Last night on “Wheelof Fortune,” a contestant had made about a gazillion dollars with some lucky spins and had whittled the puzzle down to this:
THE E_CE_TION THAT _RO_ES THE RULE
She declared her intent to solve the puzzle, and burst out, triumphantly, “The Exception That Brokes The Rule!” The audience, in unison, gasped in horror.
Sorry, no, dear.
It occurred to me that I’d seen similarly hilarious wrong guesses before. I can’t remember any of them, though. What was the worst “Wheel of Fortune” guess you an remember?
(And how in the name of Christ does some guess “The exception that brokes the rule?” I can understand if you don’t know the phrase, but “brokes”?)
I’ve never seen one as egregious as that, but I did once see a contestant who had the wheel absolutely mastered. Every single spin, he landed exactly on the $10,000 space. You know, the one that only takes up 1/3 of a normal space, bracketed by a couple of bankrupts? He was hitting it Every. Single. Spin. But it didn’t actually do him any good, since he never actually got any letter correct.
One night when Mr. Bunny and I were watching, the puzzle was, quite obviously, “Tell Me Where It Hurts”. Only, the first word did not have the last three letters filled in yet, so it looked like this:
T— ME WHERE IT HURTS
One of the contestants was like “I want to solve the puzzle! TAKE ME WHERE IT HURTS!”
Years ago (late 80s, perhaps), someone had the entire puzzle revealed, except for one consonant and some vowels. The puzzle was:
STAR LIGHT
STAR BRIGHT
FIRST STAR I
SEE TONIGHT.
She had racked up over $60,000 by hitting the $5,000 space several times. When she read the puzzle the “I” at the end of the third line had not been revealed. She inadvertently (I presume) overlooked it and said, “STAR LIGHT STAR BRIGHT FIRST STAR SEE TONIGHT”. A moment of silence fell over the audience as Pat had to inform the contestant, “Sorry, that is NOT it.” At this point the mortified contestant realized her mistake but it was too late. Meanwhile, the next contestant solves the puzzle, winning a paltry $200 or $300 or whatever the house minimum was at the time. In any case it was very anticlimactic.
