The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: Don Howard on May 15, 2007, 01:08:04 PM
-
Fellow fans of the game show genre,
What was it that first made you a fan of game shows while growing up?
Was it the music, the flashy lights, watching the numbers change?
In my case, since Video Village was the show that started my interest, it was the big game board come to life.
-
Good topic, and one that I don't believe we've covered before from this angle.
I would have to go with the flashing lights, and even more importantly, trilons and other set pieces that moved. Seeing things done with computers is much less impressive because I consider it something that anyone with the right skills could do at home for practically nothing. Seeing big turning trilons and such (and all the moving parts they still use on TPIR) is impressive because it requires a budget and materials and so forth.
I would also add the fascination of being able to win all those prizes and the obvious excitement of the participants and the audience.
Plus, I've always been a ham and an emcee (are the two really much different?) at heart.
-
Wheel of Fortune's $25,000 sign. I grew up in the Pat and Vanna "glory days" (nighttime late-80s)...and apparently it was my favorite show. The only thing I remember is that huge sign.
And Nick's Double Dare and Legends, so Nick's sudden revival of the old eps. brings back a lot of memories.
-
Without a doubt, the flashing lights, more specificily the chasers.
A close second would be the eggcrate scoreboards that flashed when there was a winner. I dunno, I always felt cheated when a winners score didn't blink.
-
My answer is best reflected in a quote by yours truly on June 18, 2003. And it goes something like this:
But I became fascinated with the world of bells, buzzers and digital scoreboards, which started me on the road. Eventually I got hooked on the content.
-
[quote name=\'tpirfan28\' post=\'152308\' date=\'May 15 2007, 10:35 AM\']
Wheel of Fortune's $25,000 sign.
[/quote]
Christ I'm old. :)
[quote name=\'gwarman2005\' post=\'152309\' date=\'May 15 2007, 10:40 AM\']
Without a doubt, the flashing lights, more specificily the chasers.
[/quote]
I think this is me, too. Later, I learned to appreciate the gameplay (which is when I fell in love with the word-communications games like Pyramid and Password and Go), but when I was teeny it was all about flashing lights on a big set.
(Which doesn't explain why I love Narz Concentration so much, because with the exception of the overhead sign, not a flashing light on the set. Concentration might have been the very first game show that I got into for the gameplay.)
/Who among us smiled wide the first time we saw mass-market Christmas lights that had a chaser effect?
//I still want to wire up chasers to the window of my over-blinged PC case
///Get ready to match the stars!
-
Most of my early game show watching was on a black and white set so I didnt appreciate the lights so much..I was more into it for the gameplay and the hosts' personalities, which is why I became such a fan of Bill Cullen, Gene Rayburn and Tom Kennedy, among others of the era.
-
Honestly, I can't ever remember a time when I wasn't watching game shows (mostly) for their content. Being a spelling and word freak, I was already cleaning up on Wheel of Fortune at age 5 or so. And despite how strongly I was supposed to love Double Dare for the mess they made every day, I was hooked on getting more questions right than the players, and yelling at them to hurry up on the obstacle course because they still had a chance.
-
I was into Scoreboards when I was younger, and growing up in Chicago gave me the huge manual board at Wrigley Field and the exploding board at Comiskey Park. Yes, the flashing lights and flipping numbers drew me in, and my love for games helped to keep me coming back for more!
Eric Hines
-
Oddly enough, the comedy.
The show that first got me started on this little genre was Body Language. I used to find it funny when the celebrities and the contestants would act out impossible to act words. Later on I started appreciating the game aspect more, like the puzzles and such.
-
Sound effects!!! They still interest me to this day. I'd bet hosts and visuals had to do with it too.
-
[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'152311\' date=\'May 15 2007, 01:50 PM\']
[quote name=\'tpirfan28\' post=\'152308\' date=\'May 15 2007, 10:35 AM\']
Wheel of Fortune's $25,000 sign.
[/quote]
Christ I'm old. :)
<snip>
/Who among us smiled wide the first time we saw mass-market Christmas lights that had a chaser effect?
[/quote]
No Chris, you can't say you're that old. That card only comes into play 20 years from now, when someone says "I grew up with the seizure-inducing lights of Deal or No Deal!!!!!". :)
And your first slashy brought up another fond memory...a house near my grandparents had chaser Christmas lights. What makes it noteworthy is that where they were hung...it was a tall A-frame style structure.
God, you don't know how many times I wanted to go by the "$25,000 Pyramid House".
-
[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'152311\' date=\'May 15 2007, 12:50 PM\']
[quote name=\'tpirfan28\' post=\'152308\' date=\'May 15 2007, 10:35 AM\']
Wheel of Fortune's $25,000 sign.
[/quote]
Christ I'm old. :)[/quote]
That, more or less, was my reaction. Like Tim L, I remember enjoying them in B&W, so it had to be the game play first. In fact, Match Game was probably the only game where the thing I enjoyed most wasn't the game play.
-
From watching game shows on my father's knee, I think it was a combination of the nifty lights/set, the hummable themes, and people getting paid huge amounts of money to have fun on TV. (I remember seeing a handful of lot wins on Sale of the Century, as well as Ten-in-a-Row wins on Scrabble, and thought that was just about the coolest thing ever; winning $50,000 just for playing a game.)
After a few years, I realized that for several of the shows, I could actually hold my own from the couch, so play-along value overtook the presentation aspects. Like several people here, that meant I grew to enjoy shows that involved filling in words, and guessing of words, but a good old-fashioned trivia quiz will keep my attention, too.
-
What got me hooked? Solari's and wheels.
When I was 4, I wasn't watching $20K Pyramid for the gameplay, but for the solari's - watching those numbers flip on the timer, and on their score was so fascinating to me, along with wheels...
What hooked me on MG was the Star Wheel - imagine my disappointment when I saw my first '70s MG on GSN and there was no wheel yet! WOF's wheel also used to fascinate me, too.
-
I always liked playing games, so it was natural that I enjoyed, the original Jeopardy, Concentration and other pure question and answer shows. In 1972, I wrote a letter to the then President of NBC asking why there were no "Kid's Weeks" on those shows. Shortly after sending that letter, I was asked to audition for the Saturday morning talk show, Talking With A Giant.
I became a true Game Show fan the first time I attended a taping of The $10,000 Pyramid in 1973. I was aware of all the activity that went into producing the show; that really interested me. Of course, the game itself was great. For the next eight years, I attended Pyramid tapings whenever possible.
A couple of years later, I started to create formats for shows. Don Lipp, producer of The Big Showdown and Money Maze was the only producer in NYC who would take time to sit down with me, listen to my ideas and mentor me. I'll always remember his kindness, generosity and tutelage.
-
The original Concentration premiered at about the time I was learning to read. It was as if I had my own private tutor. I quickly learned how to play along. Having the second edition of the home game in among my earliest memories. From there, it was easy to get hooked on other great game shows of the day.
-
There may've not been the flashing lights, but there was Groucho's duck-billed wheel, the "WML?" blackboard, that wall parting to show the three guys all saying they were the same person, Jack Clark whispering "the password is...", the bells and the clicker, that whole Lightning Round presentation, the "Concentration" board clacking and the organ music.
When I got a little older, there were multiple TVs in the house and mother was away from home more often, that's when I really got hooked.
-
Hey, Chris, ol' pal...
If you're Christ, I've gotta be Methuselah :-)
Considering the earliest memories were between '57 and '60, I'm leaning toward PYLW's answer. Happy music (even if from a rinky-dink Emenee organ), polite and eager audiences, laughs, and personalities who sounded friendly, sincere and nice. It was just fun entertainment. I'll bet that more than one of us grew up with Cullen, Hull and Narz as role models in the sense of how to treat others.
-
I guess it would be the flashy lights. I can remember staying at my great-grandmother's apartment, watching Lange's Name That Tune and TJW in the afternoons. I was mesmerized by the Tune Topics board, and the flashing joker sequences.
The fact that my great-grandmother was a big game fan helped. :-)
-
It's gotta be for me the fact that Game Shows were the closest thing to cartoons in the 60's & 70's.
You had the sound effects, the colorful sets, and on some shows (like WML), you had animated openings.
I kind of wonder about how game shows do SFX, sets and openings today if I would get hooked on them like I did back then.
-
Trilons that swivelled as if by magic, with a clunk and a thud but with no apparent human intervention. Prize slips which floated onto a board, likewise guided by unseen powers. Elevator-like doors that glided open to a fanfare and closed to a spritely calliope tune. Affable Hugh Downs and lively if cheesy organ music. The prize-matching part was a snore but the rebuses were habit forming. What wasn't to like?
Xs and Os that lit up by themselves. A structure which resembled the front-end of a San Francisco cable car which glided downstage to ominous music. Words that popped out of the top of a desk. Yup, TV was magic all right as far as this youngster was concerned.
-
[quote name=\'chris319\' post=\'152355\' date=\'May 15 2007, 04:08 PM\']
A structure which resembled the front-end of a San Francisco cable car which glided downstage to ominous music.[/quote]
I was doing so well until I saw this. Which show?
-
For me, it was what Mom watched when she was a housewife back in the mid-70s through the early 80s. During my pre-school years, I vividly remember watching Password Plus, Whew!, TPiR, and Hollywood Squares on multiple occasions. My interest in the genre grew throughout my childhood, thanks to summers off in grade school with no cable back then, and Jeopardy!'s return in '84.
-
[quote name=\'clemon79\' post=\'152363\' date=\'May 15 2007, 08:36 PM\']
[quote name=\'chris319\' post=\'152355\' date=\'May 15 2007, 04:08 PM\']
A structure which resembled the front-end of a San Francisco cable car which glided downstage to ominous music.[/quote]
I was doing so well until I saw this. Which show?
[/quote]
Sorry if it's bad etiquette for me to answer instead of Chris, but I read that and figured "$64,000 Question."
-
For me, I think the lights, props and gadgets drew me in first -- the big dice and big numbers on High Rollers ('74-76, and no, I couldn't tell you which format), the big lever and the wheels on The Joker's Wild (the first game show I recall watching regularly), and of course all the bells and whistles on the pricing games on The Price is Right. It didn't hurt that in Hebrew day school, we had a TV in the room for several of the years I was there, and when we'd have recess and had to stay indoors we could watch Price and The $20,000 Pyramid (and, for a brief time, Pass the Buck) all we wanted. :-)
Of course, once I got in the habit of watching a few game shows, I'd watch as many as I could when I was home from school. I got hooked on Password Plus early (though I wondered where Password '79, mentioned in the local paper's TV book, had gone) and tried to play along as well as a 9-year-old could, I'd do likewise with Family Feud, I'd follow the Xs and Os on Hollywood Squares even though I didn't get most of the zingers, and on a family trip to Florida I insisted on watching Whew! each morning.
-
[quote name=\'aaron sica\' post=\'152329\' date=\'May 15 2007, 02:26 PM\']
When I was 4, I wasn't watching $20K Pyramid for the gameplay, but for the solari's - watching those numbers flip on the timer, and on their score was so fascinating to me.
[/quote]
Amen to that! $20K Pyramid, Jackpot!, Celebrity Sweepstakes, Big Showdown... all those numbers were a joy to behold for a child. I remember being especially fascinated with my dad's alarm clock that had those 'flip-style' numbers. My mom made "Big Showdown" dice for me by covering regular dice with adhesive tape and wrote the words on there for me. If I had a PC then with Excel, all those games I made up as a kid would have looked halfway decent. Instead I used magnetic numbers from my Fisher Price desk and placed them on top of building blocks to make scoring readouts.
Now, I'm pleased to be one of the contributors to this group who is passing his love of game shows on to the next generation...
I have no doubts my 3-year-old will be a game show fan like me. He learned his letters from WOF. Made perfect sense to me... the contestants emphatically shout out letters and then they light up. He likes Lingo and TPIR also. He just saw Match Game '75 on GSN and told my wife "Look Mommy-Bob Parker is on!"
But his favorite, as alluded to by others as a future 'first GS memory' is DOND. While in a hotel in Oregon last week, as we climbed the stairs to our 2nd floor room, I heard him saying "Anya... Katie... Jill... Leyla... Pilar... Brooke!" It didn't connect right away, but when I went back down... yep, 15 steps, one for each DOND model-all recited in correct order. Hey, it's better than Teletubbies!
Matt
-
Definitely visuals. I can still vividly remember the overhead shot of the Wheel spinning, the logos "breaking up" and disappearing on the Jeopardy! monitors, the giant percent sign raising on the USA reruns, and the smoke billowing out of the Hot Potato logo.
Honorable mention goes to Bill Cullen, which I know sounds like it amounts to nothing more than a cheesy plug for my site, but that guy seriously jumped out at me when I started watching every game show, even though I can remember thinking at the time how weird it was that he always sat down when the other hosts were always standing up and running around. Even in my personal "dry spell" between the end of USA's Hot Potato reruns and the day I got GSN in 1999, I always remembered Bill. My father used to buy some brand of cigarettes that printed trivia questions on the reverse of the pack, and the category once was "black & white TV." I can remember going nuts because one of the answers was "Bill Cullen."
-
I read that and figured "$64,000 Question."
http://timstvshowcase.com/64000q2.jpg (http://\"http://timstvshowcase.com/64000q2.jpg\")
-
All of the above. Plus two more words: Carol. Merrill.
/Those chaser Christmas lights? I haven't bought any yet. I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to stop at just one set. And, really, who wants to see every cabinet in my kitchen outlined in chase-lights?
//Not my wife, I assure you.
-
Another thing that got me hooked was watching Whew. I hadn't the faintest idea what was going on, but I vividly remember The Gauntlet Of Villians with their screens in their guts. I thought it was like life size comic book characters come to life.
One other thing I'll admit. Sometimes, if I needed a true game show fix in my grade school days, I'd fake being sick just to see all the shows I was missing. I got introduced to Mindreaders, TTTT (Robin Ward), NTT, Treasure Hunt (CBN reruns), plus I got to watch The Great Space Coaster (who remembers that?).
-
[quote name=\'gwarman2005\' post=\'152441\' date=\'May 16 2007, 01:01 PM\']
I got to watch The Great Space Coaster (who remembers that?).
[/quote]
Peter Griffin, for one. (http://\"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fzYMo9cJsE\")
-
Cartoons.
Yep, that's what got ME hooked on game shows. :)
The first time I saw an animated Whammy dancing around and making me laugh, I knew I had to watch more of these little guys and see what else he had in store, whether it was crashing into a tree, or exploding in a car, or being eaten by a shark, or getting a chandelier to the head... I just had to keep watching. As a kid, I actually wanted to see games with a plethora of whammies....
...of course, now I realize that's a bad thing for the contestants who are trying to win some money. :-p
Then I got hooked on the lights of the board, and the sound effects, and now I've been hooked, ever since. I'm hooked, I tell ya! *runs to find a PYL DVD to play later....*
-
[quote name=\'jdhernandez\' post=\'152461\' date=\'May 16 2007, 12:33 PM\']
As a kid, I actually wanted to see games with a plethora of whammies....
[/quote]
Funny. Watching the Todd Newton version, I wanted the same thing.
-
A huge flashing $25,000 sign, an even bigger flashing puzzle board (which when taking away from the show made a 10-11 year old me cry), a shimmery $5000 space that brought much happiness to contestants, and that flash on the gown of the gorgeous girl turning the letters (Vanna was my first crush)... :D
Outside of that, big winners who used to cry on the shows and jump in excitement after they win (think of a $100k Pyramid tourney win or a whole family running up on stage after a WOF win or a Combs fast money win) had me jumping in excitement with them. Being able to know at about 2 years old how much 25k or 50k actually was (I knew how to do elementary school math then), and seeing somebody win it was both exciting and joyful, as well. I clapped along whenever going to commercial and whenever the wheel spun, so game shows taught me how to clap too.
It didn't hurt that all the sound effects were intriguing to a little child also, especially the tension-building "beep, boop" on both Wheel and Pyramid. I used to imitate the clocks after watching each show and my parents had no clue, until years later, what the heck I was doing making all those repetitive annoying sounds for hours on end...
-
[quote name=\'wheelloon\' post=\'152467\' date=\'May 16 2007, 01:14 PM\']
my parents had no clue, until years later, what the heck I was doing making all those repetitive annoying sounds for hours on end...
[/quote]
Man, you guys just CAN'T make it this easy for me. :)
-
Lights.
Watching chasing and flashing lights during the game, and watching the set darken as the bonus round begins or the game show ends. Watching the background color change along with the game. The color and presentation got me hooked.
Sounds.
From the standard dings, and beeps, to the buzzer sounds and "buzz in" sounds that sound like ringing phones...I still catch myself imitating the buzzer sound from $ale of the Century.
The Games.
The shows themselves were fun to play. Quizzers were my favorite, mainly because of the fact I can determine the answers before the contestants do.
All in all, I think today's game show audience missed out on the days when everything was done by man and when everything wasn't sterilized (by that, I mean that if a mistake happens, they edit it out instead of rolling with the punches).
The Inquisitive One
-
Big ass numbers ( High Rollers , 1974 )
Seriously. It's how I learned to count. Once I mastered one through nine, I was on to Concentration.
-
For me, just about everything about them. The sets, the music, the game play, the hosts, the scoreboards (I've always loved numbers!)
I'm sure we all have these stories...but back in the '70s, if I saw in TVGuide that a new game show was premiering the following Monday, sometimes I'd cook up a plan to pretend I was sick so I could stay home from school to watch it...sometimes my mother bought it; sometimes she didn't!
-
[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' post=\'152483\' date=\'May 16 2007, 04:56 PM\']
For me, just about everything about them. The sets, the music, the game play, the hosts, the scoreboards (I've always loved numbers!)
I'm sure we all have these stories...but back in the '70s, if I saw in TVGuide that a new game show was premiering the following Monday, sometimes I'd cook up a plan to pretend I was sick so I could stay home from school to watch it...sometimes my mother bought it; sometimes she didn't!
[/quote]
Ian, thanks for briging up another fun part of my game show life!
I would always be excited when I see an ad for either (a) a new game show, or (b) information about an existing game show. Such had always been the case in the 1980s.
I see them doing it again a little bit now, but nowhere near the explosion 20 years previous.
The Inquisitive One, giving props to TV Guide for plugging the two Barker Specials
-
[quote name=\'aaron sica\' post=\'152329\' date=\'May 15 2007, 02:26 PM\']When I was 4, I wasn't watching $20K Pyramid for the gameplay, but for the solari's - watching those numbers flip on the timer, and on their score was so fascinating to me, along with wheels...[/quote]
[quote name=\'chris319\' post=\'152355\' date=\'May 15 2007, 06:08 PM\']Trilons that swivelled as if by magic, with a clunk and a thud but with no apparent human intervention.[/quote]
Even though game play was the main thing, the two have you have just mentioned the two things I miss from modern shows. One thing I loved when GSN aired The $10,000 Pyramid in 2002 was, as they were heading to commercial between the main game and the Winner's Circle, watching the scoreboard reset itself. Heck, I get nostalgic when I see a real board where they manually reveal answers on Family Feud.
-
Flashiness and flippy scores certainly were a part of my early fascination, but my mind for numbers was naturally attracted to any show with a lot of significant score changes. You Don't Say going from 1 to 2 to 3 points didn't count, but Jeopardy! had lots of scoring, and I was fascinated by the arithmetic mechanics of Who, What or Where. And then there was Jackpot, whose Target and Super Jackpot calculations made me all giddy.