The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: MSTieScott on August 22, 2020, 01:34:24 AM
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After watching lots of Cullen Blockbusters and thinking, "Didn't those letters just recently show up in that same configuration?" I began to track the patterns of letters used in the main game. And sure enough, the show uses the same boards over and over again.
It wasn't until this most recent Buzzr run, when the boards started playing in alphabetical order, that I finally noticed that they can easily be identified by the letter in the upper left-hand corner. Exactly one board has an A in that position, exactly one board has a B in that position, et cetera. There appear to be twenty boards, A through T... although in the episodes Buzzr has aired over the past few months, board B has only shown up during the opening and board R hasn't appeared at all.
I remember years ago seeing a clip online where they played a couple of X questions, but I can't find it anymore and Buzzr hasn't aired that episode. Does anybody know what the board layout was when there was an X hexagon? I'm curious whether that was its own special board (board R?) or whether they took an existing board and replaced a different letter with an X.
While I'm here overanalyzing a game show from nearly 40 years ago, here are other statistics about the 19 boards I've seen:
• The boards do not all appear at the same frequency. For whatever reason, board M shows up the most.
• The letters Q, Y, and Z appear on one board apiece.
• U is excluded from six boards. J and V are each excluded from eight boards. K is excluded from nine boards.
• Of the non-super-rare letters, I is excluded the most, being absent from ten boards. When it does appear, it's always along the perimeter, and often in one of the "squished" hexagons that are less likely to be called. As a result, it's surprisingly rare to hear an I question on this show.
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The board when they played with the X had J in the upper left, seen at the 13 minute mark in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fr5LNLnRyQ&t=13m
(https://i.imgur.com/uU6qFZj.png)
After digging around a bit, I found the X is replacing a U in an otherwise normal J board.
(https://i.imgur.com/ym9KlCG.png)
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The Bill Rafferty hosted revival used the same letter arrangements for the 20-hex grid boards.
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Would it be likely that, because of these set configurations, they also had premade question card trays that would contain those same configurations, making it as simple as removing the entire question tray and replacing it with the next with each game?
JakeT
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It makes sense to me that they would have organized things in the question stacking such that a particularly easy set didn't make a direct path across the board in either direction, but it never occurred to me that the letters were in a set pattern.
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Would it be likely that, because of these set configurations, they also had premade question card trays that would contain those same configurations, making it as simple as removing the entire question tray and replacing it with the next with each game?
JakeT
I'm fairly certain the main game questions are arranged alphabetically. The T is not next to the S on this board, and yet Bill pulls a T instead of an S.
https://youtu.be/rtv014nqblQ
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After digging around a bit, I found the X is replacing a U in an otherwise normal J board.
(sees Buzzr bug in screen grab)
I guess I should amend my statement to "Buzzr hasn't aired that episode in the past several months." Thanks for finding that.
(I should also correct myself that board M has been showing up the most in the past 120 episodes. I don't know the stats for the series as a whole.)
The Bill Rafferty hosted revival used the same letter arrangements for the 20-hex grid boards.
It did, although after a while, they altered board A.
(https://i.imgur.com/StMKNl6.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/8rBBWIj.png)
(https://i.imgur.com/Hjq4mEg.png)
(Placing F, C, and K on top of one another in a column? Really?)
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Would it be likely that, because of these set configurations, they also had premade question card trays that would contain those same configurations, making it as simple as removing the entire question tray and replacing it with the next with each game?
JakeT
No, this one I can answer for sure from interviewing Robert Sherman. Bill just had a single loaded tray with questions for every letter of the alphabet. Bonus info that you didn't ask for: the staff's greatest concern was that Bill would run out of questions for a given letter for each taping, so they deliberately overprepared. Excluding Gold Run material, Bill had 900 questions in front of him at the start of each five-episode taping session.
I'm starting to wonder if using a finite set of letter grids was a way of not having to deal with potentially embarrassing words showing up.
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This is all great. Thank you for putting it all together
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Excluding Gold Run material, Bill had 900 questions in front of him at the start of each five-episode taping session.
Nine-hundred questions is a lot; but the home game version (Milton Bradley--1982), used 20 letters, and 50 questions in each letter, for a total of 1,000 questions in the home game!
While on the subject of Blockbusters, I've often wondered why on the original series, the three uppermost hexagons and the two lowermost ones were cropped!
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Seriously, this is the kind of quality content I have come to expect from this board. Very interesting stuff. Thank you all for contributing.
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It's funny because a few days before this thread was created, I was reading about the UK Blockbusters how they only had about 15 different boards they used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusters_(British_game_show)#Background) and I was thinking along the lines of "those el cheapo British game shows..." Then this thread comes up and we only had them beat by 5 boards. :)
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I've often wondered why on the original series, the three uppermost hexagons and the two lowermost ones were cropped!
Because the red end zones flew in and out when converting the board for the Gold Run, and mechanical elements are imperfect.
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The red parts were stationary. The white parts gave way to the gold bars underneath, and the (later) $5,000 sign tilted down from the top of the board.
-Jason
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Would it be likely that, because of these set configurations, they also had premade question card trays that would contain those same configurations, making it as simple as removing the entire question tray and replacing it with the next with each game?
JakeT
I'm fairly certain the main game questions are arranged alphabetically.
I guess that would make more sense after all...would be annoying for Bill to have to look at the board to see which cubby to pull the question from...
JakeT
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Are you all on covid quarantine or something?
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I don't remember noticing that there were a finite number of boards, but, back in the early 2000s when I was working on watching the entire run of Blockbusters on GSN, I remember noticing that "LARVE" regularly showed up from left to right across the board.
It also slightly annoyed the OCD side of me that the hexagons did not all have exactly the same symmetry.
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BUMP!
Straight from the producing horse's mouth:
Because they had all of the letters loaded into the slide projectors for each hexagon, they could have theoretically had any configuration they wanted. When it got close to time to start production, here were the problems that occurred to them with doing this--
Somebody would have to sit down during the week leading up to the next taping and go "Okay, we'll put the R next to the B for game 1...no, wait, we used the R next to the B in the configuration for the previous match...let's see, what letter haven't I used yet on this board?" And that seemed like a lot of work for the thankless task of coming up with a unique jumble of 20 letters for each game of each match.
Once the shows are taping and it's time to start a new game, the person in charge of the game board would have to pull out a paper guide, check which configuration they're using, and then painstakingly go from hexagon to hexagon..."Let's see, #1 has to be on F, #2 has to be on W..." and then double-check the whole thing and make sure no letters are up there twice and that it matched the guide that had been arranged for them. So they were anticipating about a 5-to-10-minute stopdown before each game to do that.
It was much easier to come up with 20 jumbles of letters and arrange the letters in each slide projector to correspond to those jumbles, because with the remote control system they had for the slide projectors, they could say "Set all the slide projectors to position #7 for game 1, then set them to position #18 for game two, and then..." It took one press of a button to do that, and no stopdown would be needed.
And that's the story of why the Blockbusters board used finite configurations.
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This might very well be my favorite thread ever. Thanks to Adam for adding to it, and reminding me of it.
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Ditto! This has ben informative and elucidating.
My question--how much does the cost of slides contribute to the (above/below the) line cost of running a game show. Sure it isn't scenic flats like you'd see on Deal, Price or Sale of the Century, but if you have to take a picture of a group of letters and for some of the four and five letter groupings you might never use them again. At least Joker's Wild had a rotation of about fifty categories so you just reach into the card catalog drawer and fish them out, and you have the same forty slides for the end game every day.
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On some episodes, I would notice that sometimes the top row would have L A R V E and I would think "Are they spelling out 'larvae' or something. I did not pay attention to the rest of the board if it's the same board pattern.
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How many slides could a Carousel projector tray hold? That minus one is the theoretical maximum number of patterns they could have, with one position being an open gate.
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How many slides could a Carousel projector tray hold? That minus one is the theoretical maximum number of patterns they could have, with one position being an open gate.
If we're talking about standard consumer-grade Kodak ones, it looks like 80 was the standard, but there was also a 140-slide carousel.