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Have you seen...
cmjb13:
[quote name=\'zachhoran\' date=\'Nov 18 2003, 09:07 AM\'] [quote name=\'cmjb13\' date=\'Nov 18 2003, 07:28 AM\']
--- Quote ---Ray Combs
--- End quote ---
Was he just doing promos? [/quote]
He and RIchard Dawson hosted a Family Feud salute on Thanksgiving 1995(repeated on Thanksgiving 1996 IIRC). Dawson's segments from that 1995 marathon were shown on THanksgiving 2000 as part of a Feud marathon. [/quote]
I take it they weren't sitting together?
Matt Ottinger:
[quote name=\'cmjb13\' date=\'Nov 18 2003, 08:28 AM\']
--- Quote ---Ray Combs
--- End quote ---
Was he just doing promos? [/quote]
Pretty much, yeah. In fact, of the three people Joe mentioned, only Peter Tomarken was "very involved" in those early days. Gene Wood showed up for interviews and special segments occasionally (and did some announcing for them, of course). I honestly don't remember Combs doing any more than the same sorts of promos they got just about every game show personality to do, but he may have made some other contribution I don't recall.
Basically, their three original on-air personalities were Tomarken, Laura Chambers and Steve Day. Tomarken hosted the phone-in games they played in between classics in prime time, and Chambers & Day handled the daytime hours.
Matt Ottinger:
[quote name=\'combsisthebest\' date=\'Nov 18 2003, 03:44 AM\'] Sry. Let me rephrase that. What were the plusses and minuses of the old GSN? [/quote]
The biggest plus was its very existence. For the first time, you could watch dozens of different classic shows going all the way back to the early fifties and into the seventies and eighties. Up until that time, a collector might have owned a couple dozen episodes from Shokus, and a few grainy seventies shows if you happened to know someone who knew Bob Boden. ATGS was just starting to hit its stride about that time too, so it was a very exciting time to be a classic game show fan.
The biggest minus, by far, was the original content. Those call-in games like "Decades" and "Race for the Numbers" had no imagination to them at all, and slightly more ambitions efforts like "Trivia Track" were just laughably bad. Frankly, all the original programming on GSN the first couple of years had a claustrophobic, low-budget feel to it. (Their studio was just about the size of a decent walk-in closet.)
The station was extremely hard to get. Most of us had to pick it up on the BIG satellite receivers. I always had the feeling that there were maybe a few dozen of us watching at any given moment. And believe me, it wasn't hard to get through on their call-in programs! One of my favorite moments was getting to talk to William Windom, one of my favorite character actors (and someone with only a tenuous connection to game shows).
zachhoran:
[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'Nov 18 2003, 09:52 AM\'] One of my favorite moments was getting to talk to William Windom, one of my favorite character actors (and someone with only a tenuous connection to game shows). [/quote]
William Windom? Man that channel always gets happening stars on it.
He did do a week of SUper Password in 1986.
Matt Ottinger:
[quote name=\'zachhoran\' date=\'Nov 18 2003, 10:55 AM\'] He did do a week of Super Password in 1986. [/quote]
And believe me, they showed a clip from it. But WE got to talk about his interest in James Thurber, and the fact that I got to see him perform his one-man show when he toured college campuses back in the early eighties.
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