him, showing their frustration when his awkward readings would slow down the games.
Hmmmmm...could be a web page in all these? Maybe if I ever got off my butt and did some research.
Might be a fine idea. There are a couple of outdated pages of links, but nothing very complete. As I promised in another thread, I'll be posting a list of fourteen web sites for active high school quiz TV series, but I couldn't even begin to imagine how you could come up with a definitive list of older ones.
