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Prizes appreciating in value

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MikeK:
Any good art should have gone up in value, whether it's the Norman Rockwells I have seen on the late 70s High Rollers to the Luggature on Wheel of Fortune in the late 90s. (Hi Ryan!)

Pinball machines have gone up a crazy amount of money the last 10 years.  Good ones from the 80s and 90s would have a nice ROI, though the only shows that might offer them are Price and Wheel.

Adam Nedeff:
This is a really specific example. From Bill Cullen-era Price...There was a contestant in 1960 named Mr. Jones; if you watched the Buzzr reruns diligently, you might remember him as the one who swore and fell out of his chair during one game. I had the chance to meet him a few years before he passed away and it turned out he had some really good fortune with the specific prizes he won. There was a set of furniture that's now prized among collectors, and a set of stemware from a manufacturer so popular that collectors will apparently settle for just buying one glass at a time instead of buying complete sets. Well, he still had his complete set. He had his prizes appraised at some point in the early 2000s and got such enthusiastic feedback from the appraiser that he immediately worked out a deal with an auction house. His cut ended up coming to something like $200,000.

BTW, Mr. Jones had a nice post-retirement life as a film extra and bragged that he had albums full of photos he had taken of the sets he had been on.

"They let you take photos on the set?"
"No, but I'm an old man and I don't know better, okay? If somebody tries to stop me, I act all agitated and scared and they back off, and I go back to taking photos."

SamJ93:
The market for old-school offroad vehicles today is, to sum it up, utterly bonkers. TPiR offered souped-up Toyota pickup trucks and Jeep CJs fairly often in the '80s...a contestant who held on to one of those and kept it in good condition would certainly make a mint.

BrandonFG:

--- Quote from: SamJ93 on July 10, 2025, 09:46:46 AM ---The market for old-school offroad vehicles today is, to sum it up, utterly bonkers. TPiR offered souped-up Toyota pickup trucks and Jeep CJs fairly often in the '80s...a contestant who held on to one of those and kept it in good condition would certainly make a mint.

--- End quote ---
Honestly, everyday cars too. I’ve window-shopped on Facebook and Bring A Trailer, and see early-80s JDM cars going for 15-20K easily. And I don’t just mean a Supra or Prelude. Even an old Civic or Accord hatchback is selling for five-figures.

A lot of it is because the used car market went haywire during the pandemic but someone who won, say, a 626 coupe on LMaD could also make a decent buck.

Jeremy Nelson:
I don't claim to know how they intimately work, but the annuity that Wheel of Fortune offered in the 80s and 90s seems like it fits the category.

Obviously everyone comes from a different money situation, but I'm surprised that more people didn't play for it during the pick-your-prize bonus round era, as I remember it being worth at least twice the $25k on a couple occasions.

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