The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: Jeremy Nelson on May 04, 2025, 01:19:48 PM
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Just thinking about the economics around this Classic Concentration II pilot has me wondering- have we ever seen a show that noticeably cut its budget but still practically held its ratings or improved them?
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It’s an outlier because of public dissemination, but Carmen Sandiego made the trips rather a lot harder to win after the first season, and I’m not sure if Canada or Mexico is appreciable more expensive a destination than your chosen location in the lower 48.
Get the Picture took a hacksaw to the prize budget but I don’t have ratings info.
I don’t imagine Feud 94 with Richard Dawson or Scrabble ‘93 lit the world on fire. Hollywood Squares was likely doomed after season six though I liked the prize progression. (That said there’s something fun lost with the step down from win a match, start a car to “anyone who wins the bonus three times will drive home in…”)
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I had the same list as Travis, but most of those shows were gone after a year or so.
Maybe Goen-era Wheel? The laughable $75 space, a $5,000 top prize or a Toyota Tercel in the bonus round. But even then they only got two more years with that format.
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For CBS Wheel you should compare to theNBC version so you lose budget utility when scrapping all of the prizes.
I am less likely to give grace to the bonus puzzle where the winner was playing for quite good cars if not the luxury ones on nighttime eventually. If your grand prize is a Geo Metro and you’re on a nationally aired network, maybe you did it wrong somewhere.
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If your grand prize is a Geo Metro and you’re on a nationally aired network, maybe you did it wrong somewhere.
Alex’s car lot on Concentration offered some cars better than Metros, but the Yugos and Daihatsu Charades sure dragged down the selection.
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Although to be fair, the cars on CC always seemed to run the gamut between the generic boxes and the niceties, wouldn’t you say? Like for every Excel or Precis you might have a Jeep or Camaro.
(Speaking of which, did they ever offer the Excel and the Precis in the same bonus? Seems like that would be a way to save money by having the original and the rebadge together.)
Another show I notice seems to have trimmed back the budget as it progressed was Tic Tac Dough. I mean, sure, Barry and Enright didn’t exactly shower contestants with vast amount of money as it was, but to me it doesn’t seem like contestants were winning as much after Thom McKee went on his streak. I don’t know how much that has to with budgets but they don’t seem to be paying out as much as they had been in bonuses and such.
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Chris P—
I think (and should track down videos to confirm) that John Walsh lost to the woman who lost to Thom. He rated seventh in the all time TOC and piecing together bits and pieces I think the won something like $96,000 very quickly. Secret Category plus ties equals the chance for ballooning pots.
More red boxes adds more chaos into the game and more chance for new champions and fewer cars. Grand Question means those monster pots would be much harder to come by. To that end, wasn’t the Barry/Enright stable getting clobbered by Family Feud and then Wheel/J?
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Could we make an argument for daytime $ale? By the mid-80s they still offered nice cars, but not the Caddys and Benzes from S1. Off the top of my head Mark DeCarlo won a Celica convertible, which is nothing to sneeze at but a far cry from the $30K luxury sedan you saw in '83. I found an episode from June of '87 where a Taurus was offered, which tells me the move to more conventional everyday cars happened earlier than I thought.
It's hard to call that a downgrade, considering the cars on deck in the final couple years were still $15K+ at a time when four-figure car prices were still a thing.
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Although to be fair, the cars on CC always seemed to run the gamut between the generic boxes and the niceties, wouldn’t you say? Like for every Excel or Precis you might have a Jeep or Camaro.
(Speaking of which, did they ever offer the Excel and the Precis in the same bonus? Seems like that would be a way to save money by having the original and the rebadge together.)
I wanna say yes, but while looking for an example I found an (Eagle) Summit and (Mitsubishi) Mirage, which {Consumer Reports}"are essentiially similiar"{/CR}.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vpzpe3XPeg
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I thought of Sale too, and they certainly added cash by the bucketful, but daytime generally would have been suffering downgrades by ratings and hemorrhaging cartsige too, so for all of these very good examples, I’m wondering how heavy a load it is to hsve thst uptick.
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Excellent work by the winner in saving the best car of the lot for last, though I think that was largely chance.
Thirteen grand! My 2012 EX was $17k in today bucks.
Be cool, concentrate, pick two cars you would be happy with and at 45 seconds it should be doable.
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(Speaking of which, did they ever offer the Excel and the Precis in the same bonus? Seems like that would be a way to save money by having the original and the rebadge together.)
I once watched a week of shows where six of the eight cars started with the letter C. I don't recall the win rate, but I'm sure it helped rebalance the budget.
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(Speaking of which, did they ever offer the Excel and the Precis in the same bonus? Seems like that would be a way to save money by having the original and the rebadge together.)
I once watched a week of shows where six of the eight cars started with the letter C. I don't recall the win rate, but I'm sure it helped rebalance the budget.
That's nasty. Reminds me of those all-cash games in the original series with amounts like $69, $96, $696, etc.
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But that was a gag for a celebrity show and the total prize was rounded up. It’s not like in 1973 Concentration had a ball of yarn and a blank cassette tape as the marquee prizes.
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But that was a GSF for a celebrity show and the total prize was rounded up. It’s not like in 1973 Concentration had a ball of yarn and a blank cassette tape as the marquee prizes.
I was referring more to the challenge of remembering the matches, but point taken.
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(Speaking of which, did they ever offer the Excel and the Precis in the same bonus? Seems like that would be a way to save money by having the original and the rebadge together.)
I once watched a week of shows where six of the eight cars started with the letter C. I don't recall the win rate, but I'm sure it helped rebalance the budget.
That's nasty. Reminds me of those all-cash games in the original series with amounts like $69, $96, $696, etc.
Nice.
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(Speaking of which, did they ever offer the Excel and the Precis in the same bonus? Seems like that would be a way to save money by having the original and the rebadge together.)
Indeed LOL ;D
https://youtu.be/E38UwiKzqoI?si=4H6ccKSYuLfwc740
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No surprise he not only won the car quickly but also scooped a Thunderbird and $10,000 in the championship playoff.
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There were many instances where budgets were slashed due to factors besides actual ratings--time period downgrades first and foremost-- and there was no discernable ratings erosion that immediately resulted from them. As for ratings growth--in daytime in particular, there's rarely been a cause-and-effect that a bigger budget caused a ratings increase. Even in the case of ABC PYRAMID the show was improving once it moved to 2 PM before the jackpot was doubled.
Sure, tournaments with large payoffs occasionally spiked numbers--the JOKER's run between 77 and 80 where each ensuing tournament's grand prize was improved upon are perhaps the best example--but the belief that the bigger the payoff the bigger the audience is essentially a myth, and Lord knows I spent far too much time analyzing ratings patterns to prove that point to superiors who felt strongly about keeping budgets in line to overrule otherwise eager producers who still believed the myth,
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Would J! count when they eliminated co-champions in the event of a tie? I doubt very few (if any) fans stopped watching because of it, and it was a pretty obscure rule (and very much an anomaly for a game show) until Arthur Chu began exploiting it.
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If my fuzzy memory was right, when Tom Kennedy's Name That Tune first started (in the Kathie Lee Johnson years) if a player won their match AND the Golden Medley, they got an individual shot in the isolation booth the following show for $100,000.
Then when they went to the disco set, any player who won the match AND Golden Medley only got to play in additional Tournament of Champions elimination matches weeks later for a shot at the big prize. They never got to play against the house for the $100,000 like they did in the Kathie Lee years.
I want to say there were more years (and ratings) during the disco era than the first Kennedy version.
Was that correct?
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If my fuzzy memory was right, when Tom Kennedy's Name That Tune first started (in the Kathie Lee Johnson years) if a player won their match AND the Golden Medley, they got an individual shot in the isolation booth the following show for $100,000.
Then when they went to the disco set, any player who won the match AND Golden Medley only got to play in additional Tournament of Champions elimination matches weeks later for a shot at the big prize. They never got to play against the house for the $100,000 like they did in the Kathie Lee years.
I want to say there were more years (and ratings) during the disco era than the first Kennedy version.
Was that correct?
I think it was 4 for the OG and 3 for the disco.
I don't know if the show actually got cheaper- they were giving away a guaranteed $100,000 every nine weeks and cars in Melody Roulette- a prize previously reserved for Golden Medley winners. Shoot, I know I'd seen losing contestants walk away with $5k+ on numerous occasions. I'm not familiar with the ballpark win rate on the original Kennedy version, but it would surprise me if they were giving away $100k in 1975 once a month.
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1984 Scrabble started with 10 time champions being able to win over $50,000 but then later on they capped it to a flat $20,000 after a 5th Sprint win and $40,000 after the 10th and final Sprint win.
Also when they went to the self-contained episodes, the Scrabble Sprint round went from $1,500 to $1,000, perhaps to balance the fact that a minimum of $5,000 was up for grabs at the end of every episode due to the Bonus Sprint.
Scrabble lasted about 6 years so I dare say when they went to the self contained format it didn't seem to adversely affect anything ratings wise. The only thing that did Scrabble in was the changing of the times with fewer and fewer traditional housewives being home to watch game shows, soaps, etc. as more and more entered the working world.
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I'm not sure that the reduction in budget was a one-to-one to increasing the ratings. The show was getting better in terms of game flow, players understanding the rules and the procedures. I might argue that the move to the daily bracket format was a budget increase in terms of giving away more than a grand here or there with the bonus squares and the sprint jackpot.
Didn't seem to adversely affect isn't the same as reducing the prize fund and seeing a ratings increase.
/there are non-traditional housewives too, yes?