The first season premiere I vividly remember watching (and recorded) was S32…has this really been 20 years ago??
As unreal as that seems, I did in fact watch the 52nd season premiere today some 20 years later, and boy, was it awesome to finally see a full audience again! It’s a year overdue in my opinion, but obviously the show had very little control over union protocols and so forth that mandated the continued use of the pods, so all is forgiven for their extended stay. I’m just happy they’re gone!
Part of me wishes I had never looked at any of the spoiler images of the new studio over the past month and instead let myself be totally surprised today, but I still enjoyed what I saw. There are a few kinks to work out, but overall, it seems like they’re running just as well oiled of a machine as they were up the road, which is massively impressive given all that went into making this move happen.
I do hate when Plinko ruins a perfect show. I get why they played it today, but man…. As others said in Discord, I suppose you can flip it around and say this was a ‘lossless’ show. I won’t gripe too much about it!
I’m also not the biggest fan of playing Golden Road for prizes that were in-line with its budget, say, 25 years ago. If we’re going to start playing the game more often, then perhaps it’s a fair compromise. But oh would I have loved to have seen a six-digit prize there. Maybe the extra prize budget there was spent on the move.
The main thing that seemed difficult for me were the shots of the audience for call downs. The shots were kind of dizzying to me, and I think it was because they were so close to the audience. I think there are 2 things causing this...one, the smaller space/audience. And the other, trying to shoot around those already in contestant's row, because now because they are higher relative to the audience they block the view.
I didn’t think about the raised contestants row getting in the way, but now that you mention it, this makes sense. While it looks fantastic — especially to have been created with such strict time constraints given the move and all that went along with it, it’s definitely obstructive in some situations.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we see some revisions to the current contestants row within the next season or two. The gap between each display is likely a product of having to piece the new row together so quickly. As I speculated in the Discord chat earlier, the reasoning behind the wider row in general is probably to accommodate special episodes with two or three contestants standing behind each one-bid position. They were able to easily accommodate this in the BBS, but the new raised platform may not allow for that transition to be made as easily. Moving forward, maybe (hopefully) they will increase the size of the one-bid displays — not by a gross amount, just enough to fill in the gaps better. After all, the Barker-era displays were actually larger than their LCD counterparts, just with smaller bezels. I think a display roughly the size of those but with the larger, LED bezels of today would fill the space just about perfectly.
In a perfect world where we can make the new studio at Haven look like an exact clone of Studio 33, perhaps they’ll physically dig out a ‘pit’ during the summer taping break, resolving nearly all of these issues without raising the stage.
Provided that probably won’t happen, I say we’ll have to deal with the different camera angles unless they can find a way to get creative — maybe have telescoping camera platforms they can raise by two or three feet when needed to simulate the stage being higher up? That may not even be possible. There’s also the jib, but… eh.
