It is with pain and remorse that I offer this critical observation. Mr Barker had two verbal ticks that got in the way of clarity.[=
On the contrary, I find this kind of discussion quite engaging since it only comes about in a day and age of overindulgement of 24/7 reruns that is so far removed from when these episodes originally aired.
Hit Me— Bob had a reluctance or a verbal block in calling an ace an “ace”. He would call it a “one” that could also be an eleven. Found it odd that in his effort to parallel the playing of the game to Blackjack that he never got around to calling an Ace an Ace, for clarity’s sake.
It may be this was to make simpler the "math" to the contestant. It may also be that it was to avoid "locking" on the ace as eleven when the contestant, say, followed that with a deuce and then a ten. You don't want to score them a bust. I'm not sure if anybody's keeping track, but it would be interesting to see how strictly they played the ace in those years compared to later years when it was essentially a floating one or eleven, depending on what was most convenient.
Now and Then— Bob would use the phrase “three in a row” when explaining what is needed to win. If he had used the phrase “side by side” or “connected to each other” it would have been more accurate and might have produced fewer blank stares from contestants.
Agreed. The terminology of "three in a row" never made sense, since the products were not arranged in a row, nor was successive correctness pertinent to victory.
And as demonstrated by the clip uploaded to the YouTube channel today, while in later years in this game--when there was only one winning combination left, Bob would just pick a starting point and have the contestant go from there--I preferred the former way that in such a scenario, Bob would at least ask the contestant where he'd like to begin. Yeah, it leads to the "blank stares" (since contestants who have messed up that badly to be locked into using all six products for a shot at victory generally haven't grasped the game very well), but it's akin to rolling a one or a six in the Dice Game. It's just not
right if the MC just plows along without getting the contestant to consent to "higher" or "lower" even if it's defaulted because a choice is still supposed to be made.
