Stardate 20010907.1030 (On Screen): James is nostalgic for
Let's Make a Deal! I confess that when I was young and home from school with whatever virus was going around, that I never failed to watch the show. One difference between it and some game such as
The Match game or
Jeopardy was that there was no skill whatever in
Let's Make a Deal! It was completely luck -- luck to be chosen to participate, luck to pick the right box or door.
Of course, if we want to talk about moronic TV game shows, the absolute nadir had to be Supermarket Sweep. Imagine if you will a studio audience sitting on bleachers near the front of a grocery store, and carefully placed cameras permitting viewing of the entire place. Three contestants are given shopping carts and given a small number of minutes to fill them with whatever they want from the store and get them back to the front. Each gets to keep whatever they collect, but whoever's basket rings up to the highest price gets a special prize. (I don't even remember what it was anymore.) The problem was that there was an optimum strategy and once it got found the game ceased to be interesting: head the for the meat section and load up on steak. At a buck a pound (this was a long time ago, folks) you could rack up a lot of dollars very fast there. The show organizers tried to offset this by hiding coupons elsewhere in the store which were worth bonuses in hopes of getting the sweepers to go somewhere else, but it never worked. These stores didn't have a liquore section; if they had, that would have been the place to go. Load up on the Amaretto and Cointreau! (discuss)
