5 Things That Make Press Your Luck the Best 1980's Game Show

Taking a little break from our Year in Reviews 2012:  Movies Edition series to pay homage to that staple of 1980's day time TV:  the game show.  Specifically, one of my personal favorites, the ridiculous and whammirific Press Your Luck!  The Price is Right is the indisputable king of daytime TV game shows--synergistic fact, Rod Roddy was the announcer for both The Price is Right and Press Your Luck--a title I certainly will not contradict here.  But thanks to the magic of reruns and the geniuses of programming at the Game Show Network (GSN), here are five things that make Press Your Luck the best 1980's game show.

1.  1980's Contestants

I loved Press Your Luck as a kid during it's three year run from 1983 to 1986.  But it is immeasurably more entertaining looking back through our retro spyglass.  I was but a small child in the '80's so my perspective is a bit hazy, so a question to all you older folks:  was everyone just ugly and/or awkward looking during the Reagan years?  It's not just the bad haircuts, earth tone blazers, novelty sized eyeglasses, bushy mustaches, or in some cases all of the above.  You don't have to look too hard at your nearest hipster hangout to see a lot of "fashion" of the era has come back, and with a vengeance.  So it's not just the style, but the people themselves.  Everyone either appears to be a giant dork or a hayseed.  This was long before the reality TV era, where everyone and their uncle's cat thinks they can and should be on TV.  You can see a noticeable difference in the sensibilities of the eras.  I'm sure the producers told the contestants to act excited and whatnot, and you can see that their trying so hard.  But John and Jane Q 1980's were, generally, just not ready for the spotlight.  On a recently viewed episode, one of the female contestants, Bea, was so nervous on camera she could barely even speak!  Sort of an important aspect of game show contestanting.  Can you imagine such a thing on today's game shows, like Minute to Win It or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  It's the exact opposite.  With the exceptions of Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and the Price is Right--all hold overs from the golden age of game shows mind  you--contestants on today's shows never shut up.  Before each question or challenge we're subjected to some inane reasoning for their answer or an obnoxious soliloquy about how when they're grandmother used to bake apple cobbler she always made sure to grease the pan with genuine hog lard and that memory gave the contestant the insight needed to complete the challenge in record time.  Or something equally stupid.  Yes, even Press Your Luck had it's share of blowhards, but they were much fewer and further between.  So, awkward and ill-dressed as they are, give me the unassuming not ready for prime time game show contestant of the '80's any day over today's fame seeking blabbermouth.

2.  Terrible Prizes

If you're not familiar with Press Your Luck here's how it worked.  It featured three contestants who would buzz in to answer a series of trivia questions to win "spins."  Their were two rounds of questions, and after each round contestants would get a chance to use their spins on the "Big Board."  The Big Board features many squares displaying dollar values or fabulous prizes.  And of course, the whammies (more on those later).  A lighted border would flash around the various squares and when a player would hit their buzzer and yell "STOP!" one square would remain lit, netting the contestant either a whammy, cash, or fabulous prize.  Except many of the prizes were far from fabulous.

Examples:

• A water conditioner - Huh.  A really nice, practical prize, I'm sure.  But maybe the most unexciting prize ever.  Wouldn't you have to live somewhere with the most mineral enriched water ever to truly appreciate a game show water conditioner?  As in, your faucet is basically dispensing rocks?
• A graphic - To this day I'm still not sure what this is.  The prize tile simply read "Graphic" and had a poor representation of American Gothic displayed on it.  I'm guessing it's art of some kind?  Why wouldn't you just say that?  Art.  Doesn't that sound better than Graphic?  Am I getting a decal to stick on the side of my car?  Or a single graphic on a floppy disc to display on my Tandy?  This still boggles my mind--way more than it should.
• A Jog 'n Tramp - Um, we actually had one of these.  Pretty fun as a little kid.  Pretty awful as a game show prize.
• A silver service - Great, something to collect dust in my china cabinet.  Has anyone ever actually used one of these sets to serve tea?
• A trip to Concord, CA - So........I.......wha......I just.........huh.  Concord.
• Silver gifts - What's with all the silver stuff?  Who's picking the prizes, Paul Revere?  And what exactly are silver gifts?  Is this a sneaky way of unloading the leftover silver services from the warehouse?  Is it a pocket watch, a paperweight, just a solid bar of silver?  These are questions that need answers.
• Catamaran - This is my personal favorite.  It's the epitome of impractical game show prizes.  Sure, it might be fun on the open water, the wind in your face and sea mist in your hair.  Too bad it's going to spend the next decade taking up room in your garage or costing you money at a self storage facility.

3.  Horrible production values

Compared to the high-tech, slick TV programming we have today, a lot of vintage TV looks pretty creaky.  Bad sound, fuzzy pictures, cheesy graphics and special effects are not the fault of the era.  They were doing the best they could with what they had.  But even amongst its contemporaries, Press Your Luck was pretty bad.  On more than one occasion I've seen cue card holders and stage hands clearly in the frame.  It's not like this was a live broadcast.  Couldn't they have re-shot those sequences.  Other times I've noticed people just sort of milling around behind the set, their silhouettes clearly visible behind the host.  When the contestants would hit their buzzers to answer the trivia questions, it sounds like you or way slapping our dining room table.  Presumably, the buzzers were not active until the host finished reading the question and only then would they actually buzz when struck.  But contestants were always trying to buzz in early, so there was always cacophony of table slapping to accompany the questions.  It just really hurt the overall professionalism of the show.  No, really.  Also, sometimes the tiles on the Big Board wouldn't light up and you'd just have empty spaces.  Or pieces of the set literally falling apart on camera.  I guess that's what separates the greats from the rest.  Can you ever remember Plinko on the Price is Right not working correctly, or some stage hand loitering just behind Alex Trebek?  I didn't think so.

4  Host Peter Tomarken

Do people aspire to be game show hosts, I wonder?  Well, if Peter Tomarken ever did he certainly found his calling.  The perfect blend of smarm and charm, he was actually kinda funny and appeared to have a good time ribbing the contestants.  Always with a smile that seemed genuine, he signed on with, "Welcome to Press Your Luck, the game where you can win a bundle or lose your shirt," and always signed off with a goofy little poem about whammies.  They were always terrible.  At one point they were sent in from viewers at home (allegedly).  Who would actually take the time and then spend the stamp to sent it in.  But as game show hosts go, he was pretty good.  Not as dignified as Trebek or Barker, not as creepy as Richard Dawson or Wink Martindale after too many plastic surgeries, it's a shame he never did much of note after Press Your Luck.

5.  The Whammies

As mentioned earlier. other cash and prizes, whammies also resided on the Big Board.  If you hit a whammy, a devilish looking little cartoon creature that bore a resemblance to the Tasmanian Devil wearing a cape, you lost all your money and prizes.  Get four whammies in a game and your disqualified.  As a kid I loved the whammies.  When a player got one a little cartoon whammy would appear next to the players money total, manically laughing and erasing their winnings with a lawnmower, WWI era fighter plane, or by moonwalking across them (this was the 80's after all), or other such silliness.  It's a ridiculous gimmick that fans of the show love and haters hate.  Because that's what they do; haters gonna hate.

Bonus Reason:

In 1984 was embroiled in something of a scandal when contestant Michael Larson won over $110,000 utilizing 47 spins in one game, both a record by far.  The game actually had to be split between two episodes.  Believing Larson must have cheated, CBS initially refused to give him his winnings.  However, they could never prove it.  Larson had learned the pattern of the flashing lights and timed his buzzes accordingly.  His run is available on YouTube and is pretty fun to watch.  You can almost hear the producers' brains exploding.  Tragically, Larson lost all his money in bad business deals and died in 1999 of throat cancer.  He was only 50 when he died, though he looks like he was pushing 65 at the time of his winnings in 1984.  People just looked older back in the olden days I guess.

Here's Larson's record-breaking run:

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part 3

Blogger's Note:  Be sure to check out parts One and Two, if you missed  them.  You know you want to.

In our last installment we recapped Tree of Life, The Old Man and the Sea, Gone with the Wind, The Dust Bowl, and Red Tails.  What wonders will this edition bestow!

Midnight In Paris (2011 - Woody Allen) - Other than this one, I think I've only seen two other Woody Allen movies from start to finish, the mildly amusing Small Time Crooks, which I don't remember that much about except that I found it mildly amusing.  The other is Bananas, which I remember was actually pretty funny (that's about three steps ahead of mildly amusing).  I enjoyed Midnight in Paris.  Owen Wilson stars as a hacky screenwriter looking for inspiration to write a novel while in Paris with his neurotic fiance and her kooky rich parents.  On a late night walk he stumbles into an alternate universe where he is in 1920's Paris, rubbing elbows with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Salvador Dali, and a few other notable artists and authors of the era.  It's a lighthearted fantastic sort of movie, with good performances from Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and especially Michael Sheen as an uber-pretentious self-proclaimed expert on all things Paris.  The famous figures of the past are perfectly funny caricatures, particularly the manly man Ernest Hemmingway.  Dos Equis guy has nothing on him.  The dialog is clever and it probably helps that Woody is not actually saying the lines he's written.



Three Kings (1999 - David O. Russell) - A pretty underrated movie and one of Clooney's first meaty movie roles--ie not a cheesy action flick, rom-com, or franchise crushing comicbook movie.  Clooney plays an Army major during the closing days Desert Storm with doubts about the war.  He catches wind of a map a trio of non-coms find in an Iraqi soldier's hindparts that supposedly leads to a cache of Kuwaiti gold stolen by the Iraqis.  Seeking to get something out of his days in the desert, Clooney and his booty map (double-meaning!) finding cohorts, ably played by Mark Walberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze, take off to find the gold and end up in a series of sticky ceasefire situations involving the Iraqi Republican Guard, anti-Saddam partisans, and an exploding cow.  Among other things.  Director David O. Russell, who is getting love recently for his Oscar nominated Silver Linings Playbook, co-wrote the script which is both funny and thought provoking, which really all war movies should be.  Very solid flick.  I hadn't seen it for a long time and had forgotten how much I liked it.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010 - Dave Dubois and Chris Sanders) - I watched about half of Steven Spielberg's War Horse today, which is a similar type of story as How to Train Your Dragon, and I found the latter to be exceedingly more entertaining.  Granted they aren't exactly the same kind of movie, slapstick gags and one-liners may have been a little out of place in the WWI horse tale, but they're both "boy and his dog/horse/dragon" stories, where the lead character forms a bond with a creature and some sort of serration or crisis gets between them and the boy vows to never forget/desert the creature.  I won't be too hard on War Horse since I haven't seen it all the way through, but just as I wouldn't expect it to play for laughs, I would expecte it to go for the heart strings.  From what I've seen thus far Dragon tops Horse even in that respect, on top of being funny and exciting.  Rango was my favorite animated film I saw last year, but Dragon wasn't too far behind and had the added advantage of being something I could watch with my four year old daughter.

Rango (2011 - Gore Verbinski) - And speaking of the animated noir with a chamaleon in the lead role, here is my full-blow review of Rango from a few months back.  I really liked it.

From Here to Eternity (1953 - Fred Zinnermann) - Probably one of the most famous images from classic movies, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach as the tides washes over them, comes from this movie.  Starring Lancaster, Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Montgomery Clift, and Ernest Borgnine, the melodrama based on the racy novel of the same name, tracks the lives of the characters in and around an Army base at Pearl Harbor in the days before December 7th, 1941.  Honor, duty, infidelity, intimidation, love, scandal, friendship; it's all there.  Good performances all around, particularly Ernest Borgnine as scuzzy Sgt. Fatso Judson.  Legend has it Sinatra secured his role with a little help from his Mafia friends, providing the inspiration for the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather.  No word on how many horses lost their heads to make it happen.

Stay tuned for Part 4.

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part Two

Blooger's Note:  Don't forget to check out Part One if you haven't already.

Last time we took at quick look at Lincoln, The Shootist, Army of Crime, Four Christmases, and The Ox-Bow Incident.  Let's dive into part two.  Once again, these are in no particular order.

Tree of Life (2011 - Terrence Malick) - About a month ago I wrote up a full blown review of Tree of Life on my phone, only to have it inexplicably erased for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me.  I have no idea what life lessons Malick was trying to convey in Tree of Life, but he is indirectly responsible for teaching me one valuable lesson:  don't compose posts on your phone unless you are prepared to save every two minutes.  As the movie actually goes, if you've seen a Terrence Malick movie before you know what you're going to get, more or less.  If you haven't here's what you're going to get:  a non-linear, amorphous "plot", lots of shots of the sun and leaves and hands running through tall grass, and possibly dinosaurs.  The movie is "about" the life and times of a 1950's family in Waco, Texas.  Growing up and domineering fathers (Brad Pitt), and childhood and loss and Sean Penn wandering around looking like he's got IBS and...dinosaurs.  It's not for everybody, but it's worth seeing if for nothing else then its incredible visual beauty.  Just don't expect to have any idea of what's going on for at least the first hour.  Then the dinosaurs show up.

The Old Man and the Sea (1958 - John Sturges) - A straight forward visual retelling of Ernest Hemmingway's famous novella.  Spencer Tracy stars as the Old Man.  Not really much else to say about it.  Considering the vast majority of the movie is the Old Man sitting alone in a boat thinking to himself, Tracy does a good enough job of keeping you interested, but the movie doesn't really add anything to the story and the book is, of course, much better.

Gone with the Wind (1939 - Victor Fleming) - I had never seen Gone with the Wind before, but as an amateur film buff had always wanted to.  However, it's quite a commitment at 238 minutes.  I could watch a few other movies I'd also like to see in that same time frame.  But, when you're laid up on the couch with the flu you've got nothing but time on your hands.  Such was the case this past Thanksgiving weekend.  Like a lot of classic movies, it's one I'm glad I saw and can certainly appreciate it's achievements, but it's not a movie I see myself watching again for a very long time.  It's romantic celebration of the Old South seems juuuuust a touch out of step with today's sensibilities.  Slavery is actually mentioned very little, which might seem odd for a movie set in and around the Civil War.  And though it isn't really meant to be about slavery, it is about the antebellum South and to sort of whitewash the peculiar institution almost completely out of the picture, some may find of-putting.  I didn't, only because it should be viewed as a product of it's time (which is not the same as saying the attitudes of that time are ok just because they were the attitudes of that time, if that makes any sense at all).  I imagine a sort of parallel study of slavery as seen through the history of film making with Gone with the Wind and modern films such as, oh I don't know,say, Django Unchained, would be pretty interesting.  Again, worth seeing for it's place in movie history, and because it is a good movie, but also because you'll recognize a lot of well known lines that have been repeated, copied, and spoofed that you never knew originated from the mouths of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

The Dust Bowl (2012 - Ken Burns) - As a history buff, I'm a huge Ken Burns fan.  His latest offering chronicles the experiences of those who lived in a few small towns in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, right in the heart of the dust bowl during the Depression.  If you're unfamiliar with what the dust bowl was, see this movie.  But in a nutshell, for a good part of the 1930's the Great Plains were struck by an ecological catastrophe, caused both by man and by nature.  The combination of drought and over exuberant plowing, left the land barren and windswept.  Giant dust storms became the norm, blowing mountainous clouds of dirt into the air and causing "black blizzards."  You know in dry, dusty areas when you get those nasty black boogers in your nose?  Imagine having that experience for half a decade or so.  In typical Ken Burns style, The Dust Bowl comes to life through photographs, interviews with the regular folks who survived it, and letters and correspondence from those who have since passed away.  Another edutaining look at American history from Mr. Burns.  This Mr. Burns, not this one.

Red Tails (2012 - Anthony Hemmingway) - I gave this plane wreck a full scale review several months ago.  It still makes me angry that the Tuskegee Airmen might not ever get the film treatment their story deserves thanks to this debacle.  Sigh.

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Stay tuned for Part Three.