The second-most anticipiated episode of mine, and I've got to say they did fairly well with this one. The set didn't quite measure up to Press Your Luck, but at least they used Perry's version and not the Eubanks version.
Speaking of the Eubanks version, I'm still very puzzled as to why they made no mention of it despite including clips from it (and they didn't even mention the Rafferty version while they were at it). You would think they would since it was the CBS version. Glad they left out the pitiful 2001 revival, or with it's blink-and-you-missed-it history, maybe they forgot about it.
The opening of the game was fantastic. My jaw dropped as to how close it resembled the original, but they butchered the opening poem beyond what was acceptable.
I am glad that Paige is out of the game now. She started as the best celebrity in the game and then became the most annoying. That "sixty-nine" crap was beyond stupid. Brande became the more-likeable contestant, but honestly, neither of them were overly impressive.
Nice to see clips even make it into the game. It was
really nice that they used some of the pilot. I wonder how hard it would be to chop those parts into my atrociously-awful video quality copies of them...
The maingame was farily enjoyable, but Money Cards irked me a bit. They recreated the Money Cards board well enough, but what was up with the contestant podium? It had little to no resemblence to the original. The might as well have gone podium-less like the Eubanks version. Plus, if they were playing for $144,000 possible total, why then didn't the display have seven digit displays? That thing they had wouldn't have even displayed beyond $10,000 without dropping the dollar sign.
And the car round...I'm not completly up to date on the Eubanks version, but if I remember correctly, the car game was played with ten cards with the contesant having to choose the card that said "CAR," right? Why then did they butcher it with a format that wasn't even used? Did they have to involve their group of ten that much?
Speaking of the group of ten, nice that they included that element of the game. Now, why didn't they have any "educated guess" questions?
Overall, not totally bad, certanily not the worst episode of the series, but there were a lot of places where they could have easily done a lot better.
Robert Searcy wrote:
That was the pilot episode (or one of them......IIRC, I think there were 2 pilots shot for this, but don't hold me to that).
Yes, there were two pilot episodes. Both were actually shot the same day. The clip of the $28,800 Money Cards win comes from the second pilot.