The Game Show Forum > The Big Board
Game shows a guilty pleasure?
Chelsea Thrasher:
Ah, an intelligent discussion about wrestling and DVD's, in a thread about GS' being a guilty pleasure...
Gotta love it.
I'm not ashamed to say I'm a game show fan. Also, I'm not as proud of it as I was back when things were better, but, yeah, I'm a wrestling fan (still).
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They really need to clean house at WWE. Fire about 50% of the wrestlers (Keep just enough big names to keep the promotion running until they establish the new guys, then can them too), and bring in new talent. The Ric Flairs and the like can't keep wrestling into their 100s, as much as WWE brass would like them too. Gotta start working on new talent.
And, they gotta get new writers. The new creative angles plain out suck, and the only ideas that are REMOTELY good, are recycled from years ago.
It seems like that around 2 different points, the quality of the work took nosedives, and have never recovered from them. The first dive happened when WCW was bought by Vince & Co. Without the competition (not that WCW was any comp for the WWF/WWE at the time anyway, but still), the main brass let the quality on Raw slide BIGTIME, and the quality on Smackdown go down quite a bit too. But, the shows still had their highpoint. But then, right around the time that the Panda (World Wildlife Fund) won the rights to the WWF name, things seemed to suddenly drop in quality again. And the brand has never fully recovered. About once every 2 mos, there will be a bright spot, but it's mostly dismal. Thank the Lord for VHS' and DVD's with old matches on them....
TheInquisitiveOne:
Hello there. Disgruntled WWE fan here. I saw tonight's episode of RAW, and it sucked. Before I get back to topic, I am going to pitch a bitch about this.
If you had read my second post at the \"GSN: R.I.P.\" post, you know that I am anti-HHH. His backstage politics are clearly ruining the Monday Night RAW experience as well as his boring mic segments and crappy wrestling performances. What is also bad are the numerous instances of \"Crash TV\" segments present on both shows. I have no shame in saying that I am a WWE fan and I am openly talking about wrestling to anyone who listens. There absolutely is no shame in my game.
The same goes with game shows. I always talk to my friends and family about game shows. It is my unbridled love of game shows that drive me to be a full-fleged game show host. That is also why I do game shows on campus. From Match Game and Family Feud to (Super) Password (Plus) and The $250 Pyramid, this shows my dedication and devotion to reviving a product that is shockingly and unfortunately frowned upon by today's masses. Stereotyped? Hardly. In fact, I think that we are in a higher regard than those who take delight in seeing the most negative form in human television ever invented -- reality television. I also find it nice to be in a board where we have past contestants, those who worked on a show as an intern, a kick-ass announcer whom I hope to work with when I enter the business, and those with strong opinions that support or refute my arguments. We are the core of those who have some level of adoration of game shows, whether they reveal it or not.
For those of you who have friends that lambaste the institution that is the game show, give them this fact: before there was any other form of television, there was the game show. Think about it.
The Inquisitive One
(By the way, if I get one of my shows taped, I'll send you a copy. :) )
parliboy:
Lemme put things this way:
I have never felt embarrassed for being a game show fan. Absolutely never. After all, I came into elementary school already subtraction, addition, and multiplication from years of WoF. And when a horrible dating or reality show is on, I can easily say, \"That's just a dating show\", or \"That's just a reality show\".
I have been embrarrassed with wrestling. The first time I watched it at one friend's house happened to be in December of '97 (NWO takeover night). Try explaining to people who hold you in otherwise high regard how watching a half hour of intimidating teamsters and kicking over giant letters is supposed to be entertainment. I can't even say \"it's sports entertainment\" because, well, wrestling's in your name, dammit!
whampyl03:
Ehh, Guys... What exactly does all of this wrestling stuff have to do with Game Shows being a guilty pleasure?
DjohnsonCB:
It all depends on the show. I was one of those lucky kids who remembers days or summers off from school watching Hugh Downs on \"Concentration\", Bud Collyer on \"To Tell The Truth\", Art Fleming on \"Jeopardy!\" and Bill Cullen on \"Eye Guess\", just to name a few. There was certainly nothing wrong with any of *those* games. The \"guilty pleasure\" problem probably didn't come into its own until Chuck Barris unleashed his first wave of shows. They had their fans, but after a couple of viewings they bored me. Just talking heads and mounting scores--no boards or other impressive hardware.
Later, prime-time sitcoms like \"The Mary Tyler Moore Show\" actually tried to make viewers question their devotion to games by making them punchlines for jokes; I'm sure it must have had something to do with Barris' shows gaining in popularity while an intellectually-stimulating game like \"J!\" was dumped in the middle of the '70s.
Then came the announcement that NBC was going to unleash David Letterman on daytime audiences at the expense of three games including the classic HS. Critics cheered and had a field day, but--despite the fact that I came to love his late-night work for NBC--I could only cringe at their barbs and I only watched his morning show occasionally and was actually pleased at the time to see the experiment backfire.
Regardless of how viewers and critics felt about games from the '60s to the '80s, I'm sure even the most cynical of them thought they looked pretty good next to what stations were giving us in daytime during the '90s. I feel sorry for today's kids who have nothing but TPIR to look forward to during summer vacations. Maybe its all they need these days, as they're probably being rushed off to soccer practice or public pools the rest of the day.
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