Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Win Jack Barry's Food Stamps: The origins of Hot Potato
On all game shows, including Barry & Enright games, contestants would win real cash (which is what drove Barry and other hosts working for the company to collect food stamps, the contestants were winning most of the cash in the company's budget). In 1983, Barry had Bill Cullen host a pilot for CBS called Win Jack Barry's Food Stamps. The format was simple, 3 VS 3, you just tried to guess 7 answers to a survey-like question, and if your answer was on the list, you scored, if not, you sat up on a bench. You could pass control to the opponents if you wanted to. Players competed to try to win some of Jack's food stamps. CBS declined to pick up the show because it was (and still is) illegal to give your food stamps to someone else for their own use, so Barry reworked it into Hot Potato, with the same format, but with a potato being tossed, making the show funny. This format made it to TV, and contestants competed for cash, just like on all other game shows.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I never knew there were surveys on Hot Potato. I thought it was just a potato being tossed around! Goes to show: the questions were a lot less funny than the potato, and it was right for CBS to reject WJBFS.
ReplyDeleteBill would ask the question, then toss the potato at a random person, who would be first to answer. That person would then toss it to the next person, who had to come up with the next answer. This would go on until either all 7 answers are revealed or an entire team got sent up to the bench. WJBFS was this, with the exception of tossing the spud.
Delete