Dennis James's first few episodes of Nighttime TPIR.
Wheel Of Fortune with Chuck Woolery in earlier episodes.
Wheel of Fortune co-host auditions before Vanna.
Original Sale of the Century
The Chase pilot for fox.

You should see the crazy things that showed up when searching for that Bill Anderson/Sarah Purcell show.

On-topic, I used to like newspapers.com a lot more when you can easily get a crappy OCR version of articles for free. Even free snippets of articles done by others (mostly by Wikipedians) are behind paywalls today.

Good luck searching Google for information on Password.

I had many, many more problems searching for information on Go.

It may be worth noting that a few years into Drew's time as host, offering (and awarding) more expensive showcases on a more regular basis was prioritized, which, to my casual observation, came at the expense of getting wins in the first five-sixths of the show.

I don't remember when it seemed like that practice was at its peak, and tpirstats.com didn't keep track of showcase prices back then. However, looking at tpirstats.com's pricing game win–loss records for each season may offer a hint:

(Season 36 was Drew's first season; all numbers are presented as win–loss)

Season 36: 535–605
Season 37: 460–686
Season 38: 415–725
Season 39: 398–742
Season 40: 450–696
Season 41: 485–649

For comparison, season 52's record was 509–631, and season 53 (the most recent complete season)'s record was 520–620.

I think the fact they do throw money around, but historically do NOT throw that same attention at the showcases illustrates it's not where they choose to be doing that. My cynical side says it's solely because the showcase round is harder to control from a budget standpoint. But as a fan, I can also see there's a lot more mileage to be had over a tension-filled pricing game for a big prize, as opposed to a six-figure car showing up without revealing its six-figure price visually in a showcase reveal.

-Jason