I was gonna post this in MPSIMS, but the more I thought about it, the more of a rant it became in my mind.
I’ve been watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire for a couple weeks now and I cannot believe how incredibly fucking stupid some of these people are. I mean, for crying out loud, one guy needed to poll the audience to find out what color is made by mixing blue and yellow! How the fuck did these people make it to the show?
I expect stupid people on some shows, like Wheel of Fortune, but not on a quiz show! The folks on Jeopardy could eat these people alive!
I gotta say, though, yesterday was hilarious when one guy got the $100 question wrong. Yes, that’s right, the easiest question in the game, and he got it wrong. I don’t think I’d ever be able to show my face at work again if I were in his shoes. I’d have to enter the “stupid gameshow participant” protection plan and move to another state with a new name.
During the August run, some guy didn’t know the legend of Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants. He chose llamas!
If that $1,000,000 winner this week didn’t guess the correct distance from the Earth to the Sun, I was going to drive to New York and strangle him. He took a college course in astronomy, fer cryin’ out loud!
I qualified in the summer and fall for the very first phone quiz. However, I never got any callbacks.
Judges 14:9 - So [Samson] scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion.
Do they only open the phone lines at certain times? I know I saw them give the number once, but I wasn’t paying very close attention and I haven’t seen it since.
I have qualified four times by passing the first phone test.
Haven’t gotten a callback once.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the phone test is dependant more on speed than on difficulty. The first question is often, “Put the following Big Ten Universities in alphabetical order:” It sounds at first blush like a challenge, but after a second you realzie the ‘Big Ten’ aspect is meaningless; you merely have to put four words in alphabetical order in ten seconds.
Getting chosen for the show is almost completely luck. With that as a backdrop, is it any wonder that there’s an oversupply of …er… uninformed people?
Do you really think they want people like YOU on this show, people who would actually know the answers? I mean, how entertaining would THAT be?
I think they deliberately choose idiots because 1) they take longer to answer and create more suspense, and 2) they don’t all win the million dollars because they don’t know that blue and yellow make green, or that the game’s title is Duck, Duck, Goose.
Plus, the millions of idiot viewers identify with them better than they identify with people on, say, Jeopardy, or Win Ben Stein’s Money.
I say, you don’t like this show? Turn off your TV, watch something else.
I’d have to agree there eden, the point is that they’re stupid. Don’t think of it as a quiz show, think of it as “America’s Dumbest Game-Show Participants” or something along those lines.
When thats how you’re viewing it, it becomes much much more interesting. (Just get a couple of friends, some beer, and yell at those losers until you go hoarse. It’s like Jerry Springer, just with less cursing and more money)
What the hell are you guys talking about? Blue and yellow make white.
I think ABC likes it when people at home go “I can’t believe they didn’t know that!!! What goddamn morons! I could do better than that.” You know, same as you say when watching Wheel of Morons. People seem to have a fascination with idiots who get on tv.
They also like not losin’ a million clams.
I heard that on the show Greed, the “Dot Com Team” didn’t get the question “What does the ‘com’ in .com stand for?” right.
Ben Steins show is reatively challenging as is jeopardy. The measily 5000 bucks makes it not worth it though. I mean cmon 5000 dollars? It costs 1/4 of that to get there, then the taxes and all, shit its worthless. You might as well say I kicked Ben Steins ass and leave, its about the same.
Jeopardy … Ahhh now theres a real show. I get about 90% or more of the questions right while I scream at the TV about those who didnt. One day I will get on there and then I’ll be able to retire RICH.
I never watch television, so I hadn’t even heard of “Who wants to be a millionaire” until a browsed through a thread on this MB.
I thought to myself “There is no way this is a real gameshow with such easy questions and Regis as a host.”
I hooked the old dusty rabbit ears up to the TV and caught an episode. I was shocked. I was terrified. I am not the same now. How could ANYONE believe that the show is real?
First of all, it’s Regis, the Smiling Lord of the Mundane Housewives and Downtrodden Unemployed!!
The audience (which consists of people so exceedingly retarded they will make a special trip out to some distant studio and stand in line for hours for the sole purpose of meeting Regis) is smarted than the contestants. When did this happen?
Lifelines???
The Melodrama of it all. The planetarium lighting effects, futuristic chairs, appalling initial selection questions, cheezy pre-filled out checks of large amounts of money displayed to the cameras when an answer is correct, that inane “Is that you’re final answer” crap.
Seriously, I don’t consider myself exceptionally stupid, but I had never heard of “Duck, Duck, Goose” until it became a byword for how stupid the contestants on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? are. I gather from the context that it’s some sort of kid’s game. We sure never played it in my neighborhood; why does that make us stupid?
I tried out for Jeopardy! once, and made it to the second round of entry questioning. They tell you that they intentionally make those questions harder at that stage, so they don’t get some absolute shit-for-brains on the show. How entertaining could it be to see some bottom-feeding mouth-breather up there missing a bunch of questions while he stands theree drooling on his buzzer?
Apparently, the reverse is true for Millionaire. I don’t know if it’s pressure or what, but those guys hem and haw for what seems like an eternity, and still miss the fucking question! Christ in a feather boa, dumbass, the Answer Bird isn’t gonna fly in a shit the answer in you ear! Either use a lifeline or take your damn money. Stop stalling! Fuck!
He weathered a firestorm of agony and did not break.
And while Yori raged against his unbending
courage, we took Kyuden Hiruma back.
His loss is great, but so is the gift his suffering brought.
-Yakamo’s Funeral
Yeah, the blue and yellow thing is almost a trick question. If you are working in RGB, then blue and yellow are opposites.
I remember my driver’s exam when I was 16, and there was a multiple choice question about nighttime driving safety. I ended up picking something like, “Dim your lights when you approach sharp curves”. I was thinking about blinding drivers coming the other way.
It turned out that the answer they wanted was, “Don’t outrun your headlights.” Of course, it was a futile effort to explain to the officer that it is quite impossible, in this universe anyway, to outrun your headlights. Yeah, what they meant was, don’t go so fast that your stopping distance is greater than the effective range of illumination, but that’s not what they said.
Blue and yellow are opposites in RGB? How? I think yellow must be a secondary color, formed by red/green or green/blue or blue/red. Blue and orange are opposites in the classic color wheel.
Yellow is formed by equal parts red and green in RGB. I get it now, Lib–yellow and blue will give you white, so they are opposites. I bow before your superior knowledge. Sheesh, I’m a web designer, I should’ve figured that out. But I prefer paint to pixels.
In the movie Quiz Show, one of the characters brings up the point that even if they stop rigging game shows, all they have to do is make the questions easier because people were watching the money. That may be the most prophetic statement in the history of television.
Also, the law student yesterday said that they didn’t teach math in law school. Well, did he sleep through math class, where the definition of an integer was taught in elementary school and constantly referred to afterwards? At least he didn’t use a lifeline.
He took a college course in astronomy, fer cryin’ out loud!
