The Game Show Forum > The Big Board

A Million Dollars?

<< < (2/2)

uncamark:
[quote name=\'tommycharles\' date=\'Sep 24 2003, 11:11 AM\']ObGameshow: did the shows of the fifties (the honest ones) ever give annuities?[/quote]
The contestants on \"You Bet Your Life\" received their funds in lump sums, while \"College Bowl\" winners had the money donated by GE to their college scholarship fund.  :)

In other words, there was no such thing as an honest big-money quiz show, as far as we know.  It's been well-documented that \"$64,000 Question\" did contestant interviewing so thorough and tailored the questions to the contestants' strengths (or weaknesses, if need be) that when Charlie Revson (the guy who ran Revlon) wanted someone gone, they were gone, unless they were Dr. Joyce Brothers.  And we all know about \"Twenty-One.\"  \"Name That Tune\" in its George DeWitt days (sorry, Tammy) seemed to be rigged up the yingyang (and when I watched the first John Glenn/Eddie Hodges show at the MTR last year there were several things that seemed not exactly right).  It's safe to say that the imitations of \"$64,000 Question\" all engaged in a certain amount of manipulation.

That said, all of the funds were lump sum.  Unless someone else knows of something sooner, the first annuity on a game show was \"$100,000 Name That Tune\"  (\"One of our players tonight could win $100,000--that's $10,000 a year for the next ten years\"--and didn't Tommy Oliver and the boys seem to be playing a little louder whenever Tom Kennedy said that second part?).

dickoon:
As an aside, a rather Treasure Hunt-esque (that's Edwards Treasure Hunt rather than Kendall-Rice/Murnaghan-Perry Treasure Hunt) game show in the Netherlands has offered a jackpot of €5,000,000 by now, though I'm not sure whether it has yet been claimed. Accordingly, it seems reasonable that the next reasonably-winnable quantum leap in prizes will either be to five or ten million dollar/Euro/pound size prizes. I don't think Super Greed's four million dollars counts as reasonably-winnable. Usual caveats apply about how an interesting 10,000 dollar win would probably be more entertaining than a dull 10,000,000 dollar one.

Please include my standard rant about how the Turkish WWTBAM? really ought to have given away one treeeeeeeeelion lira instead of a mere five hundred billion, just for the sheer mathematical joy and hell of it.

WWTBAM? is over five years old now, at least here in the UK. Crikey, that's a long time.

Posting in the manner of the adverb derived from the adjective \"pernickety\",
Chris

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page