A Classic PYL Question

[Blissey]

About the Whammies on the original "Press Your Luck," I have a question. See, I was watching the 4th of July episode that BUZZR posted on their YouTube channel, and it got me thinking: when the contestant hit a Whammy, did they play the Whammy in studio?

[vnisanian2001]

Yes. I remember Rick Stern (associate director) said on Facebook that the Whammy animations were on one-inch tapes.

[JayC]

I would assume the contestants saw the Whammy animations since they would sometimes be shown reacting to them before the symbol popped up on the podium.

[Axl]

The contestants could clearly see the Whammies, but I always wondered how.  Logically you would expect a monitor to be embedded in the platform next to the scoreboard that the contestant looks at, but I never saw a monitor like that in any wide shot.  Were the monitors hidden somehow in the carpeted slope underneath the scoreboards?  Did a stagehand roll a monitor in front of the contestants, just off-camera?  I've never figured it out or seen a definitive explanation anywhere.

[ThomHuge]

The contestants could clearly see the Whammies, but I always wondered how.  Logically you would expect a monitor to be embedded in the platform next to the scoreboard that the contestant looks at, but I never saw a monitor like that in any wide shot.  Were the monitors hidden somehow in the carpeted slope underneath the scoreboards?  Did a stagehand roll a monitor in front of the contestants, just off-camera?  I've never figured it out or seen a definitive explanation anywhere.

If you look closely during some of the credit longer credit rolls (the ones where they used the wider shots), you could sometimes see a black box off to one side of the stage. It was never all that clearly shown, but best I can recall it looked like it was divided into nine squares--not sure why but I always figured that was what they played the Whammies on.