Would it be a fair assumption to say that the Whammy animations, as played during a typical episode of PYL, were probably recorded on tapes, and played back and keyed on as called for?

If so, what might have happened to those tapes? Any slim chance they could've found their way to one/some of the production staff after PYL ended, or were they likely all wiped and sent back to CBS's spare tape stockpile?

I would believe some of them exist someplace. Clean whammies were keyed into GSN promos when Press Your Luck came on the schedule. Maybe they were part of the episode package. Considering some game board hardware managed to survive all these years and showed up on that GSN documentary, chances of at least some of the animations hanging around seem pretty high.

-Jason

Some of the original whammies were also used for the "Game Show Marathon" from a couple of summers ago, so the tapes likely exist someplace.

My memory is fuzzy from working on it, but as far as I can recall they found the Whammy animations somewhere. I remember the search for those.

I also recall the search for the actual Whammy master slides. I remember having to cut out the Whammy from giant images of the slides taken from various places and getting them to look as good as possible on the show. It was tough. The part I don't know about is the whole prize slide situation. I know we made a lot of them by hand but I don't completely know if they actually found any masters of those or if they were all our Photoshop work. We were trying to get the Flokati rug to look remotely normal. That took an unbelievable amount of time to look like a rug and not some sort of swamp. Lots of fun to work on the show, but aggravating how it got screwed up at the end from poor production. And hey, I got a paycheck.

I seem to recall that on Mandel Ilagan's website he had pics from a Press Your Potluck party he threw a few years back where they played a game of PYL at his house. On the screen where they played the game, he had what seemed to be the show's actual animations for the Whammies on a green or black background. I checked his site, and those pics seem to have disappeared.......

Tyshaun

At least one non-GSN Whammy animation from 1986 (The Willie Nelson Whammy) was featured in promos for the show back in 2001. Whether it was lifted directly from an actual 1986 episode or not, I have no clue.

Speaking of 1986 episodes, I'm pretty sure that GSN does have all 750+ episodes of the show in their collection. They just only had the rights to 450 shows from February 1984-November 1985, though.

Fremantle probably has all the episodes, but not GSN, at least not anymore. That didn't used to be such a big distinction, but it appears that it is now.

If push came to shove, it could have been rotoscoped. From a motion graphics person's standpoint, that would have taken FOREVER, mind you, but it can be done.

How were the cash and special slides made? Those were the only two that haven't been yet discussed.