Four old pilots I've never heard of.

[DoorNumberFour]

While on gscentral.net @ archive.org, I found four title screengrabs from what look like four unsold pilots:

*Celebrity Dominoes
*The Shopping Game
*Birds of a Feather
*Headline Hunters

You can see the four screengrabs for yourself here.

Does anyone know about these?

[Matt Ottinger]

[quote name=\'DoorNumberFour\' post=\'164929\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 01:41 PM\']
Does anyone know about these?[/quote]
Some are pilots.  Some are Canadian.  Some might even be Canadian pilots.  
They're all from Nicholson-Muir productions.

[DoorNumberFour]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'164933\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 01:09 PM\']
Some are pilots.  Some are Canadian.  Some might even be Canadian pilots.  
They're all from Nicholson-Muir productions.
[/quote]

Yeah, now that I plug them into Google, "Headline Hunters" and "Celebrity Dominoes" were Canadian shows in the mid-70s.

But I can't find a single word about the others.

[dzinkin]

[quote name=\'DoorNumberFour\' post=\'164929\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 01:41 PM\']
Does anyone know about these?
[/quote]
Two of them were actual aired shows, not pilots.  Headline Hunters and Celebrity Dominoes both ran in Canada on CTV.

The only reference I can find to The Shopping Game is on a cached entry from Dave Mackey's blog.  No idea about the last one.

[alfonzos]

On clear days in the summer, I could watch some Canadian television in Cleveland, Ohio and I remember watching the last few minutes of Celebrity Dominoes. From what I can recall, each of six celebrities had six dominoes. There was a gameboard (seen on the screen grab) on which players were supposed to place dominoes that matched either end of the dominoes already on the board. Players had to remember which celebrities held which dominoes and the player who placed the last domino was the victor. There may have been a question/answer element to earn picks. That part of the game is hazy in my memory.

[Chief-O]

Gosh darn, ever since I saw that graphic, I wondered about all those. I found out about "Headline Hunters" [one of the few shows Jim Perry did up there]. "Shopping Game" and "Birds of a Feather" sounded to me like they would've been pilots.

[EDIT:] Now that I think about it, "Birds" sounds like it could have been a relationship-type show.

[TimK2003]

[quote name=\'DoorNumberFour\' post=\'164934\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 02:17 PM\']
[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'164933\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 01:09 PM\']
Some are pilots.  Some are Canadian.  Some might even be Canadian pilots.  
They're all from Nicholson-Muir productions.
[/quote]

Yeah, now that I plug them into Google, "Headline Hunters" and "Celebrity Dominoes" were Canadian shows in the mid-70s.

But I can't find a single word about the others.
[/quote]


I look at the HH set.  When I glance at the set, it looks like the rear wall & curtain looks like it came from Definition, the seating areas from To Tell The Truth, and the right wall behind the players looks like Perry's Sale of the Century.

[ChuckNet]

TSG was actually an extremely obscure early 80s TPiR ripoff that aired on the also extremely obscure Satellite Network, and as pointed out on Dave's blog, was hosted by Art James.

Chuck Donegan (The Illustrious "Chuckie Baby")

[mmb5]

Shopping Game aired in 1981 on the very minor cable channel SPN (NYT Reference).  SPN later became Tempo and then later was bought by NBC for the channel slot to launch CNBC.

I can't find a darn thing on Birds of a Feather.

And I'm a little freaked out that a different Nicholson-Muir project involved Henry Morgan voicing a human heart.


--Mike

[Craig Karlberg]

Seeing those pictures of Celebrity Dominoes & Headline Hunters brought back memories of my time in upstate New York where I watch mostly what was on CJOH-TV channel 8 from Ottawa Ontario, Canada.  I always wanted to see Headline Hunters every Tuesday night at 7:30 PM no matter what I might've been doing before that.  The thing I always remember about that show was the last main-game set of headlines know as "The Deadline".  They started at 500 points & decreased for each non-guess of the subject's identity.  The bonus gane was a 60-second "Quickie" round that almost led me to think of the Speed Round of $ale of the Century except one player played for a mere $10 per quickie identity.

As for Dominoes, every time a domino was "captured", that celebrity then had either another one or a blank one.  Blank ones cause a player to lose control as well as a non-matching domino.  As for earning picks, it's basically a scrambled word a celebrity leaves out.  To cue the players, s/he played some silly sound effects to start the unscrambling portion.  I didn't care much for that show anyways back in 1975.

[davemackey]

[quote name=\'mmb5\' post=\'164961\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 07:59 PM\']
And I'm a little freaked out that a different Nicholson-Muir project involved Henry Morgan voicing a human heart.
[/quote]
That was part of the "I Am Joe's..." series, which was based on a series of articles that ran in Reader's Digest about different body parts giving first-person accounts of their functions, and what can go wrong with them if Joe doesn't take care of himself.

Another thing I remembered about the Shopping Game - Art's assistant was named Elyse. I don't remember her last name but she was quite pretty.

SPN was one of those weird cable channels in the early, bad old days of cable. I have been a cable subscriber since 1981, and yes there were still a lot of rough edges in the industry. SPN showed an odd mix of commerce shows, infomercials (another industry at its beginning), and old movies and TV shows like "I Married Joan".

[The Ol' Guy]

The Shopping Game had a lot of elements you're seeing in today's shows, so perhaps in some ways, it was a bit ahead of it's time. Four contestants were given questions worth $100 each. After the questions, merchandise items were offered up for bidding. None of the players knew how much money anyone else had, so it was possible a player could bluff their way to a winning bid. After a player won the item, the same item was then offered to the viewers in a home shopping style. I'm also in the fuzzy memory club as to how many question rounds there were, but that was the main premise - players bidding on items that were also made available to home shoppers. It had a low-budget look, but it wasn't too bad a show.

[BrandonFG]

[quote name=\'davemackey\' post=\'164990\' date=\'Sep 28 2007, 06:36 AM\']
SPN was one of those weird cable channels in the early, bad old days of cable.
[/quote]
Cable got better? :-P

[sshuffield70]

[quote name=\'davemackey\' post=\'164990\' date=\'Sep 28 2007, 06:36 AM\']
SPN was one of those weird cable channels in the early, bad old days of cable. I have been a cable subscriber since 1981, and yes there were still a lot of rough edges in the industry. SPN showed an odd mix of commerce shows, infomercials (another industry at its beginning), and old movies and TV shows like "I Married Joan".
[/quote]

The show I most remember on SPN was "Telephone Auction".  I believe it was before HSN got big.  QVC came later.

/remembers when there was another MSN
//it was Modern Satellite Network

[Don Howard]

[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'164933\' date=\'Sep 27 2007, 02:09 PM\']
Some are pilots.  Some are Canadian.  Some might even be Canadian pilots.  
[/quote]
Have we been channelling the Grand Slam Questioner?