Recently during the Jeopardy hiatus I've been missing the daily kick of Jeopardy questions that comes with it, so I've been rewatching a show that was my earliest exposure into the trivia world (or was it jeopardy in the old days after school a 4PM in the Chicagoland suburbs? I'm not sure) but the late Regis Philbin's voice really brought back some memories. Talk about the "hardest working man in show business," Regis apparently once had the record for longest time spent on US televison, in part due to the hourly episodes of WWTBAM from 1999-2002, airing DAILY on network American television. Boy what a time to be alive, a game show with difficult trivia questions and people winning thousands, maybe even a million dollars, every night of a whole TV season, and being rewarded for their general knowledge (I wouldn't call it intelligence necessarily, more ability to absorb and recall information, which is mostly what trivia is). Nowadays network television isn't what it used to be in popularity, and even if it was I feel like people would be more interested in The Bachelor, Love is Blind, and other matchmaking shows, drama shows rather than learning facts. Jeopardy is the last bastion for trivia lovers, and really the last resort for people like me to get on national TV if not for committing a crime or some chance event.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had a great format because each question after the $500 question essentially doubled the size of the pot, ($32,000 to $64,000), and that's not even factoring in the "minimum winning levels" past $32,000 where you couldn't leave with less than that after passed $32,000, as well as factoring in the fact if you got the quesiton right, you have a higher expected value to get to the million dollars, so that swung the odds in the contestant's favor to go for it. If the contestant was 50-50 about a question, narrowing down to 2 choices, then game theory says the contestant should go for it, even it's a blind guess between 2 choices. There were plenty of times watching where I yelled at the TV (retroactively from 20+ years in the future) after the contestant had narrowed it down with the 50-50 life line (or somehow was between just two) to GO FOR IT! But of course it's not my money, and Americans and poeple in general are irrational about money: For people who need every cent to get by in life, I get walking away with a certain amount of money, especially after the big stock market crash of 2000 wiping away people's fortunes. Then again, though, you walked into the studio with zero dollars, it's essentially a lottery, they're not taking money away from you..... it's all funny money for the game anyway, and a million dollars at that time (and even now, to an extent) is lifechanging money, $32,000 is not. For every contestant who walked away without guessing, you can think of it as taking their money and running, but you can also frame it as they're voluntarily giving up their chance to double their money right then and there, but also giving up the chance to continue to life-changing money, which $32,0000, or $64,000 or whatever, certainly is not. As their financial advisor (which I certainly am not qualified to be), I would have advised them to go for it. (especially if they're young with no kids, you have your whole life to make money if you don't get it).
Who wants to be a millionaire is similar in many ways to Jeopardy because it tests some of the same material (which musical is about a performer named Louise who became a stripper? Answer: Louise), how many Von Trapp children were there in the musical Sound of Music, which was the only president not to be nominated by his party for a second term (at the time, now we have Joe Biden joining the record books! A: Franklin Pierce) but what's fascinating about is the format of multiple choice versus free response of Jeopardy. MJ loves multiple choice! And I get it: multiple choice gives you a fighting chance at a question even if you have no idea about what the answer is, and you don't have to reach deep in the crevices of your mind to come up with the name of a fish, a river, a Seven Wonder of the World, etc., so coming up with candidate answers itself is tough to do for most people. So yes I'm saying multiple choice is easier than free response. But of course that means the questions could be made harder whereas Jeopardy routinely offers some softballs like "which state is the Sunshine State" or something. Multiple choice also eliminates any wrong answers that you might have had that were not included in the given choices, in this case narrowing it to 4. It also allows you a chance to analyze all 4 choices to see what were the 3 in common and the 1 that sticks out, analyze the words given, the dates given, to see if it triggers something in your crevices. Not all questions, but definitely a good portion of questions, I would not have known after the question, but knew after the choices were given, like what's another name for "cerumen"- a.) earwax, b.) sweat, c.) saliva, d.) blood. I had some inclination of hearing that word somewhere, and it's in fact deep in my notebook of trivia questions I've compiled over the last 3 years, but I couldn't have come up with it unless........I just had a feeling when earwax came up that I had heard, that feeling of "bell ringing." At the same time, I think of the other ones in process of elimination, I've never heard of other names for sweat and saliva, and if there was one I wouldn't think it would be named cerumen. Plus, I would NOT have been able to answer the question backwards: If someone asked me on Jeopardy what was another name for earwax, I wouldn't be able to produce "cerumen." I don't even know how to pronounce it, I've never said it in a conversation in my life. But multiple choice, you don't need to say it for the first time ever on live TV, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do in a pressure-packed situation. But you don't need to do that in multiple choice, you just pick the one that's there (especially good if you'are a visual thinker). The beauty of multiple choice, on so many different levels.
Oh and I loved the fastest-finger questions: always putting 4 different things in order, usually chronological order of what came first, time-wise, which is in my wheelhouse of remembering when things happened in history. I would have loved to get a crack at that show too (now that I'm much better than my 13-year-old self watching blankly about old TV shows I've never heard of like Hill Street Blues or Starsky and Hutch). it might still come back with Jimmy Kimmel! But no more fastest-finger questions, they just select contestants now to go directly the Hot Seat, I guess they don't want to risk having a dull contestant anymore or one that doesn't fit the demographic requirements that network TV needs to cast on their shows!
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