The thread not too long ago about shoddy editing on a recent ep. of Wheel got me to thinking about other cases of poor editing in other game shows, be it in the show itself, the music or the SFX. Here are some I thought of...

-Family Feud: On the Dawson version, the main theme always started with the first few seconds cut off at the start of the show. I understand that what they were trying to do was have a clean segue from the opening "fiddle" cue, but it just came off as a mistake each time.

-Match Game...the bad edit in the theme (cutting out the first "B" section) has been discussed before.

-Press Your Luck: The premiere ep. has an EXTREMELY poor edit towards the start of the show. There's a camera on Peter as he talks about the new show for a bit, then the camera immediately cuts to a wide shot of the contestants, who with the audience are laughing for no apparent reason.

Any others?

--Sam

This is because they had to wait for Gene Wood to finish his intro of the families and the show title before they could switch tracks. They might have edited them together, but it's better that they did not in case the intro ran long...



I have to disagree, that was not a bad edit. I much prefer the air version just as much as the original version. Mike Malone did some interesting work for G/T in the 70's, this is more evidence of that.



This tends to happen with shows, especially in the early part of the run, in that they will run long and have to have something go here and there. The edit was probably the most feasible thing to eliminate and there was no other way they could excise what they excised without it looking weird, so it ended up looking weird. Notice, I use the word "weird" and you use the word "bad".

Sometimes in post you can't get around certain things when editing the show (if you have to that is), so you're stuck with that weird edit. Makes you just say "C'est la vie!"

When an edit causes a disruption in the tempo of the song, that, sir, is a bad edit.

But is it the one with the bad, bad taste?

The Super Password premiere had an obvious one, between contestant announcements and Bert explaining the rules of the game.

Just about every writing answers segment on syndie MG too.

Especially on a show like "Press Your Luck". There were many instances where the spinning ran long, so they had to cut out Peter's opening interviews with each contestant. When you look at a show like that, either you cut out some of the buildup to the word "stop", or you cut out the interviews - there's not much else you can cut. I prefer the latter.

One of the major edits from Price I can think of was from November 2002 where a contestant won playing 10 chances and chased Barker behind the game, dragged him to the front, and Barker fell to one knee.

They were deciding whether to leave that in or not. Thankfully, it was edited for the viewer to make it look like something happened, but you didn't know what.

I'm just suprised they didn't cut to commercial after she ran to her car.

I know syndie MG was mentioned, and I happen to remember one from MG, but it might've been PM, c. 1980. While writing, Charles made one of his smartass comments to Brett, and she says something involving the word "sugar-honey-iced-tea" (I can't even remember the context). Anyways, there is a VERY noticeable loop between the conversation before and after the expletive is mentioned, and you hear audience laughter out of nowhere after the edit.

I've only read about this one, but how about $20K Pyramid...

Dick: Tony, what's one thing you've learned about the game?

Tony: You can't say...

(huge audience laughter)

How about the first MG78 without Dawson.

Gene makes his entrance as usual. He starts to say something as the clapping/music dies down. But then, they cut to a shot of Bob Barker, while we hear Geno say "....and we have Bob this week" in such a way that there was more to his sentence.

Thought: Bob and Gene each made a one-sentence comment about Dawson, without mentioning him by name, before Gene greets the contestants. If Rayburn's intro speech was edited out, why wasn't the Richard ref. edited out as well? Like I said, just a thought.

Rick

Even more awkwardly, I think it went, "We're happy to have Bob Barker with us, in his seat," without ever identifying the "him."

I just thought of two slightly recent ones.

-Peer Pressure's second season, they called the show "Pressure I" or something like that...IIRC those were the reruns, and it was done to distinguish itself from the first-run eps. of the show (assuming PP got a second season). Anyways, in the reruns "Peer" was always muted out, so all you'd hear is, "Welcome to (_) Pressure".

-There was an ep. of syndie Millionaire where contestant, Merle, lost on a question and went back to (I think) $1,000. After she answered incorrectly, you see a very obvious jump with Meredith saying "We'll be right back." From what I read, Merle kinda jumped down Meredith's throat, causing the edit.

Merle was cruising along, saying "final answer" almost automatically, until her downfall. IIRC, they didn't cut until Merle had already whined to Meredith, "Why didn't you slow me down?!?" (or was it, "Why didn't you stop me?!?")
<old audio clip from WBCN-FM in Boston> <John Cleese> And now, for something completely different. </jc><Mr. Peabody> Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for the 1970's...</mp></oac>
I remember a contestant on Rhyme and Reason who apparently wrote the word "S**T" on her answer screen (the first half of the couplet probably ended in "Bit".) After several awkward seconds of close-ups of the celebrities, you heard (but didn't see) Bob Eubanks tell the contestant that she needed to choose an alternate response. (Now that I think of it, she was probably trying to match Jaye P. Morgan, whose verbal responses often ended in censored words.)

Esoteric Eric, who also remembers a young woman who was braless wearing a see-through top that left nothing to the imagination during her R&R appearance (If You Know What I Mean)

From: http://millifeline.homestead.com/transcripts061203.html, we find

Merle Glickman has gotten up to the $125,000 question:
The Petronas Towers, considered to be the world's tallest buildings, are in what country?

A. Indonesia B. The Philippines
C. Singapore D. Malaysia

She nods yes/no for each choice, yes on Singapore, but that's not it. They are in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Earlier, Merle says "Make sure I focus before I run my mouth."

No ma'am. The host's job does not include making sure the contestant is focused. She just messed up. She did not do what the CCs tell you to do once you get to the chair.

Thanks for the link, Travis. My apologies for my incompleteness (including not being able to recall if Merle's outburst was aired or later documented, either here or on Prof. Steve's site.)

Esoteric Eric, with another edit story; there seemed to be big problems on the syndicated version of Celebrity Sweepstakes, with the calculation of the payoffs on the final wagers and / or the contestants' scoreboards, leading to an insert to show the correct totals.

Actually, according to my local Tv schedules at the time, the shows were actually called "Peer Pressure 1" and "Peer Pressure 2", with one of these shows the reruns, and the other being the first-run's second season.

I never saw the show, so I don't know if they were actually called "Peer Pressure" or just "Pressure" on air, but, according to something I read (either the "Encylopedia" or a website, forgot which), the repeats have the "Peer Pressure 2" (or 1) electronically overlaid over the original "Peer Pressure" logo, whenever that logo appeared on screen.

Actually, I remembered that "Pressure 1" was a completely separate game show than (Peer) "Pressure 2." Click aired back-to-back with Peer Pressure the previous season, and Pressure 1 was a replacement for Click. Don't really remember the rules of "Pressure 1," though.

Three players compete in various solo tasks to move spaces on a 'life-sized' game board. The two who are the farthest along at the final break compete in a final challenge where they must alternately guess how the audience responded to various 'dilemma' type questions.

And I never saw the second iteration, I'd be interested to see how that worked. It had to be better.

Maybe my previous post wasn't clear, but I'm familiar with the rules of Peer Preesure. I was thinking of the rules to a separate game show called Pressure 1; also I'm thinking that (Peer) Pressure 2 aired after Pressure 1. Didn't Pressure 1 lean toward being a more conventional quizzer than Peer?

One such instance involved the word that you guessed.
First line: "Jaye P. Morgan did one of her bits."
Jaye's second line: "Jaye P. Morgan showed her (cuckoo sound)."

Since that wasn't really a bad edit, here's one: I saw a Dawson Feud earlier this year, which was discussed in a thread, where a FM question was edited down to, "Name a car," or not much more than that. The speculation is that the question was to name a car that was bad in some way.

Indeed...and it was the 2nd season of reruns for Peer Pressure, they just changed the title and kept the Pop-Up Video-esque comments and generic category graphics (guess they only had rights to the Magic 8 Ball for the 1st season...LOL) from the previous season.

Chuck Donegan (The Illustrious "Chuckie Baby")