[quote name=\'chris319\' date=\'Dec 13 2004, 01:00 PM\']
The one thing I'd like to hear again most - if my memory is still intact on this - the show had a very cool theme - the melody was played on a harp, with a bongo-type rhythm behind it. If anyone else with similar faint memories can confirm that, I won't sign myself up for a "rest".
No need to check yourself into the rest home just yet. I was 5 - 6 when it was on and I remember a really cool harp-and-bongo theme as being the best part. If I had to do music for a game show and was told I could only use two instruments, it would never occur to me to combine harp and bongos.
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My farthest memory banks remind me that the music on the show was live and that it was a literal one-man band. TV Guide had a photo feature of the guy at work. Since I was still real little, I can't really remember anything else about the article--or the show, other than Mother saying "Oh, there's that stupid game show again!" and either changing the channel or turning the TV off.
I do remember that the set doors looked to my young eyes like a bunch of Kleenex boxes stacked to the ceiling (with "SURPRISE PACKAGE" even looking like the 50s/early 60s Kleenex logo before they introduced the script logo) and that on maybe the one show I saw all the way through someone won a "Booby Prize." Had I been a decade older I probably would've started laughing like Beavis and Butt-Head at that.
(Back in the 70s, a guy named Carey Gold also had a multitude of instruments in his booth for the CBS soaps "Love of Life" and "The Secret Storm" in their last years on the air--almost everything keyboard or percussion but an organ--the producers wanted to drop that cliche but good. I would almost guess that the muic guy on "Surprise Package" also didn't include an organ because Allan Sherman didn't want to go that cliche route.)