"You Bet Your Life" with Bill Cosby

[chris319]

[quote name=\'Brandon Brooks\' date=\'Jun 8 2004, 11:07 AM\'][quote name=\'GSWitch\' date=\'Jun 8 2004, 05:43 AM\'] It was better than Buddy Hackett's.  The payout for the Secret Word was $500 ($250 per contestant) & the best possible sum was $16,000. [/quote]
More money always makes a game show great.
[/quote]
As an experiment, on one episode of Mindreaders, Celebrity Turnabout was played for $250,000. Damn if that episode didn't get a 70 share.

Now some may ask, "Chris, how did they arrive at the $250,000 figure?" Well, that was the lowest amount we could play for and make it sound impressive. Johnny Olson saying "a quarter-MILLION dollars" is much more impressive than him saying "a TENTH of a million dollars" which would have been the case if we had played for only $100,000.

[gamed121683]

I remember this skit on "In Living Color" where they were doing a take on Cosby's "YBYL." I believe it was Jamie Foxx doing Cosby and the guests in this skit were Sinbad (David Alan Grier) and Delta Burke (Forget who plyed her). It's been a while since I've seen it but all I remember was that the skit ends w/ Cosby learning that the show's been cancelled (While the sets being striked, has yet to comprehend the fact!) also a lot of jokes about Burke's and Sinbad's then floundering carrers. One that comes to mind was this joke by Sinbad during the interview portion.

"What's the difference between Delta Burke and Delta Airlines?...20 POUNDS!"

Ouch!

[Ian Wallis]

I read somewhere that the show was cancelled in mid-season, but Cosby and the producers wanted to finish the season, so that the stations would get their money's worth and that viewers would watch until the end.

From what I read, "You Bet Your Life" was a very expensive show so it's not surprising to hear stations wanting to get their year's worth out of it.  Because Bill was coming off an 8-year run with "The Cosby Show", and the syndication of that set new records and standards at the time, ratings for "YBYL" were expected to be huge.

You know the rest...