I’ve been sick all week, so I’m watching old game shows from the 70s and 80s. The Price is Right always consistently has the best prizes. The show is an hour, so they do sell more advertising, but it seems like their prizes are still much better than any other game show.
I put TPIR on Roku (same episodes as on Pluto, AFAICT, but fewer commercial breaks) when I can’t think of anything better to have on. Seems to me that the really good prizes are notoriously difficult to win, like at the end of Golden Road, so they tend to get reused.
The prizes were advertisements and the whole game revolved around giving the prizes a ton of screen time. They weren’t an award for winning a game like trivia but were an actual part of the game.
If you’re Mazda and in exchange for giving the show a free car to give away they’ll put your car center stage with a couple of models, have Rod Roddy read a short sales pitch about it, have an audience ohh and ahh over it, and then have contestants play a game guessing its price, it’s really cheap advertising.
That, too. All things on the show are there via the goodwill of their manufacturers. At most, IMHO, Goodson-Todman had to pay some token amount for their initial appearance.
Another possible reason: pretty much every other network game show gave away a lot of cash. On TPIR, cash was secondary, so they could spend more of the budget on prizes.
Another thing I thought of, I’ve heard stories of people turning down some of the prizes once they find out what the tax bill is. So, the car manufacturers or vacation providers get the free ad but don’t have to give away the product.
Are these the floating head picking out the loot versions? I only used to see it when I was home sick as a kid, but I heard recently that they did away with that. It was my favorite part!
(I recall a college roommate reminiscing about Bob Barker’s long skinny microphone)
Used so they didn’t have to waste time mic’ing up contestants when they were called up on stage. A simple and brilliant solution for a real problem.
That style of microphone was developed by his fellow game show host, Gene Rayburn.
Which makes sense since the 2 Match Game bonus rounds were done in the middle of the stage set and no microphones
supposedly bob barker said that only 20 percent of the winners took the prizes and that they were mostly midwesterners because CA and NY had exorbitant taxes on winning actual items but not on cash
that was wheel of fortune and that ended when the daytime show did …
Wow - this is absolutely the weirdest timing ever.
Just yesterday I watched this:
ETA: unfixably(?) screwed up link - you’ll have to scroll to the beginning.
This was from 1977, when the show was live. The blue rectangle was added later, although YT has an uncensored version available.
This usually applies to trips, as (a) the person who won the trip has to be one of the persons that takes it (so it can’t be sold, or even given to a relative), which means trying to get time off from work, (b) it has to be within one year, although last season there was something in the credits that said this is extended to two years if COVID-19 policies prevent the travel, and (c) the winner has to pay tax on the full retail price.
It’s not really a problem with a car, as they can sell the car, even if it’s to the dealer that offered it in the first place.
For a real hoot, watch the prizes on the original Price Is Right from the early 1960s with Bill Cullen. The episodes I’ve seen had Cadillac convertibles (not cheap econo-cars), loads of full-length fur coats, lots of furniture sets and appliances, and fancy jewelry. The best prize that I saw was a trip to Europe on a passenger ship (the Normandy perhaps); it was like three weeks long. The format is completely different than The New Price Is Right, with contestants bidding on prizes, trying to get closest to the actual price. I think it was really confusing and not much fun to watch
Where have you been watching these? GSN only plays reruns of Match Game.
YouTube has just about everything you could want.
oh. I thought you had found a TV channel that was showing it.
actually, Fremantle media bought the old Goodson/Toddman library and started a network “buzzr” which has all the old shows GSN used to have (and why GSN was the family feud channel for a few years)
MY cable channel lineup has them next to each other … I wish someone would bring scrabble back on tv new or old …
I wonder where the rights to Scrabble lie? I don’t think I’ve seen it at all, except for VHS uploads to YouTube, since the 1980s