9 Prize-winning Facts about Game Shows

Scandals, police chases, and why one notorious episode of "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" will never ever get aired. Plus-- why Dana Carvey should have had the slimiest job in TV! It's all right here in today's 9 Things. Featuring Gabe Luzier.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what will What's that man go? So you know,
I love spelling bees, right, and not actually being in
them because I'm not a great speller, But after watching
that movie spell Bound, I came away with this new appreciation. Man,
there's so much fun to watch. I always watch the
finals every year, and it's it's actually funny to see
how much harder the spelling b words have gotten over
the years. I don't know if you've noticed this, but

(00:20):
I was. I was looking back at this list of
final words from some of the early National Spelling Bees
and their words like knack and croissan. I mean, it's
so much harder these days. I know, it doesn't feel
like you should win a National Spelling be off the
word knack, especially since the words today are things like
uh I think I saw feldon christ and guestl shaft,

(00:41):
Like I don't even know how to say these words.
Little But did you know the first televised game show
was actually a spelling be It premiered on the BBC
in night and people called it the most boring show
on television. Ouch. Yeah. The funniest part is that critics
say one of the few happy consequences of World War
two was that it took the spelling Bee off the air.

(01:03):
I mean, I think there were some other good consequences
of World War Two, but apparently helping to cancel that
game show ranks right up there. And that's just one
of the many game show facts we'll be talking about today.
Let's dive in a their podcast listers. I'm Will Pearson

(01:32):
and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangues
shot Ticketer and sitting there behind the soundproof booth motioning
that he wants to buy a vowel as our friend
and producer Tristan McNeil. And today we've got researcher Gabe
in studio as well, although Mango and Gabe are actually
out in How Stuff Works l A Studio. How are
you guys today? Doing great? Yeah? Happy to be here? Awesome.
So I'm excited to chat game shows now. Mango, I

(01:54):
know we're both huge who wants to be a Millionaire
fans when that show came out and aviad Jeopardy Watcher,
But you should tell the listeners that you were actually
on a game show. Was Cash cab Ones? Yeah, and
I was terrible on it. Luckily, my my wife is
way smarter than me, so she wanted the money, and
we actually put that money towards our honeymoon. But weirdly,

(02:15):
my my college roommate was on that show once too,
and I was his phone and friends, so I've technically
been on that show twice. I'd forgotten about that. All right,
that's pretty awesome. Well, let's get started. So I'm going
to kick this off with a fact about Jeopardy since
it's one of my all time favorite shows. So the
first one that I want to talk about is MERV Griffin. Now,
I had heard several times that Merv had made a

(02:37):
ton of money off of the Jeopardy theme song that
he wrote, and I wanted to see what that was exactly,
because I didn't know exactly what it was. But he
earned seventy to eighty million dollars in royalties from that
theme song alone by the time he died in two
thousand seven. Did you know this? It's crazy. So it
was actually originally written as a lullaby for his son

(02:58):
Tony and and was first called a time for Tony.
So writing this little lullaby ironed him more than seventy
million dollars. And actually, one other fact that that Stacy
had told me when we were talking about Jeopardy. She
said that the maximum amount of money that can be
one in every Jeopardy game. That's if you answered every
question correctly, landed on the daily double questions, last in

(03:19):
each round, and bet the maximum amount. In Final Jeopardy.
The most you can win in a game is five
hundred and sixty six thousand, four hundred dollars. I take that,
all right, So that's my first fact game. You want
to go next? Yeah, sure, this is a price is
right fact? So another long running game show, and you know,

(03:39):
the most popular pricing game they play on there is
a game called plink Oh where you take the plastic
chip and you set it against the board and kind
of let it go and it knocks into all the
pegs and hopefully winds up in one of the high
dollar marks. Um, but it could go in zero, which
is in the center too. And what I thought was
funny about this was there are actually only ten Plinko
chips in existence, and yeah, and they only use a

(04:03):
maximum of five per game, which keeps you know, just
five in uh in storage. And those are the original
Planco chips that they've been using since the games started
and there's just the one set and they're actually protected
under lock and key in between games. But the thing
is the prices right did donate one of the chips
to be included in a CBS time capsule a few

(04:25):
years ago, so now they're only down to nine. Ah,
that is terrifying. They they should at least keep another
set off site somewhere. That's uh, that's crazy. Alright, Mango,
you want to go with your first Yeah? So you
guys know, I love weird game shows, like Johnny Carson
had this old one called do You Trust Your Wife?
And uh, And there was one in the US called
Oh Sit, which was kind of like adult musical chairs

(04:48):
with a big obstacle course in front of them. But
the one I love the most is this one from
Russia called The Intercept, where you get to drive and
keep a brand new car, but what they don't tell
you is that it's stolen. So the says, you get
this car, you get to drive it off a lot,
and then you have to play keep away from the
cops for thirty five minutes. It's basically Grand Theft Auto

(05:08):
in real life. And the weirdest part about the show
is that it was pitched as propaganda from the Russian
authorities to show how good their police forces. So not
that many people win. But one of the funniest things
is that crimes actually went up after the show aired,
and uh, and the police were totally baffled by this. Ah,
that's pretty great. Well, we'll speaking of crimes and things

(05:30):
that are scandalous. I think we should do around where
we all talk about something scandal related in game shows.
And I'm mainly saying that because I've got one here,
so you guys do as well. So, uh, the one
I wanted to talk about, and I Gabe already talked
about one of the shows that I would watch during
the summer as a kid, but one of the other
ones was Press Your Luck. The number of times I
screamed Noammy, Noammy stop at the TV as a kid,

(05:51):
but I was looking at there was another story I've
heard before, but it was a really interesting story about
how Michael Larson memorized the light sequence on Press Your Luck.
And this was back in nine six, and he figured
out a way to analyze the show and he discovered
that no wham He's ever appeared in certain squares, so
by avoiding those Squares. He was able to continuously play

(06:12):
and rack up prizes for so long that the producers
actually had to split the game into two episodes, and
so he ultimately took home something like a hundred and
ten thousand dollars and because of this, they reprogrammed the
board after Larson's win, including expanding the five random light
patterns to thirty two light patterns, just to be able

(06:33):
to stop this in the future. Okay, so that's my
scandal story. Mango, you got one, Yeah, I've got one.
It's it's uh, it's about Carmen San Diego or where
in the world is Carmen san Diego. And apparently there's
one episode of the show that never aired, and it
should have been a good one. The case involved the
character Patty Larceny stealing the New Year's Eve Ball from

(06:55):
Times Square, and then Gene Wilder was actually a special guest.
But the reason it in air is that in the
final game, where you run across a map at the
end of the show and placed flags in the countries,
the gum Shoe, who was the finalist, fell and fractured
her arm running across the map of Europe. I mean,
I just think that's crazy. And I have to say
the worst part about it is that when she was

(07:16):
at school the next day, I'm sure everyone asked, how
do you break your arm? And she probably told everyone,
you know, I was in the final round of Carmen
San Diego and then that show never aired. All right,
that's a good one, Okay, Gabe, you got a scandalous fact.
Oh yeah, yeah, you wanted a game show scandal, I've
got a game show scandal. This is This goes back
to a nine episode of The Dating Game and on

(07:37):
that episode, bachelor number one Rodney A Cola he won
the right to go on a date with a not
so lucky lady named Cheryl Bradshaw. But despite choosing him,
Bradshaw reportedly refused to go out with him after the fact.
And that means that Cheryl had pretty good instincts, because
a few months later, a Cola went on a murdering
spree that eventually included at least five victims. Of the

(08:00):
testimony at his trial what Yah and some investigators believe
he could have been responsible for the deaths of up
to fifty women. But don't worry. He's now serving a
life sentence and has been on death Row a couple
of times. Now he keeps appealing, but in sen he
was charged with murdering a woman in nineteen seventies seven.
If guilty of that, that means he actually appeared on

(08:21):
the Dating show during his killing spree. All right, Well,
that that was a little dark, So why why don't
we light it up again? Mango? You want to help
us wrap up with your last fact? Yeah, definitely. So
I know Will knows this, but I was a huge
Double Dare fan when I was a kid, and in
third grade, the kids in my neighborhood wasted our summer
training for Double Dare. Like we'd give each other trivia
questions and practice obstacle courses in the backyard, and I

(08:44):
think we're just expecting that the phone would ring one
day and we'd be called in to play the game show.
But here's something I didn't know about the show. So
apparently Dana Carvey was almost the host. He got offered
the job the same day. He also got offered the
job for a side of Night and Live, so he
ended up turning down Double Dare, which is kind of crazy.
And also, Stacy looked up some Double Dare stats and

(09:07):
for each taping session. Uh, this is what they had
on hand, fifty gallons of whipped cream mixed with geladin,
thirty gallons of green slime, a hundred cubic feet of popcorn,
several dozen eggs, and twelve dozen balloons. And also they
tried to use outdated food to cut down on waste.
That's unbelievable. I was always so jealous of those kids

(09:28):
that got to be on double there. I've never heard
that about Dana Carvey though. Alright, Gabe, you got one
more fact than you. Oh yeah, this is a good one. Um.
Game show audiences can't always be trusted. You know. In
some game shows, perhaps most famously Who Wants to Be
a Millionaire, the contestant is able to ask the audience
for help. And apparently this may not be a good idea,

(09:48):
because studies have shown that audiences in certain countries, especially Russia,
the Ukraine and sometimes France, they give the wrong answers
on purpose. Yeah. So in the case of France, uh,
French audience members tend to give misleading answers only if
they think that the question is an easy one that
the game show contestant should have gotten right, even though

(10:10):
the contestants asking the audience for help. They the audience thinks, well,
they should get it right. It's like they think it's
you know, they don't deserve to win because it's an
easy one and they should have gotten it. Oh, that's
pretty good. All right. Well I've got one more for
us here, and it's it's just because it's a game show.
I mentioned two games shows that I really really loved.
One game show that I couldn't stand as a kid

(10:31):
because my grandparents watched it every day was Wheel of Fortune.
And so, but this is a pretty cool fact that
in two thousand thirteen, Vana White was awarded the world
record for the most frequent clapper thanks her duties, of course,
on Wheel of Fortune. So as of January thirty one,
two thousand thirteen, so think about how many more times
she's clapped since then. But as of January thirty one

(10:51):
and two thousand thirteen, she had clapped approximately three million,
four hundred and eighty thousand times, at an average of
six hundred and six claps per show. I would imagine
her hands are probably actually a little bit sore after
each episode. So I feel like that deserves a plase
it song exactly thank you very much. Guys. Well, I

(11:13):
did like that fact, but I have to admit I
think Gabe really took it to another level with his
plinkoh fact. I had no idea about those facts. He
made it really dark for us and then brought it
back with the Russian audiences. So I don't know about you, Mango,
but I kind of think Gabe deserves the trophy today. Yeah,
I'm glad I brought it to him in l A.
All right, Well, I hope you guys enjoy working on
some of our upcoming projects. We can't wait to tell

(11:36):
the audience about those in the not too distant future.
But that's it for today's nine Things. We'll be back
with a full length episode tomorrow. Thanks so much for listening.