Winner Take All

[zachhoran]

[quote name=\'Don Howard\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 03:38 PM\'] Bill Cullen's first, Goodson-Todman's first, the first with players competing against one another and the first with returning champions [/quote]
 Also the first to have a buzzer lockout system, later perfected on shows like J!

[Matt Ottinger]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong -- because despite what melman thinks, I don't have an encyclopedic recall of these sorts of things -- but I'm thinking the episode last night, the fourth Cullen show, is one that GSN has never shown before.  I can't believe in my Cullen obsessiveness that I would have missed one, and I only had the first three.  I was expecting last night's to be a replay of one of the other ones.

At any rate, 2/27, 2/28, and 3/5 are the correct dates for the first three.  I've got a call in to someone at GSN to give me the skinny on the last one.

It's a q-and-a game at its most absolutely simple. Were there any other games on TV at that time, or was this the first try at it?

The 1948 original was certainly among the earliest game shows in history, though by the 1952 Cullen shows, the airwaves were full of them.  So as a q&a game, all its vaunted "firsts" were pretty much by default.  I have this image that for years, every other straightforward quiz game was dismissed as being too much like WTA.

[Jimmy Owen]

Very enjoyable half-hour.  My favorite Cullen moment, at the halfway mark when Bill said something like,  "For those of you just joining us, let me get you up to speed as to what you have missed.  Nothing."

[GS Warehouse]

[quote name=\'clemon79\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 03:43 PM\'] As a game show, it was really quite lame. Mind, I say that with an understanding of the history of the medium and the knowledge that MOST EVERYTHING ON TV at the time was really quite lame. [/quote]
That's television for you.  Nothing has changed in 56 years.

[uncamark]

The versions of "WTA" that GSN aired were "sustaining"--meaning that they did not have a sponsor and that the network is airing the show to fill time, pray that the local stations don't pre-empt for local programming that has advertising and perhaps hope that they find a sponsor.  (Most likely, the only reason these kinescopes exist is that the network and/or G-T were using them to pitch the show to ad agencies--even if had been on the air for several years by that time.)  The break in the middle was to accommodate station breaks, which in those days came every 15 minutes (there were still a lot of 15-minute shows back then--the first half-hour soap, "As the World Turns," wouldn't start until 1957).

In the case of the Gray "WTA," looking at a schedule back then reveals that the show *started* at 15 minutes until the hour and *ended* at 15 minutes after the hour--as a half-hour show.  On certain days of the week, when its lead-in "Bride and Groom" (a daily wedding on live TV, with the lucky couple getting the gifts from the producers) ran an extra 15 minutes (no doubt because they had a sponsor for that time), "WTA" only ran for 15 minutes.  Things were different back then.