One of the things that annoyed me about when Bob hosted is he would sometimes not really explain a game. He’s ask a contestant if they knew how to play it, and if they said yes, he’d let them at it. For me though I was a fairly new viewer and had no idea how all the games were played.
And Barker would usually explain the rules while the contestant was playing the game, letting the contestant show how much of a "loyal friend and true" he was while not leaving out the process for anybody who didn't know.
I appreciate how Drew explains every game when it comes up.
The perceived need to explain the rules to everything every time is terrible crutch on which the game show hosts of today lean. A full-blown explanation of the rules is not always needed. Use that valuable time for contestant interaction (and not in a way that's fake and staged).
A non-Price example, but it works: Only now that time constraints have finally caught up with the current version of Family Feud is there not always an explanation of the rules to Fast Money (and the forced exclamation of "twenty thousand dollars!" by the first player). For decades, though, there seemed to be the need to
always explain the rules in full
every episode (and let's not forget all the time with wasted applause and a music sting when returning from the commercial break before we even get to this point). Oftentimes on Dawson Feud, the beginning to Fast Money was a fade in from black with Dawson saying, "fifteen seconds, please". Ding, the clock would come up and, boom, Dawson would be into the first question.
I
so miss that speed with game shows, and I know what I just described was usually what happened when the game ran long and they needed to hurry along to finish on time, but it was doing things live-to-tape and not relying on post-production editing that made for a better flow to watch as a viewer. Plus, if things ran long in the main game, it was usually because something genuinely amusing happened.
The same goes for Price. Barker was a pro at managing the good contestants and bringing the best out of them and taking a little longer where things were making for good television, and then he'd hurry along elsewhere cutting the unnecessary bits to save time. True, sometimes other good contestants were played short since earlier ones took up too much time, but more often than not, the trade-off got something engaging and entertaining while maintaining the live feel of the show.