It's Broke, so Fix It!

[TheInquisitiveOne]

Hello everyone!

Many game shows have flaws...some obvious, some that takes a while to notice. When the corrections are made, few of them are met with resounding success.

That is the focus of this topic. Which game shows do you believe had a flawed format which, when corrected, was met with success?

If you are confused with the question (and justifiably so), allow me to lend an example. Many of us have raised the issue of the NBC version of $ale of the Century's Shopping Round where the cash jackpot was a stand-alone prize. (The problem may have not been with the prize itself, but with where it was placed.) Once the cash jackpot was reached, all but one decided to take the money and run (that one, as we all know, was Babara Phillips.) That was the flaw: no one was willing to put his or her money on the table in order to add prizes that, at times, totaled less than the jackpot. (Thanks to Chuck Donegan for raising this issue in an earlier thread.)

The correction: the Syndie version of the Shopping Round was formatted where the cash jackpot could only be won as part of "The Lot."

So with that, I leave the rest to all of you. Thanks in advance for the responses!

The Inquisitive One

[Jimmy Owen]

Dare I say, "Twenty-One."

[Craig Karlberg]

In the early days of Pyramid, whenever there was a tie(sometimes a 21-21 tie), sudden death would be played & the team that created the tie gets to pick a letter that the words began with & proceed from there.  As always, high score wins.  Problem is, if the round ended in another tie, another round was played & this could go on untill an eventual winner was chosen.  Later on, the sudden death round was modified to eliminate subsequent ties by going by fastest time if both teams got 7/7.  Also, the regular scores were erased to avoid any confusion that might be caused.

[daveromanjr]

[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 02:06 AM\'] Dare I say, "Twenty-One." [/quote]
 Good one!

[DrBear]

In general, many of the 50s panel shows needed some sort of tweking of the panel; few had a good regular panel out of the box.

A bit more recently, Match Game 7x didn't really get going until it dropped the _____ Stew type of questions for the ones that we know and love.

[zachhoran]

[quote name=\'TheInquisitiveOne\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 12:55 AM\'] Once the cash jackpot was reached, all but one decided to take the money and run (that one, as we all know, was Babara Phillips.)
 [/quote]
 Barbara had $484 in her bank as of her next-to-last win, $26 away from the cash jackpot on her last day IIRC. SHe managed to get enough maingame cash to win the lot on the last question of the maingame(in the days where the final FG was followed by three more questions).

[aaron sica]

The only one which comes to mind, which I've mentioned before (and always seem to pull out at moments like this!), is the scoring for HS86 when it first came out. Each round was worth $500, but if the same player won the first two rounds, they were up by $1000. Most shows saw only three rounds, so the third player was screwed.

This was corrected in later seasons (Zach??) when they made round 3's value $1000.

[zachhoran]

[quote name=\'aaron sica\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 06:52 AM\'] The only one which comes to mind, which I've mentioned before (and always seem to pull out at moments like this!), is the scoring for HS86 when it first came out. Each round was worth $500, but if the same player won the first two rounds, they were up by $1000. Most shows saw only three rounds, so the third player was screwed.

This was corrected in later seasons (Zach??) when they made round 3's value $1000. [/quote]
 The "third and subsequent games worth $1000" rule began on the next to last week of season one.


The same rule befell Marshall SYndie HS with each game worth $250. If one player won the first three games, usually the other player would be out of the race for the econobox.

[CaseyAbell]

One tweak I really liked was the free letters in Lingo's bonus round. This helped avoid those long stretches in the first season when the contestants stared helplessly at the board as the seconds ticked away. And it probably helped Lingo survive into a third season.

I also liked the six-in-twenty on Donny's Pyramid vs. the classic seven-in-thirty. Tightened up the pacing. Too bad Donny's version wasn't a huge success, but that probably had a lot more to do with the industry's current hostility toward game shows than with the new format.

[Don Howard]

[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 07:49 AM\'] I also liked the six-in-twenty on Donny's Pyramid [/quote]
 So did I. I also liked the fact that if in one's first trip to the Winner's Circle if the $10000 was not won, the amount you played for the second time out was still $10000. Unfortunately, because of there being no returning champions, there was no chance to play again with another win for an additional $15000. But we beat this issue to death for two years to no avail so I shall now go back to listening to sleep-talking Les Brown, Jr. on the Music Of Your Life.

[SplitSecond]

I couldn't stand the six-in-twenty rule.  Not simply because it was a change, but because it meant that virtually every segment of gameplay ended on a negative "time's up", rather than a positive "you got through them all".  It's a small thing, but I think it went a long way to sour many people's subconscious enjoyment of the show while their conscious minds were busy picking apart the myriad other undesirable elements of this revival.

[Clay Zambo]

That's a good point.  I wonder if "five-in-twenty" would have lead to more finished categories--but not so many that it lead to time-eating tiebreakers.

[Matt Ottinger]

My favorite example of a game that improved while it was on the air is Scrabble.  The final format, the one most people remember, was excellent, but they struggled mightily in the early days to get there.

As for the modern Pyramid, much as I dislike the knee-jerk reaction that changes to a classic format are automatically bad, I'm a seven-in-thirty man myself.  I also think they wasted enough time in other parts of the show that they could have gotten those 120 seconds back somewhere.

[clemon79]

[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 05:49 AM\'] Too bad Donny's version wasn't a huge success, but that probably had a lot more to do with the industry's current hostility toward game shows than with the new format. [/quote]
 I blame the multilation they did to the Winner's Circle, me.

Unforutnately, we'll never know.

[CaseyAbell]

I didn't mind unfinished rounds in the front game on Donny's Pyramid. They added to the urgency and the challenge, and made the front game seem like less of a routine time-passer before the Winner's Circle. The players definitely had to move right along with the tighter deadline.

While Pyramid didn't knock the socks off Nielsen Media Research, Variety commented (page down in the blog) that the numbers indicated a "renewable" show. I really think there's genuine hostility in the industry right now towards the genre. Michael Davies' Studio 7 flop probably didn't help the atmosphere.