So now each of the two contestants can only be on twice for two games instead of just one only having one chance and a winner keeps on going past two times if he or she can.
And there are fewer stars on the big wheel so even less of a chance for them to get a double.
I don't like it that they made these changes.
I'm guessing it's an experiment to draw in more viewers or else I'm watching repeats of the syndicated evening version where the game show title is not followed by the year anymore and they wanted it to be different than the daytime version.
Anyone know why the changes?
It was syndicated
daytime episodes. CBS canceled the show in 1979, and it continued in syndication (right when the title changes from
Match Game 79 to simply
Match Game). In this system, episodes were distributed to the various subscribing stations in one-week batches in a kind of "round robin", so the different weeks' episodes were shown in different week-order in different cities. (GSN apparently shows them in actual production order.) This meant that there could be no continuity from one week to the next, so they established a pattern of always playing exactly six games in five days. This is why they often resolved ties with "sudden death", to keep on schedule; and why if they occasionally finished the week's six games
early, Gene would go out into the audience. The fixed two-game play was probably done so that it didn't matter whether you appeared early or late in the week for how much you could play. And letting the player who was ahead go first in round 2 insured that both players would get to play two questions, and help even-out the length in the process.
The change to the Star Wheel was indeed a budget-tightening measure; which seems ironic when comparing MG to
Wheel of Fortune a few years later, where the syndicated version played for
bigger money than what aired on NBC during the same era.
I also noticed that once it switched to syndication, they mostly avoided questions where obvious answers would be "boobs" or "tinkle". I suspect that this is because on the network they were one single mass market to the entire nation, whereas selling in syndication they had to be more concerned about possibly more delicate sensibilities in various local markets.
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