The winning team then played the "Audience Match," where they tried to predict how a previous studio audience (or, occasionally, special groups like 100 men, 100 teenagers, etc.) answered similar questions. Each member had a guess at each question, with the team winning $50 for each match (for a top possible payout of $450).
The debut celebrities were Arlene Francis and Skitch Henderson. Sometimes during the run, six celebrities (hint-hint!) would face off against each other for charity; the first such occurrence happening during the week of January 6, 1964, with stars Henry Morgan, Bennett Cerf, and Robert Q. Lewis playing for The Boy Scouts, and Joan Fontaine, Peggy Cass, and Betty White playing for The Girl Scouts.
The Match Game went on to its reward on September 20, 1969, after a hefty 7-year, 1,760-episode run on NBC. Sadly, what with it being a live show, a mass inventory of the videotapes became a tragic victim of The Peacock Network’s unfortunate inability to preserve many of its daytime shows, and as a result they have been wiped clean; only 11 episodes, including an original 1962 pilot featuring Peggy Cass and Peter Lind Hayes, are known to still exist today: 9 in The Library Of Congress, 1 in Museum of Television and Radio, and 3 in the trading circuit.
Fortunately for us faithful viewers, the last was not heard of
Match Game, and so it has resurfaced in many updated incarnations many, many times over the years…the most popular and beloved one, as we well know, being its second,
Match Game 7X, beginning on CBS Daytime July 2, 1973 and remaining on for 9 years, in daytime and nighttime!
(Sources of info: Match Game.org and
The Match Game Homepage: The '60s)
DECEMBER 31, 1987
The $25,000 Pyramid experienced its first of two cancellations on CBS Daytime, following a 5-year, 1,339-episode run, with guests Anne Marie Johnson and Robert Hegyes. When its replacement, the Bob Goen-hosted Jay Wolpert Production
Blackout, left much to be desired,
The $25,000 Pyramid, by popular demand, returned to CBS after 13 weeks, thus making it the only game show in TV history to be replaced by another game and then in return replace that same game!
JANUARY 3, 1975
Jeopardy!, that fun-filled Merv Griffin-created quiz show wherein questions, not answers, paid off, aired its 2,753rd and final telecast on NBC Daytime. The final Jeopardy! episode featured highlights of past shows, including a few clips from the 2,000th episode in 1972 featuring Mel Brooks as The 2,000 Year-Old Man, and a clip of a college tournament telecast wherein a student won over $5,000 in a single game!
The last Final
Jeopardy! category was "Fictional Heroines" with the answer "At end of novel, she says defiantly, 'Tomorrow is another day'". (Well, we all know what the question to that was!) Host Art Fleming, who was present for
Jeopardy!'s full duration of 11 seasons and 2,753 tapings, capped the whole thing off with a sad farewell. (He would return to host Jeopardy! on NBC in 1978, though.) But the loss of
Jeopardy! would be the gain of another, more impressive Merv Griffin creation the Monday afterward...
