What Got You Hooked?

[GSFan]

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.

[alfonzos]

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.

[uncamark]

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.

[The Ol' Guy]

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.

[BrandonFG]

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. :-)

[TimK2003]

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.

[chris319]

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.

[clemon79]

[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?

[MikeK]

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.

[Adam Nedeff]

[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."

[dzinkin]

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.

[mcsittel]

[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

[Adam Nedeff]

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."

[chris319]

I read that and figured "$64,000 Question."

http://timstvshowcase.com/64000q2.jpg

[Clay Zambo]

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.