Contestants would be shown three phrases stacked. One of the three didn’t belong with the other two. You had to ID the odd-one out. You could buzz in before the host told you what the common thread was.
Example:
FLEETWOOD MAC
JETHRO TULL
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER
In this case a contestant tried to buzz in before the commonality was announced and guessed G W CARVER, thinking the other two were rock groups. Although true, he was wrong. Now locked out the host says “involved in agriculture”. Odd one out is FLEETWOOD MAC, since TULL(a real person who invented the seed drill) and CARVER were in agriculture. This was actually one of the trickier questions.
I thought the host was Bill Cullen, but none of the shows on IMDB under him ring a bell.
Very interesting. A similar game but not the one. There were definitely three items, not four. The board was big and they would slide each item one at a time. The announcer would read each item as exposed. Also, the way to be correct was to name the outlier, not say what the common theme was.
And Arte Johnson was not the host of the show I’m trying to find. I never knew he ever hosted a show until today.
It almost feels like someone took the show I’m talking about and retooled it.
Is it possible you’re conflating Knockout with Split Second, with Tom Kennedy? This was my favorite game show as a kid. I have no idea why, because the way winners were able to add the final car prize always bothered me.
(There were four or five new cars on the set–yeah, it was a pretty big set!–and the contestant was given a set of keys. S/he had to pick a car and stick the key in the ignition. If the key worked, the contestant won. I always felt it wasn’t fair that for the rest of the game they used their brains, but the end prize came down to sheer luck!)
IMHO, Split Second was a bit smarter than Knockout–the contestants had to give an explanation of what each of the other phrases/words were.
Bill Cullen hosted a show called Three on a Match in the early 70’s. Just brought back memory of a catch phrase in my high school: “Errahh, That’s true, Bill.”