Two car wins to start off the season, but a DOB brought down the end. I was surprised Drew didn't mention the fact that this was a season premier at all; Wayne mentioned it on
LMaD, but nary a word here. Maybe it's because they didn't have any souped-up prizes or because they wanted the flexibility to reorder the airing date of the episodes if they saw a need. Some specific thoughts:
Contestant coordinators: please, please, please stop telling the contestants to do a dance move on the way in. If they really want to on their own, fine, but having every single contestant do it is getting old
fast.5PT: Falsitis almost gobbled up another contestant in this game, but a nice escape at the end.
L7: When the third number was a 5, I thought they were making this easy, but then the fourth number was a 9, nixing that thought. Good job by the contestant navigating the traps!
Time is Money: Ouch. At least we don't have to worry much about the contestant slowing down by looking to the audience for advice, but no matter how fast you were, that was a tough setup. I was a bit surprised when Rachel made the items "look nice" after the contestant's first guess, as I would've thought they wouldn't want both the contestant and Rachel touching the same surface.
P. S. an apology, especially if any of the contestants are reading this: I'm writing this from memory, and I don't remember the contestant's names
.
The host maintaining control of the $$$ is very telling of how games that use that type of “interaction” will handled. This list is not meant to be comprehensive, but think about these scenarios:
The handling of the balls in Three Strikes
The handling of the Drew Dollars in both Vend-o-Price and Balance Game
The handling of the dice in Dice Game
The handling of the dice in Let em Roll for that matter
The handling of the Easy 1-2-3 blocks
And I second the “rehearsed” feeling of the CODs. Also, the wardrobe of said contestants. Very much NOT the “come as you are” of the past.
We saw Easy az 1-2-3 today, and Drew didn't touch the blocks; only the contestant did. We saw Balance Game during the primetime show a couple of weeks ago, and the contestant put all three bags (the three digit bag and the two four digit bags) on the scale. For Let 'em Roll, the contestant never actually touches the dice anyway, so I don't see much change necessary there. For Dice Game, they had a dice based game on
LMaD today (Winfall) and Jonathan used a contraption that was basically a very long set of tweezers to "hand" the die back to the contestant; they'll probably do something similar on
TPiR (except Drew would use it to put the die in the slot on the board). In short, conceptually speaking, I think Drew handling the money in Lucky $even is going to be the exception, not the rule.
Anyone else recognize Tonoccus as one of the anchors of the old "Channel One" teen newscasts they would play for us in high school back in the late 90's/early 2000's? Should I be telling the kids to get the hell off my lawn?
I didn't recognize him specifically, but I certainly do remember Channel One. *shudder*