GSN used to show a lot more older shows but now during most of the day and night it is a lot of newer stuff from the rebirth of game shows during the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Early in the morning and late at night they show older stuff from the 70’s and 80’s which is what I LOVE to watch because I was born in 1972 so it evokes a lot of childhood memories.
I’ll watch Match Game whenever I get a chance. It is my favorite game show of all time. The slightly suggestive answers that are supposed to be so racy are amazingly tame by today’s standards but I still find it funny as hell because of that. Card Sharks is often hilariously dated when it comes to the questions and answers. The Family Feud (Richard Dawson) also has some amazingly hilarious bits in the context of comparing it to the modern era.
Dick Clark said something earlier today on The $25,000 Pyramid that made my jaw drop. It was after the contestant didn’t finish the Winner’s Circle and he comes over and smugly offers suggestion for clues that should have been used (Which I always thought he did rather dickishly). One of the one’s the contestant missed was “Things That Are Whipped”. The clues that given were stuff like eggs and cream. Guess what Dick Clark’s suggested clue was…
Dick Clark just wants to give helpful suggestions they could have used. I never saw it as dickish. And slaves were in fact whipped. The other clues obviously weren’t good enough if the contestant didn’t get it.
You watch those 70s gameshows (like Match Game and the original Hollywood Squares) and, even though the humor is tame by today’s standards, they still just reek of that kind of “Aren’t I a clever and daring person to make that sort of joke on national TV?” attitude. It’s hilarious…I wonder how many of them back then ever imagined that they’d live (or almost live) into an era where what they were saying was almost too coy for junior high?
Do they still run* What’s My Line* and I’ve Got a Secret from the early '60s? I loved watching those reruns a few years back. Reminded me of when game shows were a sophisticated cocktail party with Arlene Francis, Bennett Cerf and Dorothy Kilgallen.
No, they stopped airing those a few years ago. They really were extremely conservative and uptight compared to the 70’s and 80’s stuff, not to even mention the new shows that GSN is making. The new shows like Baggage are just trash TV dressed up as game shows.
I preferred the boorish cocktail party that was The Match Game. The 70s just looked like so much fun to me. Hideous clothes, scotches on the rockses, everyone’s smoking constantly, shagging, eating red meat deep-fried in pig fat, talking in double entendres, fellas wearing flashy gold jewelry…good times!
Agreed on that. Baggage is just Springer’s usual level of taste and sophistication. There’s also Wendy Williams’s Love Triangle, which is at least as tasteless.
Barker may have also used it, but I’ve read several sources which indicated that Rayburn created it – Rayburn hosted TV game shows through the 1950s and 1960s, and was the host of the original version of Match Game in the 1960s.
I wish they would launch a second channel called GSN Classic. They could air all the old shows they used to have like Tic-Tac-Dough, Love Connection, The Gong Show, Press Your Luck, Let’s Make A Deal, The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Joker’s Wild, Password, Hollywood Squares and so many others that don’t leap to mind at the moment.
Nooooo! Man, I hated that show. I came down with mono during my sophomore year in college (1984), and found myself watching daytime TV for three weeks. “Press Your Luck” made me insane…they seemed to go out of their way to recruit stupid contestants. “Big money, no whammies”…man, I wanted to slap them upside the head.
Yeah, but PYL was also the show that had the contestant who’d memorized all of the “random” patterns of the game board and walked away with the biggest win in the show’s history. That was awesome. Sad story, overall, though.
