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How to explain the amazing success of the game show Wheel Of Fortune, the biggest hit in the history of syndication television? It must be the mental challenge, such as it it. TV watching is such a passive experience that it's fun to play along with the game, to match wits with retired tool-and-die makers from Elkhart, Ind., and accountants from Saugus, Mass., even if they do applaud wildly and shriek a lot.
CBS's two-year-old entry Press Your Luck though, comes from a different game show tradition. It's about as participatory as standing on the sidewalk waiting for a safe to fall on your head. Sometime in the evolvation of game shows, TV executives started applying one of their favorite inaccurate cliches about the viewing audience: that it's a "fast paced" world out there and people spend most of their time playing video games, so wired on sensory overload that the box has got to act something like a cattle prod to wake people up. And Press Your Luck is like Times Square on speed -- more flashing lights and beeps and jangles and special effects and zap-pow-whiz-bang than any other such show on the air.
It's not that its actually more tacky than other game shows. In fact, its gotten to the point where it's well high impossible to be shocked by anything in a game show. Running the gamnut from College Bowl, on the past the semi-respectable Jeopardy to Wheel Of Fortune to The Newlywed Game all the way to the outer regions of The $1.98 Beauty Contest, Press Your Luck lies somewhere in the middle.
It may be hard to believe that something considered "moderate" would feature contestants who spend much of their time yelling, "C'mon big bucks!", But there it is.
Press Your Luck is aptly named: a few offbeat "questions" are asked, and by answering correctly players accumulate "spins" for later use, but the real action is the spinning. The lights start pulsating randomly. You yell "Gimme a spin -- you better do it to me!" or "C'mon big bucks!" You push a button, and you win money, or perhaps the stainless cookware, or a trip to Portland.
But the gimmick here is the "whammy". If the whammy stikes, you groan, lose all your money and watch helplessly as a little animated figure of the whammy marches across the screen in front of you laughing at your dissgrace. Though the contestants grin gamely when they get whammied, underneath you can see that they'd really like to turn this cute little guy into breand-name hot sauce.
You can't blame them, especially when the game is structured so that often the contestant stumped by most of the questions gets lucky with the whammy and wins. This doesn't seem fair. One redeeming feature of Press Your Luck however: only when the game's over does host Peter Tomarken say, "After this message, we'll come back and tell you about what you've won." Would that more game shows endorsed that theory. [END]
