2004-03-05 - 1:40 p.m.

Toys and Games

This is what bastion calls a place-holder. It’s just a post that I’m still here, until I’ve worked out what’s really on my mind.

I’ve written before about toys, particularly the craze to provide the gift of toys to every child. I think the toys I remember best were hand-me-downs (not unlike the clothes my cousins didn’t wear out), or else they actually belonged to someone else. Tinker-Toys and Lincoln Logs appealed to me, but I seem to remember that my brother commandeered those. Most likely they had been given to him with the instruction to “share with your sisters.” Y’know how well that works.

Board games were great, especially those that depended more on skill than on luck. (I still don’t play poker; what can you do if the right cards aren’t there?) Among others, we had “Double or Nothing,” based on a radio quiz show, and “Go to the Head of the Class,” another game driven by questions and answers. I loved those. If no one else wanted to play, I could do them by myself. When I came to a question I couldn’t answer, I looked in the answer book. Point of no return: I memorized all the answers, and then no one wanted to play with me. Nobody likes a smarty.

Well, there were still quizzes on the radio (remember Groucho Marx, “You Bet Your Life”?) and soon we had television and there were a lot of quiz shows. The more you loved quiz shows, the more hurt you felt when the big scandal was exposed. Around that time, game shows – as opposed to quizzes – proliferated. I liked a lot of them too.

One of my favorite games was “Password,” which you could play your own way, even as you watched the show. “Password” was broadcast in New York and, when there was a prolonged newspaper strike, personalities from the theater played on the show as alternative advertisement. I think that was the beginning of seeing celebrities all over the place – they were on game shows, they were on talk shows, they got onto the news shows… We still love to play, but M.D. and I are so good at “Password” that no one else enjoys playing with us; I told you, nobody likes a smarty.

In the early sixties, “Jeopardy!” appeared, with Art Fleming. Wow, that was good, with really hard questions. I went to New York to try out, and I think I did pretty well on the test; however, I went back to school soon after that and I was unreachable by telephone, so I’ll never know. “Jeopardy!” was still around when my babies were born, and I watched it while I nursed them; I needed the mental stimulation. Somewhere along the way, the network decided that “Jeopardy!” didn’t appeal to as many people as something like “Hollywood Squares,” another celebrity-driven show. It was funny, but it wasn’t stimulating. I was still looking for hard shows, until the return of “Jeopardy!” with Alex Trebek. That was more like it. On the Comedy Channel, “Win Ben Stein’s Money” eventually provided another source of good questions.

The Game Show Network began by airing old shows that I had seen thirty years ago and more. The original “What’s My Line?” with John Daly. The original “I’ve Got a Secret,” with Garry Moore. Who cared if they were black and white? They were still funny.

GSN would air two straight hours of “Password” in all its incarnations, and we’d work out alternate ways to play it. And we still laugh with “Match Game” and Gene Rayburn, though I remember the first version of “Match Game” (black and white, of course) with more contestants and fewer celebrities.

Then GSN began developing some new shows, some better than others. I liked “Inquizition.” (That’s probably why it only lasted a couple of seasons.) On “Inquizition” all the contestants had a chance to answer every question asked, so that the issue wasn’t who had the best reflexes. And the multiple-choice questions – not easy to begin with – were made harder with the choice “none of the above.” (I suppose that nothing I learned in college was wasted.)

The other thing I liked about “Inquizition” was that you could try to become a home contestant, playing along by phone. It wasn’t easy getting through, but I did. Someone took all my information and told me when to expect a call-back (about half an hour before the show would begin), and I would play along by using the buttons on my phone.

This was harder than it looked, because you couldn’t watch the show at the same time. The few seconds delay between the phone and the TV was enough to make you miss the question. I sat tailor-fashion, with the phone in my lap, the receiver to my ear, and my eyes closed. I made it through the first phase, after which the lowest-scoring studio contestant and home contestant were eliminated.

I made it through the other sections as well, scoring just about as high as anyone ever did. I missed two questions – timing more than knowledge – out of about sixty-five. The prize was $250 – not much in the way of cash but priceless in the way of validation. Sometimes it’s okay to be a smarty.

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