Well this was my first time ever seeing the original Balance Game...all I can say is I see why it didn't last. The contestant appeared confused about when the Barker Dollars came in to play and never got the opportunity to use them. At one point, she even asked Bob if she could use them, yet he seemed to ignore her and didn't answer.
I didn't want to post 3 times in a row above so I'll add to this. I actually thought this was a game that worked very well on paper. I actually loved the core idea: using the prizes to balance one another out. It had several problems though:
1) It seemed under-rehearsed and/or as if the on-camera talent didn't understand the game. Bob did a
terrible job explaining it (at one point he was talking about thousands of dollars and I was at sea), Janice seemed lost about where to take the Barker dollars during the game and relied on Bob who also seemed flustered.
2) The way to win was obscure. Basically you needed to put the most expensive prize on one side and balance it out with the less expensive prizes. So in that playing the $100 recorder needed to be on one side where as the other prizes needed to be on the other in some combination. The contestant using the smaller prizes to balance each other out was noble (and pretty much how you'd think to use a balance) but they never worked to balance each other out since their differences were causing the balance to be off in $10-$15 increments going either way as the contestant added prizes (when the contestant could only be unbalanced by $5). It got to be super unlucky that the last prize left was the recorder, which just led to an anti-climactic mega-loss.
3) I concur that Bob really botched the explanation of the Barker dollars. Its simple: you can be unbalanced by $5 in either direction and you can use the 5 Barker dollars I'm giving you to correct the imbalance. And yet he was just like "here's $5 with my face on it" with no real instructions as to what to do.
I loved Balance Game '84 for what it was. But it definitely didn't pan out in execution.