There are two very small spoilers in here, but other than that, these are just my opinions as the show went on:

Whoa, new opening logo animation! Very nice.

They didn't lie about the new one bid displays- the LCDs work JUST like the old ones. I think they're smaller now.

Plinko reveal is now a wide shot of the curtain being lifted. I like the shot.

God, the other side of the turntable is ugly. I can see it clashing with a few of the other games. Unless, of course, Drew had it painted that way to subliminally make us root for the Sounders.

I like the new "promotional consideration" shot.

A Dell/HP mixup? They must not have gotten close enough to the computer to see the logo. Well, at least he got the prize anyway.

Grocery Game clashes with the other side of the turntable too. I wonder if they've thought about repainting some of the games.

That sherbet looked like a generic package they put together and randomly slapped a price on.

That showcase display is so hard to read. They should just change it back to make it look like the old eggcrate display.

I like most of the new camera shots. Minus the Showcase podiums and the back of the turntable, the set looks great. Drew's good- still a little lax for my tastes, but he seems like a better host. Looks like he's trying to build up some tension with the Showcase reveals now.

Oh, and a word to the wise: if you're gonna obviously underbid your showcase, make sure that you know the other person is obviously over. He cut that one pretty close, and I'm sure he thought she was over by a LOT more.

Was he underbidding? I thought he and his friends were just nervous and/or clueless.

Loved Drew's quip about the contestant thinking it was 1979.

No way. That showcase was waaay more than the $10,000 bid he put in. Even I would have guessed between $20 and $25K. Even a calculated bid puts a car at more than $10K. Had to have been an underbid.

Nobody should need subliminal suggestions to root for the Sounders. :)

/of course, it'd be an easier sell if they could score a friggin' goal at home

It appeared that the one-bid displays had colored fabric stretched over them - much like the old displays would have. If that's the case, it's a nice touch and quite the attention to detail, although the displays seem a bit too dark.

The Showcase displays, however, need a major overhaul. Having the display just be static with some wacky font goes against the aesthetic of the rest of the show. If you're going to show off that, yeah, it's a monitor now, have the numbers do some sort of flippy animation, have some kind of color-change for winners and overbids - have something. Or, do like you're doing on Contestant's Row, grab yourself the Eggcrate font, and get to emulatin'. Short of either of those things, you might as well slap Comic Sans and Arial up there and call it a day.

I was also surprised to see the old displays used on Plinko and the Showdown. Perhaps monitors will be phased in as the season progresses.

Oh, and the new set? Sharp. Very spiffy. And hopefully Drew's found his groove and will be able to maintain a solid performance through the entire season, picking up where he left off in the last couple months of season 37.

I honestly don't mind the Showcase monitor fonts as much as the color (looks like Gotham-the font they used on M.G.'s Crosswords). White text on black or a darker shade of blue background looks easier on the eyes, but I'd honestly go for emulating the eggcrates as well.

Still haven't seen the Contestants Row totes and haven't gotten enough of an idea from the pics...are they plasma monitors like the showcase screens, or traditional vane totes, like what Super Password used?

The pics lead me to believe they're plasma / LCD. In 2009 they're gonna be cheaper than vanes and even less failure-prone.

They're LCD, like the other ones, but they try to emulate the old ones more. However the 4 has a pointy edge on its left prong and the red and green screen's text look a bit blue-tinted.

My .02 on today:

A) Regarding the one-bid LCDs, you could just alter the opacity of what's showing up to give it that old-school graphic feel. Maybe that's what they did, maybe it isn't - still looked nice overall.

B) See, what killed me about the Showcase readouts is the justification. I know, I know, nitpicking but you add that dollar sign and it sorta throws things off. While I agree that things could use animation here or there - I say baby steps when it comes to this. That said, drop the dollar sign or center justify it.

C) The rest? Loved it. For all the nitpicking on the open's spiel - I WAS TOO BUSY LOOKING AT THE BORDERS AND THE OPENING ANIMATION. Whole-heartily applaud them entering the society where you can use a write-on effect from AE with an alpha channel and make a nice opening animation out of it. I will gamble that it was write-on and Trapcode's Particular effect (for the flying dollar signs) to get all that.

I haven't posted in forever. The life of a nomad scholar, I guess...

The show's clearly gone digital, but then what hasn't? The thing is that even digital displays meant to look like the original still come across on television as an imitation. I think the one-bid displays were at least faithful. I thought the new showcase podiums looked really cheap, almost like they were done at the last minute. The new turntable? I like the backlighting-type effect on the squares, but the whole thing just seemed -- well -- awkward, for lack of a better way of putting it.

Drew is clearly more comfortable in his role, and he's still trying too hard. Let's see how far he progresses this season.

Now, calling an HP computer a Dell? That's getting really sloppy.

In fact, 'sloppy' would seem to be the theme of the opening day of Season 38. Where's Roger when you need him?

It could have been much, much worse, though. At least the contestants are as nutty as ever. I still enjoyed the season opener, and I'd hope it's just cobwebs from the summer that they're shaking off.

Did anyone else think that for a season premiere, the show was kinda...cheap? The game line-up wasn't much to write home about, either. Of course, Plinko's there, but...just like how Wheel made wheelloon think of budget cuts, this show felt the same way to me. Not much was set up to be noteworthy.

The light box, looked ok. At least, the top and bottom are.

The set looks great (especially in HD)! I concur with the majority here...the Showcase podiums look very cheap and poorly done. (I didn't like those since I saw the pics posted and my opinion hasn't changed after seeing them in action.) The bids in the display looked small, too.

I also didn't like the back of the turntable. Looked awfully plain or barren.

I, too, thought the prizes were relatively "cheap" for a season premiere.

The only other nitpicky thing that I haven't seen mentioned yet was the lack of a mention of this being the start of their 38th Season in the opener.

All in all, though, I love the new set and especially some of the newer camera shots!

It could have been a lot worse -- they could have called an Apple a PC. Now them's fightin' words!

NOTE: They changed the Showcase podium font to something more readable today.

Centered it as well. Looked much less slapped-together.

Also, it looks like we got replacement monitors in Contestants' Row today...didn't look as tall and square as the ones we saw during the season opener. In other words, now they look almost EXACTLY the same as what they replaced.

Good points. The new home base looks better than I thought, especially behind Drew when he's at Contestants' Row. But the border is too much, and the wall on the turntable looks terrible with the games or merchandise. This and last season's make Drew look really short.

The Showcase lecterns are bad. Finally this year, Jeopardy figured out what to do with plasma technology. TPIR could do what they did and make each lectern one big vertical screen. There could be a cool motion graphic on each before the first showcase, then they could list all three or four prizes as opposed to one (then Rich and Drew don't have to remind us), and there could be a nice reveal of the bid difference.

My take on the new season "look":

• LOVE the Contestant's Row Monitors -- If they weren't actual monitors, I'd swear they switched to LED bulbs. Glad they stayed true to form!
• The editing has definitely increased, but much smoother than I thought.
• I like the new animated opening.
• The turntable/showcase area is nice, but everyone's right about that one "empty" wall side of the turntable -- it's too plain!
• The contestant's showcase podiums -- not as cheap looking as I thought based on previous comments, but why keep the "SHOWCASE" label until the
reveal? I say put the showcase's name on the lower screen as soon as the bid comes up on the upper screen?
• Drew seems more comfortable with the show, but he still seems a little too laid back at times.
• I like how the prizes are finally more geared toward the 21st century audience -- less washers & driers, more computers & i-pods.
• Using the green-screens and big screen monitors to display trip destinations instead of those backdrops (I know there's an official name for them --
the name slips my mind at the moment) IMHO, was a long-time coming!
• I love how some of the games now are played facing the audience (i.e. Double Prices).
• From the shows I've seen, the contestant selection has gotten a bit better -- there seems to be less personalized Dollar Store T-shirt-clad college kids
among the nine than in previous years and more of a better range of ages as well.
• Where the hell did the daily di-ah-bee-tuhs commercial with Uncle Wilford go?? (BTW, Happy Belated 75th B-Day to Wilford last Sunday).
• Rich Fields just as annoying as ever. "Well, Drew, how about a NEW KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHR!".
• I still want to borrow the Lovely Rachel for a few days :)

Skins. Not to be confused with the team that broke Detroit's losing streak.

I like the chroma effect for stuff like snowmobiles and jet skis, keying in snow and water video. I also like the plasmas for trip scenery, but {Armchair Director} the zoom effect used when displaying the name of the destination onto the screen has gotten a bit old for me...need more effects. {/AD}

The green-screen I was "enh" about (the show I saw had some green-screen panels simulating water behind a boat or jet-ski or something, which was okay, but not great - but would have been pretty damned cool if they were LED panels) but I LOVED the use of the vertical plasma / LCD screen in Temptation.

I was also 100% fine with the new streamlined show open, but I will freely admit that my ears perked up with a "wow, that doesn't sound right" when it was time to intro Drew and "the STAAAAR of The Price Is Right!" was cut out. Doesn't kill me, not gonna storm CBS with torches, but I did miss it.

Hopefully they reach a good mix of new and old. I'm getting a little tired of seeing Apple all the time. On today's regularly scheduled show, for instance, there was a MacBook up for bids, and later 2 iPods in a pricing game. How often are the iPods on the show, 3 days a week? It certainly feels that way. The variety in cars is nice, although the SmartCar seems to take the air out of the room when it's the Big Kahuna in a showcase. The contestants still seem conditioned to believe there's at least one car in a day's worth of showcases, when most of the time, there isn't.



I like the screen in the back of the house in the sense that it's another place for things to be shown. In the two-game segment, they could theoretically have prizes in every nook and cranny of the set, which adds to the "every day is different" feeling of the show. However, I find the plasmas not so cool when compared to the trip skins. They have their place (Chris just mentioned one good example - they're good as the "secondary" way to display a trip), but it's TV, where things are larger than life. I thought the giant murals did a better job of making the TV world seem special, as opposed to stock footage and text on plasma screens. I know it's a rare example, but Most Expensive for 3 trips felt like a huge deal when every door had a giant wall behind it. Drew called them "old paintings," but the only people that knew how long they'd been around were the people that didn't care.

-Jason

WHOOHOO! One in a row, baby! One! In! A! Row!

Count me as one that was glad that they stopped using the aged-looking skins. I liked when they used the green screen to show movement. I think one time they gave away a trip to Niagara Falls, and had a video of the falls themselves. It's too bad that the screens completely flummoxed the contestants. There has to be a better way. How does Wheel make the backdrops behind the contestants?

I agree with Jason in that I understand that Drew likes Apple products, but unless they're footing the bill, I don't see why they should get preferential treatment to this degree.

The answer lies in the question, grasshopper.

Is Drew so tired from lifting his $7 million dollar paycheck that he can't flip the numbers in One Away now? Or Spelling Bee? How long until the model holds the one bid card and hands it to him?

Josh