Forgotten Television Shows: Volume Eleven

Haven’t done one of these for a very long time…

Forgotten Television Shows: Press Your Luck

I am fully convinced that the longest summer of your life occurs when you are eleven years old. Think about it, do you have a care in the world when you are eleven? Now, I know that this might sound like a beginning voice over from The Wonder Years where I will start talking about how all I wanted to do was make out with Winnie Cooper but then again, didn’t we all? But I swear that in retrospect those weeks seemed to last longer than entire years.

You just don’t have any concerns as an eleven year old kid in the summer. No job but you’ve got a bike so you can ride around the neighborhood but you’re still too young to get into any real trouble. You’ve reached the point where girls are now interesting but you’re not at that point where talking to a girl fills you with such anxiety and dread that you nearly double over due to fear and nausea (a feeling that goes away in your mid-thirties. Or so I hope). I think every day consisted of either a) working on my jump shot or b) playing with the Commodore 64 (probably the latter). Plus, it is that age where you start feeling devious and figure that if you angle your bedroom lamp just right that you can stay up late without your parents knowing. And if you keep the television volume low you could watch Carson and Letterman.

(This must seem like the most naïve thing in the world now. I remember thinking that I might get in trouble for watching Benny Hill late at night. The average eleven year old now probably has a broadband connection and is watching streaming video of midget porn every night.)

But if there is one thing that you do every day when you are eleven it is lie around the house and watch morning game shows. That was just what you did every day, got up and watched The Price is Right and The 25,000 Dollar Pyramid and Win, Lose or Draw and Press Your Luck. Especially Press Your Luck, quite possibly the only form of entertainment ever made for eleven year olds to enjoy and their mothers to absolutely despise.

It was hosted by the incomparable Peter Tomarkin, who seemed to graduate from that game show host school in which the requirements were that a) no one knew who the hell you were, b) you seemed like a nice guy who couldn’t make it past the third act at the Laugh Factory and c) you had really nice teeth. The show started with trivia questions. Very easy trivia questions. Insanely easy questions that were written only so that everyone at home could feel smarter than the contestants. Of course, none of the questions mattered because all that mattered was the big board.

Quite possibly the best game show gimmick ever, the big board consisted of a bunch of tv monitors showing cash, prizes and the dreaded whammies. As the boards randomly lit up you hit your buzzer and wherever it stopped that is what you got. Again, this is completely up an eleven year olds alley, just hit something, make a lot of noise and see what happens. And as a kid all you did was cheer for the whammies.

Because when you hit a whammy you got a little cartoon guy doing a victory spiel and spewing the worst jokes imaginable for taking away all the prizes. These things were literally as low tech as you could possibly be. I think they were being animated while the show was being broadcast but as a kid I thought that they were the coolest thing ever. And they were until the greatest moment in the history of game shows.

See, they had always said that the pattern of the Big Board was random. That of course was a lie and even an eleven year old EC knew that it was a lie. That’s because I watched the show so religiously that I noticed that there was a definite pattern to the way the board lit up and if you timed it just right you could never lose. And I was not alone in that discovery. One day you tuned in to see this guy, kind of fat, going gray, doesn’t seem to have much of anything going for him, start to play and always hitting Big Bucks plus a spin. He hit that every single time he played. It took two episodes for him to complete the game and when he did he had won over 100,000 dollars. It’s quite possibly the only time I watched an urban legend being born.

So I would like to salute the creators of Press Your Luck for making my childhood more enjoyable. For those thirty minutes every day all I had to do was sit back and watch people jump around and yell “No whammies, no whammies, stop!” You had cartoons and flashing lights and people losing thousands of dollars in an instant. It was an eleven year old kids dream. Well, at least until he learns about midget porn…