Hyperactive Contestants

[chris319]

Watching Price just now, a contestant called on down took her sweet slow time--dancing, stopping, dancing more, stopping, a high five or two, then what appeared to be a brief chat with an audience member, before finishing her shimmy/dance to Contestant's Row.  34 seconds later, Drew tosses to George for the next IUFB.

This may not be what contestant coordinators on these shows want to hear, but as I tell my students, most of whom are on one of the best HS football teams in Ohio (truth, not biased exaggeration), pretend like you have done this before.  Don't be a spectacle.

Having attended multiple Price tapings recently, the producers encourage said wacky come on downs.

One wonders if this will change under John Quinn.

I doubt it will.

Why wasn't the 34-second COD edited out?

[Unrealtor]

This season's new pre-taping routine, a mix of video and chat from the contestant producers, specifically encourages people to "do whatever you want" as opposed to last year's video with George Gray sarcastically requesting decorum followed by a montage of particularly energetic CODs.

How much time they let people have for CODs depends on how much time they have for the rest of the show. I was at a show last season that had a very long one that was edited down to about 10-15 seconds. On some episodes it kind of feels like people reach the aisle and then suddenly appear in Contestants' Row.

[Nick]

What do we mean by hyperactive?  A show like The New Treasure Hunt doesn't work without hyperactive contestants, but those contestants' hyperactivity was usually genuine.

In the banner year of The Price Is Right that was 1978, there were many hyperactive women contestants who went hysterical the moment their names were called but still could hold it together enough to place a One Bid in two seconds and smart enough to know 45 packages of Certs would win you the Grocery Game instantly.  I like that kind of genuine hyperactivity.  I don't want it in all Price contestants, but in some it can be entertaining.  Now that they're handing out the soda pop and snacks before the tapings to get peoples' sugar levels up and encouraging them to be a wacky as can be, it's not genuine (or entertaining).

Coming on nearly 70 years after the quiz show scandals, I think we're circling back to the same problem: Producers want to engineer the excitement.  Since the games cannot be fixed, they're trying to fix the contestants to produce a certain type of personality.  If it doesn't show in the first take, then do all the pick-ups you want; and this is problematic.  I would argue a significant element in what makes a game show great is the same way watching any competition can be engaging: the human element.  If it's fake, then it's not enjoyable.

I'm sure there are several here who will quickly point out that, fake excitement or not, the product is selling and the people continue to consume it.  I'm not about to say that's a good thing.

[Bob Zager]

How about Jim Tracy, the contestant in the pilot for Bill Cullen's short-lived Blankety Blanks?  He can also be seen (back to camera) in the original $25,000 Pyramid sales-pitch film.  He played all five days of that week with June Lockhart and William Shatner.  Though he never won in the Winner's Circle, perhaps he accrued more than $1,000 for the number of games he advanced to WC.