The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: TheInquisitiveOne on June 09, 2021, 08:45:51 PM
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Good evening.
There are plenty of shows we discuss on here that are established pieces of game show history, whether they’re long runners, living through reruns on Buzzr or GSN, or are revivals of shows we loved.
What about those shows that we like that don’t have the longevity or established footing - whether its due to being wiped from existence, or not making it past a season or two (due to low ratings or otherwise)? I wanted to have a discussion to salute the shows that were underrated, but still appreciated.
One show I have been watching again recently was Talk About. I remember watching this show in the late morning on WFLD Fox 32, and I enjoyed watching some episodes on YouTube. I thought Wayne Cox was a good host and the gameplay was fun. Simple and effective, and I wish the show ran a bit longer. Definitely deserving of another season.
Another show I was fond of was Shopping Spree on the Family Channel. I liked the goofiness and simplicity of the show, and I really liked how Ron Pearson handled the proceedings. I wished it ran longer than it did, but it appeared it was set to be doomed no matter what after the mid-1998 conversion from the Family Channel to Fox Family.
What are some shows you think were good and deserved better? Show them some love here. Thank you as always for your responses.
The Inquisitive One
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I'm going to give some props to two short series that I think had legs: Studio Seven and The Exit List.
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Idiot Savants and Ultimate Fan League. Both run by the same production company, both criminally short-lived.
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MTV's painfully-shorted lived Idiot Savants would probably be my top pick even if Adam's Archives hadn't reminded me of it recently. GSN's Camouflage and That's the Question also come to mind.
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The Challengers. I know a current events-based game show has virtually no shelf life for reruns, but with the 24-hour news cycle being bigger than it was 30 years ago, I'm surprised a format like this hasn't been tried in recent years.
Idiot Savants was a great show that had an irreverence reminiscent of both Remote Control and You Don't Know Jack. Outside of RC and Double Dare, it seems the Viacom cable networks never put much faith into their game shows. Crank out 65 or 130 episodes and let them quickly fade away.
I'll second Shopping Spree and TalkAbout. The latter would possibly need some tweaks to be self-contained, but would make a great GSN original.
Tomarken's Wipeout was a fun show that deserved longer, and for years I've said Caesar's Challenge was a solid format that was either five years too early or too late. I'd maybe ditch the shopping format and play straight for points.
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Idiot Savants and Ultimate Fan League. Both run by the same production company, both criminally short-lived.
Good answers! Good answers!
I think both had things against them that were out of their control, but UFL was funny in a way that Sports Geniuses couldn't duplicate--the category title thing was done better on Ben's Money. Idiot Savants was a great package for some great ideas that were awkward in execution and totally out of place on MTV.
I think that Grand Slam loses some of the oomph if it isn't played by game show champions and most of the bouts ended in routs, but I will add it and World Series of Pop Culture to my list with Winning Lines of shows that didn't get a full shake.
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For as fun and fast-paced a show as it was, I'd say Whew! qualifies. If only there were a way to maintain the pace of the show while still being able to appreciate a lot of the wit of the clues without blazing through them.
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Idiot Savants is an eternal favorite of mine, as well. Deeply disappointing that it didn't last longer, but also surprising that it got made at all, given what a black hole 1996-97 was for game shows.
I'd like to submit Australia's Minute To Win It, which improved on the American show in every way imaginable, but only made it one season.
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One show I have been watching again recently was Talk About. I remember watching this show in the late morning on WFLD Fox 32, and I enjoyed watching some episodes on YouTube. I thought Wayne Cox was a good host and the gameplay was fun. Simple and effective, and I wish the show ran a bit longer. Definitely deserving of another season.
This was the first show I thought of when I opened this thread.
The other big one I can throw out is "Now You See It". It still boggles my mind how they were able to assemble the boards for all the shows, and come up with the questions for each of them. And--once again showing my Jack Narz fanboy-ism here---Jack was just brilliant on there.
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I found a copy of the Talk About board game (and bought it off eBay), so suffice to say that the show was underrated. And it was part of the WFLD game show block too (what little memory I had of it since I was 4 at the time).
Put my cap into Caesar's Challenge as well. Probably deserves a revival, if not putting the reruns back on.
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I completely agree with both Talk About and Caesars Challenge. Fun, easily accessible word games that I'm surprised have never been revived since their original airings.
There were three that came to my mind besides these:
Treasure Hunt: No, not much game there, but it was just plain fun to watch, both for the skits and the contestant reactions, and I'm shocked that the show hasn't been revived since 1981. I mean, this show was on for a combined 5 years, yet I don't know *anyone* outside of fandom that even remembers it.
Bumper Stumpers: You won't see this show on anyone's Top 10 (or likely even 25), but I have always liked trying to solve the creative license plate puzzles, and Al DuBois really seemed to enjoy his time doing the show. Easy to get involved with, fun to watch, and anyone who I've shown an episode of the show to really likes it.
Jackpot: I was just talking about this show a few days ago as one of my favorites because of the creative riddles, the massive amount of contestants playing, and never knowing when someone was going to have a chance at that big Super Jackpot. Another member of that WFLD game show block in 1989-1990 (I think The Last Word was the other) that I'm sad has never been revived nor really reran other than the Dark Period and that one-off during Viewers Choice.
Anthony
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Jackpot: I was just talking about this show a few days ago as one of my favorites because of the creative riddles, the massive amount of contestants playing, and never knowing when someone was going to have a chance at that big Super Jackpot. Another member of that WFLD game show block in 1989-1990 (I think The Last Word was the other) that I'm sad has never been revived nor really reran other than the Dark Period and that one-off during Viewers Choice.
Anthony
I'd be inclined to agree, except that Hollywood Showdown was kinda a Jackpot revival. Just with a fraction of the panelists.
/Yet still underrated
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I think that Two Minute Drill may qualify. Certainly, being based on a more famous UK show Masterminds, many recognize its quality, but with just two seasons — it was gone far too soon. I’ve been rewatching some of the few episodes available on YouTube and, I say this as someone who is NOT a sports fan and has absolutely 0 play-along with the show, I always enjoyed it. I would love to see a reboot — either specifically as a sports show, or more general.
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Split Second: The 1986 version was pretty mediocre in almost all repects...but in spite of that, the Countdown Round could still produce some of the most nail-biting finishes in any game show ever. That says a lot.
Every Second Counts: Doing You Don't Know Jack's "Dis Or Dat" round long before it was cool has to count for something, right? I could see a comedy-flavored revival working very well today.
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To Say the Least: I had never seen an episode until a couple of years ago, but this show was quite fun, especially as the series went on and people figured out strategies for messing with the other team.
Russian Roulette is my obvious pick from the GSN pile, though there are a few that didn't last very long.
Agreed on Idiot Savants.
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I've got quite a few. To Say the Least, Blackout, Go, Wipeout and Dirty Rotten Cheater. Plus a couple of GSN originals, Russian Roulette and That's the Question.
Edit: Add Caesar's Challenge to the above list.
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A lot of the ones I was going to mention already have been - Whew, Caesar's Challenge, etc. I'd probably include Battlestars and Celebrity Sweepstakes on the list. Despite close to a three-year run, I don't think too many people remember the latter today except for us.
My top choice would be the 1976 Break the Bank. I realize it was kind of a Squares ripoff, but I always thought it was a high-quality and kind of interesting game. I love the set! I don't think it got a fair shake - the ratings were strong through the 15-week network run (I believe somebody posted ratings from June 1976 at one time and they were still high), but it was cancelled in favor of expanding soap operas. Why they couldn't have changed the timeslot and held off the debut of the (strange) Hot Seat instead, we'll never know.
When the show was in the "checkerboard" syndicated slots in the '76-77 season, it was up against shows like Hollywood Squares, Match Game PM, $25,000 Pyramid and the nighttime Price is Right in many cities, all of which had established audiences. The next fall Jack was more interested in the revival of Joker's Wild than this.
GSN only gave us a third of the run a couple of decades ago but very little of this show has popped up elsewhere in all that time.
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Another vote for Every Second Counts. Rafferty was perfect as host. Also liked Trivial Pursuit: America Plays. The format, anyway...
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Oh god, Ultimate Fan League. I got into that way too late. Solid show.
That’s the Question should’ve gotten a better fate than being stuck (well, maybe not stuck, but I couldn’t come up with a better description) on GSN. I thought it was a good solid effort mixing Hangman, puzzle solving, and to a lesser degree trivia and it worked.
As far as coming up with one that hasn’t already been said...
I always felt among the Nickelodeon cadre of shoes, Get the Picture was always the forgotten gem. It wasn’t your stereotypical Nick show of the day, inasmuch as they didn’t need messy gimmicks to have a solid show. It was a nice simple half hour that challenged the mind in ways that most children’s shows didn’t.
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Being a student of the old school, and liking good challenging quizzes, Trebek's Double Dare deserved a longer run and/or as a nighttime series.
And The Big Showdown was also a challenging concept that I'm surprised no network or syndicator has tried to revive.
The latter show would be a great fit in the ABC Fun & Games Department as it was a self-contained game. Double Dare would be harder to fit into a 30- or 60-minute format.
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Double Dare would be harder to fit into a 30- or 60-minute format.
Not that hard, just ditch the "first to $X,000 wins" rule and replace it with "most money when time is called wins", then bring the Spoilers on for the final segment.
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Being a student of the old school, and liking good challenging quizzes, Trebek's Double Dare deserved a longer run and/or as a nighttime series.
I understand that it may have been too intellectual for its original time slot, but it’s a shame nobody at GSN watched the reruns they aired and saw the potential. Then again, GSN tends to go with anti-intellectual shows like America Says.
I loved Bruce Forsyth’s Hot Streak. Great play-along and Brucie was a treat. It was strange programming that ABC aired one half-hour game show and expected people to notice it, especially when on against TPIR.
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One more for the road, so to speak. The Moneymaze, a show combining mental and physical abilities of contestants. It also gave announcer Alan Kalter national exposure.
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Being a student of the old school, and liking good challenging quizzes, Trebek's Double Dare deserved a longer run and/or as a nighttime series.
I understand that it may have been too intellectual for its original time slot, but it’s a shame nobody at GSN watched the reruns they aired and saw the potential. Then again, GSN tends to go with anti-intellectual shows like America Says.
Totally agree with you guys on Double Dare. It was a very underrated show, and it’s a darn shame it didn’t get a longer run.
While I wouldn’t personally be opposed to a revival, I think the biggest deterrent to it ever happening is the name itself. The other Double Dare is the far more well-known show at this point (and Nick likely holds the trademark). They could call it something else, perhaps, but the Dare/Double Dare is a big piece of the game, and serves a similar function to the Dare/Double Dare on Nick’s show. So I’m not sure how they’d rework it without it coming off as some kind of J!/Nick DD mashup rip-off. (I realize G-T Dare came before Nick Dare. But the mass public that doesn’t know G-T Dare wouldn’t necessarily realize that.)
I loved Bruce Forsyth’s Hot Streak. Great play-along and Brucie was a treat. It was strange programming that ABC aired one half-hour game show and expected people to notice it, especially when on against TPIR.
On a similar note… I realize I’m probably in a minority, but I actually liked Time Machine, at least the TPIR-esque single player mini game format. But yeah, it was in a timeslot (in markets where it was even cleared at that time) that was going to be tough.
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Being a student of the old school, and liking good challenging quizzes, Trebek's Double Dare deserved a longer run and/or as a nighttime series.
And The Big Showdown was also a challenging concept that I'm surprised no network or syndicator has tried to revive.
The latter show would be a great fit in the ABC Fun & Games Department as it was a self-contained game. Double Dare would be harder to fit into a 30- or 60-minute format.
I second Double Dare ... and I did like Big Showdown even if you need lots of luck to win any big money. But my nominee is Pass the Buck. Bill was clearly having the best time of his TV life post-Eye Guess and I like the think fast format. I know lots of folks don't like the arbitrary choice of answers in the bonus round, but the idea is to keep talking and you'll hit on the right ones...I also love New York theater-based shows.
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The armchair showrunner in me would revive DD76 on AMC, lean heavily on movies/TV trivia, and call it Spoiler Alert!. Think if DD and Hollywood Showdown had a baby.
/get Tim Hortons or In-N-Out to sponsor it and rename the dare mechanic the Double Double.
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4The armchair showrunner in me would revive DD76 on AMC, lean heavily on movies/TV trivia, and call it Spoiler Alert!. Think if DD and Hollywood Showdown had a baby.
That is...not terrible. I don't love excluding a huge amount of trivial canon but we know that tough trivia is a hard sell these days.
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The armchair showrunner in me would revive DD76 on AMC, lean heavily on movies/TV trivia, and call it Spoiler Alert!. Think if DD and Hollywood Showdown had a baby.
/get Tim Hortons or In-N-Out to sponsor it and rename the dare mechanic the Double Double.
I like this too, and think you could be onto something. :)
If for nothing else but I think you might’ve shone a light on an element of Double Dare I haven’t seen anybody shine before: it really is a format you can make centered around one particular subject (Hollywood, sports, whatever) and it would work just as well. Especially with the writing style they used for the clues.
I’d watch.
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The armchair showrunner in me would revive DD76 on AMC, lean heavily on movies/TV trivia, and call it Spoiler Alert!. Think if DD and Hollywood Showdown had a baby.
/get Tim Hortons or In-N-Out to sponsor it and rename the dare mechanic the Double Double.
I like this too, and think you could be onto something. :)
If for nothing else but I think you might’ve shone a light on an element of Double Dare I haven’t seen anybody shine before: it really is a format you can make centered around one particular subject (Hollywood, sports, whatever) and it would work just as well. Especially with the writing style they used for the clues.
I’d watch.
So for the bonus round, would the "Spoilers" still be PhD's? Or would they be hardcore trivia experts?
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So for the bonus round, would the "Spoilers" still be PhD's? Or would they be hardcore trivia experts?
I bet Paul Goebel would pick up the phone.
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The armchair showrunner in me would revive DD76 on AMC, lean heavily on movies/TV trivia, and call it Spoiler Alert!.
Or just call it Dare! and have the open fly through the "A"... instant hit! :)
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Part of the PHD appeal I think revolves around them not being great at the pop culture clues. Not sure how you solve this with a topic-based format.
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The armchair showrunner in me would revive DD76 on AMC, lean heavily on movies/TV trivia, and call it Spoiler Alert!. Think if DD and Hollywood Showdown had a baby.
/get Tim Hortons or In-N-Out to sponsor it and rename the dare mechanic the Double Double.
I like this too, and think you could be onto something. :)
If for nothing else but I think you might’ve shone a light on an element of Double Dare I haven’t seen anybody shine before: it really is a format you can make centered around one particular subject (Hollywood, sports, whatever) and it would work just as well. Especially with the writing style they used for the clues.
I’d watch.
So for the bonus round, would the "Spoilers" still be PhD's? Or would they be hardcore trivia experts?
I would figure the latter.
Although who’s to say there aren’t Ph.D’s that are hardcore trivia experts in their own right?
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I've always loved Chain Reaction. A simple concept that's difficult for some to master. And I seem to be one of few people who thinks the one-word-at-a-time bonus round was a great concept, no matter how many iterations it went through in the NBC run. Get Rich Quick needed polish and a different bonus round. Go was just clunky with one player constantly moving back and forth between pairs of players. The bonus round of Chain Reaction was kind of the format's sweet spot with a fun main game added on.
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Part of the PHD appeal I think revolves around them not being great at the pop culture clues. Not sure how you solve this with a topic-based format.
Maybe instead of PhDs, they could use former champions as spoilers
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Like Eberle, I figure Paul Goebel, Marc Edward Heuck, et al would probably pick up the phone if asked.
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I was thinking television or movie historians, specifically ones who have written books on the matter (Adam Nedeff and Wesley Hyatt (https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Daytime-Television-Everything-Bandstand/dp/0823083152) come to mind). Even bloggers from say, the AV Club, who have extensive knowledge. Degrees would be icing on the cake.
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Like Eberle,
I beg your pardon.
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Like Eberle,
I beg your pardon.
Désolé, Monsieur.
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I wish I hadn’t taken five years of Spanish. Most of my French comes from Mille Bornes, Coup d’Etat and Au Suivant. How would a person say “absolved” in French?
If you have a spoiler in each area of expertise I predict lots of challenger wins, unless you nominate your geek and it becomes head to head. Perhaps the main game is nondescript and functional to draw attention to the main event.
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Part of the PHD appeal I think revolves around them not being great at the pop culture clues. Not sure how you solve this with a topic-based format.
Therein lies the rub: If the subject is pop culture, they'd lose. If it wasn't, they'd win. I love the Spoilers concept, but it needs fixing. The outcome was based on the writing, rarely anything the contestant did.
The casting of the Spoilers was incredible. They could have played up the villain thing by having the audience boo, but simply having the dorks sit there being dorks was subtly brilliant.
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The casting of the Spoilers was incredible. They could have played up the villain thing by having the audience boo, but simply having the dorks sit there being dorks was subtly brilliant.
Agreed. I think it would have added something to have the audience boo them as the wall was lifting (though to be fair they did boo them for a for correct answer). But having the Spoilers sit there like dorks was the right call.
Of course, in a revival today, you know they’d likely have them play up the villain part. Not like mustache-twirling cartoon supervillains (probably), but like brash, trash-talking WWE-type heels most likely. Though if they must talk trash, perhaps it would work to have them spout dry one-liners like wiseguy college professors, rather than going full Connor McGregor.
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Though if they must talk trash, perhaps it would work to have them spout dry one-liners like wiseguy college professors, rather than going full Connor McGregor.
Either that or the same smug "you don't stand a friggin' chance" attitude Ben Stein took while hosting/playing Win Ben Stein's Money.
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This dates me, there is no physical evidence to support my claims, and no one has mentioned this but...
Let's Play Post Office: I was only nine years old when this aired after some other quiz game that Merv Griffin developed so I didn't know the names of most of the people who were the subjects but I enjoyed playing along. I admired the style of eschewing buzzers and having the players scream, "Stop!" when they are ready to record their answers.
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Either that or the same smug "you don't stand a friggin' chance" attitude Ben Stein took while hosting/playing Win Ben Stein's Money.
Stein was brilliant. Witty, good hosting, and his rotten attitude when losing was totally natural.
You're right about Spoilers' ad-libs. There'd be too many with all the pacing and they'd be horsily written and delivered. The show would have to be wrestled from Fremantle somehow.