Switched to Buzzr for Match Game '77 while taking my laundry downstairs and putting the boxes for Lauren and my family in the Villas and Virginia together. Buzzr's still doing their Bob Barker marathon, as his birthday would have been tomorrow. Bob appeared on the last week before the show moved to mornings, as Gene complains about early in the episode. The others are more interested in contemplating why a woman is carrying what she calls a rape whistle around her neck while Gene points out that producer Roger's been misspelling answers again.
Bob and his wife Dorothy Jo also appeared on the Tattletales episode with William Shatner and his wife Marcy and comedian Pat Cooper and his wife Patti. I never heard of Cooper until today, but apparently, he was big on celebrity roasts. No wonder. He and Patti were funny as heck. Although Bob and Dorothy Jo did well, they ended up being the big winners.
Headed out to run errands after I put the laundry in the dryer. I really wanted to get my Christmas boxes in the mail. One's going to Lauren and her parents in Pittsfield, one's going down to Mom and Keefe and his family in Yorktown, Virginia, and the third will be going to Anny and Lilah in the Villas. Fortunately, the Oaklyn Post Office is three blocks from where I live. There was only a short line when I arrived at the blocky one-room building. Other than a slight bobble with the zip code on Lauren's package, I was in and out...and it's a good thing. By the time I left, the line was out the door.
Dollar General is a block from the post office, so I went there next. I mainly wanted to buy a birthday card for my friend Linda Young. I also bought a Dr. Pepper Zero (I've never seen them anywhere else) and an original metal Slinky to put in the toy donation box in the front of the store.
When I got home, I brought my laundry upstairs and put it away while watching the first Christmas episode of Paw Patrol. The "Pups Save Christmas" when Santa has an accident with the sleigh and loses his presents, his reindeer, and the magic Christmas star that allows the reindeer to fly. Rubble and Rocky fix the sleigh. Chase herds the reindeer and helps find the star. Skye, Marshall, and Zuma deliver the gifts all around Adventure Bay.
Put on the 1951 British A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim while I got Linda's birthday card and the Christmas cards going in the mail together. This is probably my favorite traditional, fully live-action Christmas Carol. Sim is a wonderful Scrooge, especially in the second half, when he's thawing out and beginning to to understand what his stinginess and bitterness has done to those around him. There's some nifty touches, too, including an expanded past sequence that fully shows how Scrooge went from idealistic clerk to nasty businessman and the hilarious reaction of his washer woman when she comes in on Christmas morning and sees her miserly boss suddenly dancing around and giving out money. This is in the public domain, so it's pretty easy to find.
Let the other program on the DVD run while cleaning up the cards. Max Fleischer released the first animated "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" as a short in 1948. This one follows the original book pretty closely. Rudolph is an adorable little fellow, especially when he's hoping Santa will fill his stocking and in the very end, where he blushes bright as his nose. This was apparently created as an ad for the story's original publisher Montgomery Ward, which is likely why it's now in the public domain.
Did job research next. When I didn't see anything, I moved on to writing. Actually, I re-wrote the entire scene in the tower. The fire that burns the tower and Harron is now choking, clinging vines that scar Harron's handsome face and crush the tower. When he uses his power to make the vines attack Cora, she uses her knife to knock one back at him. She pushes so hard, the thorns end up blinding him.
Broke for dinner at 7 PM. Watched Match Game Syndicated while I ate. Stephanie Powers finally made her first appearance since 1973, while Gene announced that Charles would be going on hiatus after this week to do a (short-lived, as it turned out) Broadway show. Fannie Flagg is more worried about dealing with "__ Decker" in the Head-to-Head. In the second show, Gene jokes about Stephanie's hair getting mussed, but Bill would rather muss Stephanie.
Finished the night on YouTube with episodes of Tic Tac Dough in honor of the 45th anniversary of the 1978 revival and host Wink Martindale's birthday last week. Tic Tac Dough actually goes back to 1956 as one of the many big-money quiz shows dreamed up by Barry and Enright. Originally a daytime show, a nighttime version debuted in 1957. The Barry-hosted daytime show was apparently clean, but the night show hosted by Jay Jackson was said to be rigged more than 75 percent of the time. Both shows changed hosts after the Quiz Show Scandals broke. The nighttime version ended late in 1958; the day show didn't make it out of 1959.
The episode I have here is a daytime show from 1958, one of the very few known to exist today. In the original version, people would guess answers from subjects on a tic-tac-toe board that was mechanically shuffled. The money they won would be added to a pot. Whomever got three Xs or Os in a row won the pot. I find the mechanical board to be charming and the questions to be interesting, which makes me wonder why someone thought they needed to cheat on this to begin with.
After Barry and Enright made a comeback in 1973 with their Joker's Wild, they decided it was time to bring one of their first hits back to the small screen. What most people probably don't remember is that there were actually two Tic Tac Dough revivals that debuted in 1978. The first turned up on CBS that summer. It apparently couldn't drum up ratings opposite Card Sharks and was gone by the fall.
The version that everyone remembers is that the show moved to syndication two weeks after it left CBS...and was an instant sensation. Along with Family Feud, it was probably the most popular game show of the late 70's and early 80's. Now the questions are asked on monitors, and there's occasional "red squares" as money bonuses. They also added an actual bonus round. In the CBS show, people would try to get three Xs or Os in a row and avoid the noisy roaring dragon that would seemingly lunge at the screen. The syndicated version had them choosing numbers to find money under them. If they found $1,000 or over, or got the words "Tic" and "Tac," they'd win a big prize package. Contestants who won five games in a row got a car.
There were a lot of big winners on this show, but the biggest debuted in 1980. Naval pilot Thom McKee started off in September 1980 and would continue winning money for 46 episodes. He eventually amassed more than $312,000 and eight cars. It was a game show winnings record that would stand until Ken Jennings' big run on Jeopardy! 20 years later. (And apparently the guy who finally defeated him went on to do really well, too.)
Martindale left to do his own Headline Chasers in 1985. Jim Caldwell replaced him, and while he apparently got better as the final season went on, he was really no Martindale. On the other hand, the set did get a rather attractive make over at this point, trading in the late 70's wood-and-gold look for softer pastels. Nothing helped. Dough couldn't stand out in a syndicated landscape now dominated by Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune and finally ended in 1986.
Dough was one of the many games that saw a revival in 1990. Alas, this version is rather notorious among game show fans for not being terribly good. On the plus side was a nifty early CGI board and a simple but fairly elegant set. However, the bonus round was unnecessarily complicated by a new knight "dragon slayer" character and the contestant choosing to play Xs or Os, instead of just choosing money. Host Patrick Wayne was an actor who had little prior experience hosting. He tended to be either totally bored or screaming at the top of his lungs.
(It's too bad most people think this moves too slow and the tic-tac-toe board is too cumbersome to work nowadays. There apparently was a pilot for a third revival shot in 2021 with Tom Berganon, but they didn't go ahead with it. I wish they'd change their minds. I enjoy watching the older episodes, and I did as a kid when I'd see them on USA. I wonder if there might be life for this show yet in the right hands.)
At any rate, see if you can solve trivia and avoid that infamous dragon with some of the most winningest contestants ever on television! (Look for commercials from the show's run on Game Show Network and USA on most episodes and bad tapes on the CBS premiere and the show from 1986.)
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