What are some of the times you remember daytime game shows plugging new stations picking up their show. I recall the $25,000 Pyramid welcoming stations in Seattle and Atlanta and some others.

I'm pretty darn sure Card Sharks '78 did that...I think I have one instance on tape. Or at least I have an instance on tape where a show welcomed a new station...

...come to think of it, I'll look sometime.

This is somewhat off-base, but I remember one iteration of FOX's NFL pregame show in which James Brown welcomed a new station, which somewhat took me by surprise because it was the year 200something.

Approximately when did this practice stop?

I can remember (especially during the Combs era) "Family Feud" doing it too, both for network and syndicated.

PYL did it a few times as well. One 1984 episode explained the rules as though it was the first show (I believe for a station in Detroit, but I'm not positive on that), and there were some welcome mats rolled out for some stations in 1985 (WITI in Milwaukee stands out [they're now FOX, but they were CBS then]).

It was done every so often...not sure how many times Perry did it, but I remember a couple of times that he did it.

On an unrelated note, he would plug the station the opening poem writer would watch the show on every once in a while.

It was more than once in a while, it was once in a while plus!

/Sorry.

From mid-1979 onward, Perry plugging the affiliate was pretty much an everyday thing. There'd be a rare occasion was the affiliate wasn't mentioned (possibly because of some affiliates no longer carrying CS when it moved to the death slot but the person's poem was used anyway).

And on another unrelated note, $otC, SCRABBLE and SP would take numerous opportunities to congratulate a local affiliate on their xxth anniversary with NBC (I think WoF did, too, but I don't think they did it as often).

The NBC version of Chain Reaction did the same a couple times in it's relatively short run. Don't know about any of the other late 70s-early 80s NBC series though.

As for general plugs of a station, I know the current run of Family Feud has done it several times, but not in the last couple of years.

One of the weirdest ones was on "Hot Potato" when Bill welcomed a new station in Boston, Channel 68 or what ever it was, which wasn't even an NBC affiliate. I guess they knew WBZ would never pick up HP.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Blockbusters in this thread, as Bill Cullen can still be heard constantly mentioning affiliates--either welcoming them or giving them a "shout-out"--even in the GSN reruns.

I believe a Houston station was also welcomed in that 1984 episode. I never understood why they redid the rule explanation (and do a demo spin again) for those two stations, when they didn't do it any other time. Maybe they figured Detroit and Houston were two big-enough markets to warrant it.

In a fall 1985 episode, Tomarken welcomed back "the whole state of Indiana". There were four stations listed, and it was just after Daylight Savings Time ended.

I remember Peter welcome KGAN in Cedar Rapids, IA--"the parlor city"--to the PYL family, and Bob Eubanks announcing that "Dream House" was now on KMTV in Omaha (this was before I moved to the area, and before thay switched to CBS...but I actually asked them to consider picking it up despite the fact that I could watch it regularly in Des Moines).

Every NBC game show did the affiliate strokes. Kept them happy and might've been a way to keep them from immediately dropping the show.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that Chuck Barris had to do them on "Gong"--although half the time I'm sure he screwed them up.

I remember seeing an ep of Body Language on GSN where Tom welcomed WKBD in Detroit. This struck me as odd because WJBK was the CBS affiliate at the time. Of course I could have misunderstood/transposed the call letters, but I distinctly remember at that moment pondering why a network show would air on an independent station.

-Greg

On a MG '90 I came across a couple days ago while converting some shows from VHS to DVD, Ross welcomes WHAS in Louisville, who had just "joined the ABC family". (WHAS had swapped affiliation with WLKY, who took over as the Louisville CBS affil)

I seem to recall Dick Clark on $25,000 Pyramid welcoming WITI in Milwaukee as well. One thing that was kind of neat was I had a cable system that had CBS stations in Chicago, Milwaukee and Rockford and I actually was able to catch Pyramid in three slots as Channel 6 Milwaukee had it an hour early at 8:00, Channel 23 Rockford had it at its normal slot at 9:00 and Channel 2 WBBM Chicago had it an hour late at 10:00.