[quote name=\'hmtriplecrown\' date=\'May 27 2005, 05:53 PM\']I sacrificed both another half hour of my life, as well as a perfectly good episode of Super Password this afternoon in order to tape The Thousand Dollar Bee. An 8 minute compilation video, including the entire final segment and end credits, can be found at
http://www.classicgameshows.com/video/1000dollarbee.wmv The video is 16 MB in size.
Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.
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Just now watched the clip for the first time. Much of the last week and a half has been spent getting married and spending our honeymoon in central Florida.
(Side note: Meet the newlyweds at
www.dougmorris.net/cindy.)
With that said, I have to ask, do they even pre-test the contestants? The poor girl who misspelled "invest", "money" and "credit" was awful. Hate to say it, but I shook my head along with the bee that faded in and out of the lower right corner of the graphic during her speed round.
The lightning round wasn't too bad. (Insert
Street Smarts' "bad pun alert" sound effects and flashing super here.) However, considering a player had to sound a buzzer first for the right to spell the word, why didn't they call this "the buzz off"?
With regard to the "bee scramble boards", show of hands, anyone thought that round was stolen from a famous
Soul Train segment? Oddly enough, the segment was named "the
Soul Train scramble board". Object for the players was to use the letters on a magnetized board to unscramble the name of an artist or musical group.
Yes, I know, unscrambling words is nothing new to the game show world (read:
Caesars Challenge; wordplay categories on TTD, TJW and J!). Still, unless Robert, BFC, et al, received Don Cornelius' blessing on this one, don't be suprised if we see
Soul Train v.
Thousand Dollar Bee in court.
Then, when the TDB players unscrambled their words, having the contestants use the words in sentences seemed pointless. Equally pointless: the final story round. Uh, hello, I thought this was supposed to be a spelling contest.
More problems now. When the kids are spelling words, they should say the word, spell it and say it again -- just like the National Spelling Bee. In the clip, they only said the word once and spelled it (or, chronologically, the other way around).
The "say-spell-say" method is a clear indication to everyone (s)he is finished spelling the word. Back to the poor girl who screwed up "money", when she was given the word, her response was, "money, M-O-N-E" and about a half a second later, Sinatra gave her the next word.
Also, from a production standpoint, the players probably need to be standing at podia -- displaying the running totals (what a concept!). Either that or step up to a microphone (a la the NSB). That's better than Sinatra handing a mic to a contestant.
The set is absolutely crummy. Too pre-schoolish. Why not a backdrop similar to the '70s
Beat The Odds pilot -- with letters all over the place?
And the theme song -- UGH! I'll just leave it at that.
If the show survives beyond this season (and, per earlier posts, that's a
big if), here's what to fix...
\ As noted earlier, have the players "say-spell-say". This worked in the spelling round of
WinTuition. Why not here?
\ Ditch the scramble boards with a round that has a series of spelling words that increase in difficulty (or at least increase in letter length: 5-letter word, then 6 letters, 7 letters, etc.). The higher the difficulty, the higher the point value. One misspelling and the player's turn is over. Opponent gets a different set of words.
\ Echoing similar thoughts throughout this thread, give the main game winner *SOMETHING* for victory. A gift card, a "must have" toy, a box of Cheerios, *something*.
\ Ditch the story round and replace it with a round where a player is show several groups of words, four per group, and is asked to identify which word is spelled incorrectly. Meeting a certain goal in a certain time limit -- say, six right answers in 45 seconds -- wins $1000 in savings bonds. Better to do that than take the ultra-cheap route of giving the season-ending winner $1000 and have all the other kids come away empty-handed.
Bottom line: I'm sticking with my original take of
$hopper's Casino being the worst game show ever. But, between crummy production values, a low prize budget, a theme song at least five times more annoying than TJW90 and a game that combines too many formats, I'll rank TDB a close second worst.
