The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => Game Show Channels & Networks => Topic started by: Casey Buck on July 30, 2025, 03:22:55 PM
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Starting September 8, GameTV in Canada will be adding 3 Bill Cullen shows to their lineup:
3:30 PM - Chain Reaction
4:00 PM - Pass the Buck
4:30 PM - Hot Potato
Here's a screenshot from their newsletter:
(https://i.imgur.com/WN0kFuN.png)
I believe this will be the first time Chain Reaction and Pass the Buck have aired on TV since GSN's "Dark Period" nearly 30 years ago.
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Holy sh....well, the universe grants me an early birthday present ;D
Clear indication that Sony's really prioritized the catalogue's digitization and shopping them around.
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Wow - that's surprising news!
If they air every episode of all three shows, we'll be seeing more episodes that GSN never got to when they ran them. I believe the only one they completed was Hot Potato; they only aired partial runs of the others.
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The newsletter included links to Vimeo clips of each show as well. I'm not sure where in the runs the Hot Potato and Pass the Buck clips are from, but the Chain Reaction one is from fairly close to the end-- the week of June 2-6, 1980 with Gina Hecht, Alison Arngrim, Daryl Anderson and Nipsey Russell, which I believe is well past where GSN got.
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The newsletter included links to Vimeo clips of each show as well. I'm not sure where in the runs the Hot Potato and Pass the Buck clips are from, but the Chain Reaction one is from fairly close to the end-- the week of June 2-6, 1980 with Gina Hecht, Alison Arngrim, Daryl Anderson and Nipsey Russell, which I believe is well past where GSN got.
The Hot Potato clip is from April 3, 1984, about two weeks away from the end of the civilian run, and whoever it was at Game TV who chose the clip made a WEIRD choice, because that episode has a question about game show hosts.
Pass the Buck is episode #26, from May 5, 1978; that's roughly where GSN left off, wasn't it?
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I'm stoked! Chain Reaction and Pass the Buck are a couple of my guilty pleasures.
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Pass the Buck is episode #26, from May 5, 1978; that's roughly where GSN left off, wasn't it?
Yesh, they aired up to #24.
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Schedule's updated with the first 3 weeks of Bill's shows.
1st 3 weeks of Hot Potato and Pass the Buck are whole, but looks like a bunch of Chain Reaction episodes are going to be skipped after ep 10.
Week 3 will air eps. 13, 22, 23, 24, & 27. Perhaps they screened them and picked the 60-ish best ones, in keeping with their pattern of licensing episodes in batches of ~60.
Couple of other schedule notes:
- "Fresh" episodes of Bumper Stumpers from the latter part of S1, plus the beginning of S2
- Split Second returns for an hour at 10AM
- Tic Tac Dough gets to C-63 before cycling back to C-1
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And I got a message in my emails this morning saying I'd won the viewer email contest relating to the message as seen at the start of the thread. Looks like a couple of T-shirts, a tote bag, and a wooden yo-yo, each branded with the Game TV "Retro Vault" imagery. Will update with pictures when it arrives.
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Schedule's updated with the first 3 weeks of Bill's shows.
1st 3 weeks of Hot Potato and Pass the Buck are whole, but looks like a bunch of Chain Reaction episodes are going to be skipped after ep 10.
Week 3 will air eps. 13, 22, 23, 24, & 27. Perhaps they screened them and picked the 60-ish best ones, in keeping with their pattern of licensing episodes in batches of ~60.
Couple of other schedule notes:
- "Fresh" episodes of Bumper Stumpers from the latter part of S1, plus the beginning of S2
- Split Second returns for an hour at 10AM
- Tic Tac Dough gets to C-63 before cycling back to C-1
Even more notes:
- Carey TPIR moves on to season 50
- "Fresh" episodes of Bergeron Squares resume after a few days of repeats at the end of August
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire season 11 (Meredith's last) airs on Saturdays starting 9/20
- Wipeout season 2 (the big balls variety) airs on Sundays starting 9/21
- Survivor: Pearl Island airs on Saturdays and Sundays starting 9/27
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Schedule's updated with the first 3 weeks of Bill's shows.
1st 3 weeks of Hot Potato and Pass the Buck are whole, but looks like a bunch of Chain Reaction episodes are going to be skipped after ep 10.
Week 3 will air eps. 13, 22, 23, 24, & 27. Perhaps they screened them and picked the 60-ish best ones, in keeping with their pattern of licensing episodes in batches of ~60.
Couple of other schedule notes:
- "Fresh" episodes of Bumper Stumpers from the latter part of S1, plus the beginning of S2
- Split Second returns for an hour at 10AM
- Tic Tac Dough gets to C-63 before cycling back to C-1
Even more notes:
- Carey TPIR moves on to season 50
- "Fresh" episodes of Bergeron Squares resume after a few days of repeats at the end of August
- Who Wants to Be a Millionaire season 11 (Meredith's last) airs on Saturdays starting 9/20
- Wipeout season 2 (the big balls variety) airs on Sundays starting 9/21
- Survivor: Pearl Island airs on Saturdays and Sundays starting 9/27
Also, the current version of Family Feud moves to Season 23(2021-taped). The first couple of months of Season 22 were air delayed and were 2019-taped. The pre-pandemic element includes the Face-Off lectern being taken off the set for Fast Money.
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Schedule's updated with the first 3 weeks of Bill's shows.
1st 3 weeks of Hot Potato and Pass the Buck are whole, but looks like a bunch of Chain Reaction episodes are going to be skipped after ep 10.
Week 3 will air eps. 13, 22, 23, 24, & 27. Perhaps they screened them and picked the 60-ish best ones, in keeping with their pattern of licensing episodes in batches of ~60.
Couple of other schedule notes:
- "Fresh" episodes of Bumper Stumpers from the latter part of S1, plus the beginning of S2
- Split Second returns for an hour at 10AM
- Tic Tac Dough gets to C-63 before cycling back to C-1
Too bad about the missing Chain Reaction episodes but eventually we should get a bunch GSN never aired.
Glad to see them refreshing the schedule a bit with shows like Split Second coming back. I wonder though...we know that 800 episodes of Definition exist...it would be great to have a run of that on Game TV. Maybe it's too costly to license (?)
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wonder though...we know that 800 episodes of Definition exist...it would be great to have a run of that on Game TV. Maybe it's too costly to license (?)
If BonusRound.ca can afford them, I'd be surprised if cost were the issue. Of course, fans can always go support that site and enjoy them there ;D
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Too bad about the missing Chain Reaction episodes but eventually we should get a bunch GSN never aired.
This is going way way back, but does anyone have a handle on what episodes CBN and USA aired when they had reruns in 1982-85? With it being on the CBN schedule for 2 years, you'd think they would have cycled through all the episodes if they were available.
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Glad to see them refreshing the schedule a bit with shows like Split Second coming back. I wonder though...we know that 800 episodes of Definition exist...it would be great to have a run of that on Game TV. Maybe it's too costly to license (?)
Do we know if they are in the same warehouse as the unmarked Pitfall tapes?
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Glad to see them refreshing the schedule a bit with shows like Split Second coming back. I wonder though...we know that 800 episodes of Definition exist...it would be great to have a run of that on Game TV. Maybe it's too costly to license (?)
Do we know if they are in the same warehouse as the unmarked Pitfall tapes?
Might be a question for Craig from Bonusround. He managed to obtain 2 master tapes from somewhere that weren't part of our original 8 in circulation.
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Interesting ending on Hot Potato today...during the end credits, the GSN logo popped up with the announcer saying that its "truly interactive" and the Sony website plugged. Obviously GameTV is using the same copies of these episodes that GSN ran back in the '90s. You'd figure they'd check for these kind of things before they run the episode.
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Interesting ending on Hot Potato today...during the end credits, the GSN logo popped up with the announcer saying that its "truly interactive" and the Sony website plugged. Obviously GameTV is using the same copies of these episodes that GSN ran back in the '90s. You'd figure they'd check for these kind of things before they run the episode.
I didn't see the Hot Potato one, but I did see that the exact same thing happened with Chain Reaction that day too. I guess by this point, 1997 GSN plugs are just as nostalgic as 1980s game shows.
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Interesting ending on Hot Potato today...during the end credits, the GSN logo popped up with the announcer saying that its "truly interactive" and the Sony website plugged. Obviously GameTV is using the same copies of these episodes that GSN ran back in the '90s. You'd figure they'd check for these kind of things before they run the episode.
I didn't see the Hot Potato one, but I did see that the exact same thing happened with Chain Reaction that day too. I guess by this point, 1997 GSN plugs are just as nostalgic as 1980s game shows.
Whoops...my bad. I think it was Chain Reaction. We'll see if it pops up on any future airings. I was surprised to see it anyhow!
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The degree to which plugs are being edited out of the three shows is wildly inconsistent. Hot Potato has aired several contestant plugs for example, yet fee plugs are routinely edited (more contestant plugs than fee plugs have aired in Hot Potato as of right now)
GSN burned in the "Contact Us" plugs onto their master copies over the ticket/contestant plugs whenever one occurred in the middle of a segment until the early 2000s. In some cases they appear to have gone back to the original master tapes (quite a few Hot Potato episodes for instance) while in other cases it's definitely GSN's copies that are airing - most particularly Chain.
The main tip-off as to whether the airing print is sourced from GSN or the original amsters appears to be whether the show ends with a newer Sony Pictures Television logo or not.
This isn't the first time these old GSN covers have aired - they showed up several times during Buzzr's airings of the seventy Cullen TPiR eps GSN ran.
And personally, as someone who is intensely nostalgic for the early years of GSN, every single time some little surviving bit of that turns up I am delighted. Stations and networks, especially in those days, tended to junk outdated promotional assets (and a LOT of stuff from GSN before the 2000s is gone - not just promos), so randomly seeing a '97 GSN promo in high quality in 2025 is a genuine treat almost as much as the episode (though I also know game show fans will complain about anything).
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The only thing I'm baffled and concerned by is the massive skips going on with Chain. There doesn't appear to be any curation to them suggesting intent (lease size or not) - and especially with October data now available I'm now strongly wondering if either there's just no copy available or there's otherwise something wrong/damaged with Sony/GSN's copies of the Chain run. Probably a mix of the two. There's no way content or clearance issues would be knocking shows out in the volume or pattern that shows are being skipped though.
GSN kept three episodes to a single digital betacam tape - and after airing the first three tapes (shows 1-9) and the first show on tape 4 (10), GameTV skipped to the first show on tape 5 (13)....then jumped exactly three whole tapes straight to the first show of the 8th tape (#22), where they're now running all three shows before jumping to the last show of the 9th (27). From there, the show is now running mostly in order save the occasional one or two episode skips.
(As of the last date in October data is available on, Chain Reaction skips twenty shows. For comparison, Hot Potato skips zero shows and Pass the Buck just one). The main lesson: If you taped the show when it was on USA or GSN and that episode is skipped, hold onto it and back it up - it just might be the best surviving copy.
And on the episodes that are airing, to be honest the episodes look like ass quality-wise even compared to other shows of the era, other surviving NBC stuff of the period, and even other rarely-rerun series like Pass the Buck airing on the same channel. Looking at the "highest quality possible" copies of what is airing, I would absolutely believe there is stuff that can't be aired.