Small details

There are some new graphics wrinkles in our little genre this season. They've gotten a bit of notice, so I'll join in.

Millionaire has done the biggest makeover. The long-standing question graphics have given way to, let's say, a blue parallelogram look. See the screenshot for a sample. There are other graphics tweaks, which give the show a little less traditional look. It's really not a big deal, but that's why this entry has "small" in the title.

Meanwhile, Wheel of Fortune has started displaying letters onscreen as they are called. The screenshot shows a contestant calling a "T". If a hapless player calls an unused letter, a slash appears across the graphic. The slash rather oddly reminds me of no-smoking signs.

Graphics packages have never been a big deal for me in game shows. Jeopardy was just fine with cardboard clues on a manually operated board. But time moves on and the small details change.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ratings: Alex has a forgettable week

Image
Another slow summer week saw a new season low for Jeopardy and not much cheer for other syndie game shows. At least most of them were flat. TV News Check has the lackluster household ratings for the week of August 13-19... Family Feud 6.1 - down a tick but still on top of the genre Wheel of Fortune 5.3 - flat Jeopardy 5.2 - down a couple ticks to that season low Millionaire 1.6 - flat Funny You Should Ask 0.5 - flat for the perennial cellar dweller I doubt that Steve Harvey will be too concerned about the tenth of a point. Celebrity Family Feud is still drawing over six million viewers and is heading for a sixth season next summer. A cable note: the latest run of America Says drew 440K viewers compared to 370K viewers for the latest run of Cash Cab . Trouble is, Discovery gets much better numbers overall than GSN. Not a good sign for Ben and friends. Meanwhile, GSN got 415K/272K viewers prime time/total day for the week of August 20-26. The network ranked 34th and 29th in
Read more

Yeah, they were game show hosts

Image
A guy named Bradley Clarke puts some cute articles about game shows on the Interwebs now and then. He's got a new list of celebs who hosted game shows, even if you don't recall their gigs in the genre. As a grizzled old game show blogger, I do remember all these hosts. Though I'll admit that I've spent way too many hours watching game shows which didn't deserve way too many hours. One of Clarke's picks is Carrie Ann Inaba, who hosted GSN's reboot of 1 vs. 100 in 2010. This was a show that I thought did deserve a bigger audience, but my view was not the received opinion. GSN had to cheapen the prize money and production values - this is cable, folks - and that left the reboot open to easy criticism. Carrie was also not the best host, as she tended to rely on irritating catch phrases. Sure enough, Bradley Clarke plods through some of these complaints in his acidic view of GSN's version. Overall, the rewind was hardly terrible, even if it suffered in com
Read more

Marathon runner

Image
Yesterday I was whining that I didn't have anything to write about Buzzr. To be honest, I still don't have anything about the diginet, but I'll sort of make something up. An older-is-better poster on the game show Reddit board plods through the usual complaint about GSN running too much - stop me if you've heard this before - Harvey Feud . But she continues the whine with slams on too much Cash Cab , too much syndie Millionaire , too much Sherriwed, and too much of just about any other show with less than fifteen years of dust on it. Somebody in the cable industry patiently explains to her that ratings dictate what goes onto any commercial TV network. This is true, of course, and it will do absolutely no good with the older-is-better true believer. So how do I get to Buzzr from this? Today Buzzr happens to be grinding through its own marathons. Nine eps of Match Game followed by four eps of Supermarket Sweep followed by six eps of Password Plus / Super Password . I d
Read more