I'll Start With The Only Piece Of News

NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me will be doing a cinecast (live broadcast into movie theaters) of one of its tapings on May 2, 2013. It's kind of sad that I've already seen Wait Wait Don't Tell Me live on tour three times at the Wang Theater in Boston, I watched the TV special on BBC America, and I'm still considering buying tickets to this five months in advance.

Now, as this is my last post of 2012, I thought I'd end the year by paying tribute to some of the game show greats we lost this year (and there are plenty of them). This is by no means an exhaustive list - I'm not about to list everyone who died this year who once appeared on Hollywood Squares, and there are probably a few more prominent game show figures I overlooked. Still, here we go, in alphabetical order:

Jacques Antoine

 Legendary producer of game shows in France who created Fort Boyard and Treasure Hunt, among countless others.

Max Bygraves 

Veteran performer who hosted Family Fortunes (the British version of Family Feud) for a few years

Dick Clark

Flat-out showbiz icon - hosting Pyramid was probably one of his lesser achievements!

Denise Darcel

Host of a few game shows in the early years of television.

Richard Dawson

Icon of American game shows, most famous as the original host of Family Feud.

Bob Holness

Icon of British game shows, most famous as the original host of Blockbusters.

Ruth Horowitz

Became the Ken Jennings of the 1960s with a long string of wins on Concentration.

Rich Jeffries

Announcer on a few game shows in the 1980s.

Kenneth Kendall

Original host of Treasure Hunt in Britain.

Dave Maynard

Hosted a local talent show in the Boston area for decades.

Jim Packard

Announcer on Whad'ya Know for decades.

Jim Paratore

Veteran TV producer who created Let's Ask America.

Bill Rafferty

Host of a few game shows in the 1980s.

Bob Stewart

Legendary producer of game shows in America who created The Price Is Right, Password, and Pyramid, among countless others; as if that wasn't enough, his son, Sande Stewart, is a game show producer in his own right.

Ian Turpie

Icon of Australian game shows, most famous for hosting The Price Is Right for years.

Mike Wallace

Hosted a few game shows in the early years of television, but later became much more famous as a newscaster.

RIP to all.

Aaron

More Of The Same

OK, the new hour-long version of Fort Boyard: Ultimate Challenge...

I wasn't a massive fan of the half-hour version, but still got pretty darn excited about the new expanded season. Who knows, maybe the extra time would enable them to fit in all the cool characters and great music that other versions of Fort Boyard around the world supposedly have. If nothing else, they'd be able to fit more games in.

Well, I was right about that part. They did fit more games in. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the only change they made.

We have the same six teams of four kids whose team names will make any American game show fan  think of Legends Of The Hidden Temple. Each episode features two of these teams, who attempt to earn keys by participating in ten challenges (hey, that's double the half-hour version!).  Four of these challenges pit one team against the other, with the winning team earning a key, while each team also gets three challenges they play by themselves against the clock and get a key if they succeed. At the end of the show, the keys are converted into time grabbing coins in the Treasure Room - each team starts with three minutes and is deducted ten seconds for every key they fail to win. The coins grabbed are then converted...somehow...into a numerical result, and the two teams that score the most points over the season will compete in the grand final.

Now, I said it on October 20, 2011 and I'll say it again: these challenges are amazing. The amazing...kind of ends there. Yes, the Fort provides a backdrop ten times better then the same challenges would have in a studio, but, well, where are all those cool characters and all that great music? The half-hour version's Geno Segers was memorable only for his booming voice, but even that puts him above the completely forgettable Andy Akinwolere; while Laura Hamilton gets a lot more screen time here then she did in the half-hour version, said extra screen time basically reveals her to be completely forgettable as well.

I am, of course, nitpicking. This is far from a bad show and my eight-year-old self would have found it as epic as it is trying to be. For the sake of said eight-year-old self, I will hold out hope that it will reach American TV on Disney XD or any other channel. Let's not kid ourselves, though. America is probably lucky it got as much Fort Boyard: Ultimate Challenge as it did.

I hope there's some news next week.

Aaron

I'll Take It

OK, Take It All...

Howie Mandel, who I still think is a darn good host, welcomes five contestants for...well, let's be honest, it's a plain old Yankee Swap. As a result, I'm not going to go into tremendous detail; suffice to say that the first round contains five prizes, and after the Yankee Swap, the player holding the prize worth the least amount of money is eliminated. The second round has four prizes, after which the player holding the prize worth the least amount of money is eliminated; the third round has three prizes, after which the final two players advance to the inevitable Prisoner's Dilemma endgame (see, for example, Friend Or Foe).

That's...kind of it.

It's better than it sounds, is the good news. It's not great, but I was never expecting it to be. It was going to be decent or terrible. It was the former, and if this one sticks, then great - but I have no reason to expect that it will.

I'll probably attempt to track down the new season of Fort Boyard: Ultimate Challenge (which premiered a few days ago on CITV in Britain) next week.

Aaron

Still No News

Given that I'm leaving town soon anyway and have to pack, it doesn't seem worth it to come up with something to write about right now.

Believe me, I feel terrible not even being able to post once a week, but at least I'll have something to write about next week - Take It All premieres on NBC Monday.

Aaron

No News Review!

As there's absolutely no news, I thought I'd take a look at a random show that jumped out at me. It's a 1990s kids game show from Australia, and let me tell you, it's Amazing.

No seriously, that's the name of the show. 

I quote TV Tropes: "Amazing was easily the most popular Australian children's show of the 1990s, and holds a similar cultural significance in that country as Legends Of The Hidden Temple and Nickelodeon GUTS do in America." 

First reaction: This might the the only time anyone will ever describe Legends Of The Hidden Temple or GUTS as having any kind of "cultural significance." Second reaction: Amazing doesn't quite live up to that.

The format: it's a five-day-a-week show, and two Australian schools compete against each other for the whole week, with two new kids representing their school in each half-hour episode. The first two rounds are played in two parts. In the first part of the round, host James Sherry gives each team in turn the number of letters in the answer to a person, place, or thing they will have to identify in ninety seconds (think "It's a place, six letters..."). The clock starts, and James begins reading out clues. Once the team has gotten the answer right, they run over to a giant floor-sized keyboard (which appears to just barely work) and stomp on the letters that spell said answer. Once the correct answer has been typed, the team scores a point for every second left on the clock. The second part of the round then features one member of each team, who is given the time leftover from the first part of the round to run through this giant, obstacle-filled maze and grab plastic letters. After time runs out, each letter grabbed that was in the answer the team spelled out is worth ten points. The second round is the same, only the other member of each team runs the maze. 

The third round is the Computer Challenge, in which one member of each team plays a Super Nintendo game against each other; the team that collects the most bananas in Donkey Kong or wins the Mario Kart race or whatever scores fifty points, and the losing team scores twenty-five points. The team with the most points is then given another two minutes (one minute for each player) in the maze grabbing keys; each key is worth one hundred points, and one key is the Bonus Key which, if found, wins each team member a Game Boy. At the end of the week, the school that scored the most points over the five shows wins some computers and educational software.

If ever there was a show that could not exist outside the 90s, this is it. That's not knocking the 90s - I was a kid in the 90s, and would have adored this at the time. Watching it now, well, let's start with the good:

• The maze itself. It's cool to the point that, like the Fun House or the house from Finders Keepers, I'm twenty-three years old, I didn't watch the show as a kid, and I so want to run through the damn thing. 
• The rest of the set, which is quite large and impressive. 
• James Sherry. Granted, he's not spectacular, but he manages for the most part to avoid the kids game show host stereotype. Going back to kids game shows I did grow up watching, he's far from Marc Summers or Mike O'Malley, but he certainly beats Kirk Fogg or Phil Moore. 

Now the bad:

• The Computer Challenge. All of it. It has nothing to do with the rest of the show, it's always Nintendo and never any other system, its scoring is lopsided (why not just award twenty-five points to the winning team?)...
• The music, in which the word "AMAZING!" is repeated a lot. 
• The prize setup. Despite what a lot of kids shows seem to think, a computer is not a good grand prize - certainly not a computer for your school.

All in all, I like it. It doesn't live up to its title, but it's a lot of fun and I would have adored it as a kid. As I say every time I review a kids game show, I frequently have to remind myself that that's who kids TV is meant for.

I really hope there's some news next week.

Aaron

I Know, I Know, I Know

I really need to get writing on this blog back into my routine.

Here's the big news in my life - I was in New York for a few days and went to a taping of NPR's Ask Me Another. It's not a show I'm the world's biggest fan of, but I wanted to see a game show and that was the one I could get tickets to.
I'm not going to go intro tremendous detail, but here's a few things that stand out:

• The Bell House turned out to be a dingy bar\comedy club in a not particularly nice part of Brooklyn. When I got off the subway with the friend I was seeing this with, we were wondering if we were going to get mugged.
• The show tries very, very hard not to stop to do retakes, but they had to at one point because the computer controlling the buzzers crashed. It took about fifteen minutes to reset everything, after which they threw out the question they had been reading.
• Like a few other shows I've seen live - Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and Have I Got News For You come to mind - after the main action of the show is recorded they rerecord some sections that didn't come through right, with the audience expected to clap and laugh as if it were the first time. They also take an intermission after a couple rounds.
• Special guest Cristin Milioti dropped the F-bomb on public radio. It will probably get edited out, of course, but it sure made the audience laugh.
• All in all it was a lot of fun, and if you're willing to go to a dingy comedy club to see a public radio game show, by all means, do so.

I hope there's news next week. I doubt it, but I hope.

Aaron

No News. At All.

Given that I'm a day late as well, it doesn't seem worth it to come up with anything this week.

I'll be back on Thanksgiving!

Aaron