The title explains it all. Mine would be a show called Let’s Induce Vomiting, and people would come on and be poked in the stomach, tickled, and strapped to giant wheels and spun around. The object is to get them to vomit. If they don’t, they appear on the show again the next night, with prizes getting better and more valuable each night, *Jeopardy *-like. I’m thinking this would be a failure in the United States, but would be a hit in Japan, land of weird game shows.
Also, there would be midgets spinning the giant wheel.
With the lesbian gangs that those dumb supermarket rags raged about even before she was in prison?
How about an obstacle course including a 300 yard swim, a 40 ft. wall to scale, followed by a hundred mile trek through the desert. The prize for survivors is a chance to work at menial labor for $8/hr.
It’s called “So, You Want To Be an American?”
“Dusting for Dollars” - this will need some fleshing out, but it’ll involve women in crisply starched dresses, heels, and pearls doing all the household chores, including laundry and making dinner, without smearing their makeup, breaking a nail, or wrinkling their clothes. The bonus round will include shampooing the carpet while trying to calm a colicky infant and keeping a toddler from torturing the cat. Hosted by Barbara Billingsly.
As an aside, this made me remember my mom cleaning the kitchen floor on her hands and knees with the skirt of her dress pulled through her legs to form some sort of weird culotte. After all, in the 50s, women just did *not * wear pants. At least not proper women in suburbia…
Wheel Of Boobytraps!
Spin the Big Wheel, to pick an Infernal Device, chock full of explosives, for Fun & Fabulous Prizes!
Are You Smarter Than an Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader Contestant?
From what I’ve seen, a most confident “yes”.
How about Are You Stupider than a 4th Grader?
One of my local newspapers sponsored a thing back when I was in grade school where they would send out a different question each week to all the local schools, and the teachers could use it as a writing exercise and the paper would publish short excerpts from them. As a kid, seeing your name in the paper was pretty cool.
Anyway, one of the questions they asked where they picked my answer as one to be published was similar to this one.
My idea was to modify basic board games to be played in an hour, and then play a different game each week, with the floor painted like the board and the contestants used as pieces. Monopoly, Chess and Checkers (not sure how you’d pull those off exactly), stuff like that. Mousetrap has some cool possibilities.
I guess reading yours has tainted my mind so that even after reading the others above this one, all I can think of is:
How big an item can you swallow?
Contestants start with jawbreakers, then eggs (hard-boiled and shelled) and move up to baseballs, softballs, bowling balls and footballs. Anybody who can swallow a tire wins the bonus money.
Ooh. Inspired by a former thread here:
RUN!
A 1/10 mile track is built inside the studio, with padding completely surrounding the track. 10 contestants start every show. There would be timed intervals, and after each interval, an alarm sounds. When the alarm sounds, three guys on the infield of the track (not contestants…think American Gladiators) chase down and tackle the runner in last place, eliminating him or her from the competition. Once the alarm goes off, the runner in last place can attempt to pass the runner in second-to-last, but whoever is in last by the time the tacklers get there is the one who goes down.
To avoid deliberately slow paces, you could set an arbitrary minimum of one lap every minute or two (a 10/20 minute mile) and tie the winnings to the distance completed by the winner.
With ten runners, you could quickly winnow the pack to five, and then spend the rest of the show slowly picking off the last four.
Although it would require contestants or regulars on the show to have “special talents” it would be a huge hit to combine the old “Name That Tune” concept with people who can make musical bodily noises like belching, stomach growling, farting, hand squeezing and those things you get when you cup your hand in your armpit and flap your arms up and down.
The winner of course is the one who can name the tune in the fewest number of notes. Whether the contestants or some show regulars produce the sounds would depend on the talent search results.
I remember some movie where some little kid was supposedly able to fart the Star Spangled Banner. Anybody remember that?
There was a Monopoly TV game show that ran as a summer replacement in IIRC 1991. I remember watching it but not enough of the details, other than for the big bonus round you got a certain number of dice rolls to make it all the way around the board to win the prize.
One could argue that elements of Mousetrap! could be seen in shows like American Gladiators (the Eliminator specifically) and Dog Eat Dog.
I have a semi-legitimate one- have people search for arcane facts on the internet and see who can find them the fastest.
More a reality game: REAL survivor. People can pack whatever they want in a 1 foot cube. They are placed in a remote location. (They aren’t told where but are told the general climate). No hurting other contestants. Cooperation is allowed.
The contestants must live in teh loactuon without oustide help. People may leave volutarily of if the doctor/judge panel feels they are too ill to continue.
After 100 days (pick a time frame), whoever is left splits the loot.
Brian
How about a real-llife simulation of a FPS game, where the contestants wear imitation body armor and carry laser-tag weapons? They have to move through simulated game levels that are set up like a weapons training course, and have to respond to anitromic, pop-up target and rear-screen projected enemies. If they complete the first set of levels without getting “killed”, they progress to the Deathmatch playoffs.
When Mrs. Fresh and I were stationed in Korea, we were big fans of Korean game shows. We sat down and came up with the perfect Korean game show.
A contestant has his hands tied behind his back and is lowered into a giant tank where he gets to fend off a shark while everyone else stands around and sings karaoke.