Mindreaders

For other uses, see Mindreader (disambiguation).

Mindreaders
Mindreaders title logo.
Format	Game show
Created by	Mark Goodson Bill Todman
Presented by	Dick Martin
Narrated by	Johnny Olson
Country of origin	United States
No. of episodes	~110
Production
Location(s)	NBC Studios Burbank, California
Running time	approx. 26 minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC
Original run	August 13, 1979 – January 11, 1980

Mindreaders is a game show produced by Goodson-Todman Productions which aired on NBC from August 13, 1979 through January 11, 1980. Although NBC originally agreed to a 26-week run, the network canceled Mindreaders after 22 weeks. The host was Dick Martin and the announcer was Johnny Olson.

Game play

A team of four men played against a team of four women, each consisting of three civilian contestants and a celebrity captain. Host Dick Martin read a question to the three civilian contestants on one team. Each player locked in an answer. One by one, the celebrity captain predicted how each of his/her teammates answered. A correct prediction kept that team in control and play moved to the next player in line. If the celebrity was incorrect, the celebrity captain of the opposing team predicted the controlling teammates' responses. Each correct answer was worth $50, with the money going to the other team if incorrect, and the first team to reach $300 won the game and went on to play the end game. Both teams kept their money.

Judge the Jury

In the bonus game, the winning team faced 10 randomly selected members of the studio audience who comprised a jury. Each civilian member of the winning team had to predict how the jury answered three questions (one player per question). After each question was read, the jury locked in their answers, and the player guessed how many of them answered yes or no. Guessing the exact number won $500 for the team, missing the number by one or two higher or lower was worth $200, and any guess that was off by three or more awarded no money. After the three questions, the winning team played a round called "Celebrity Turnabout". The civilian players predicted how the celebrity captain answered one last question. Each player made a guess and if the team majority matched the celebrity captain's answer, the civilians' winnings earned in the first half of the bonus game were multiplied by ten for a maximum total of $15,000.

Unlike most game shows, Mindreaders did not use the typical "returning champions" carry-over; instead, the same two teams competed against each other for three consecutive games, after which they both retired.

Broadcast history

NBC placed Mindreaders in a problematic timeslot, 12:00 Noon (11:00 AM Central), where it faced ABC's The $20,000 Pyramid and CBS' Young and the Restless as well as low clearances by NBC affiliates for local news. Despite NBC's hopes that Dick Martin's legacy from Laugh-In and Match Game would translate into instant audience appeal, the ratings were flat, as had those of the shows preceding it in that time slot for the past five years.

NBC replaced Mindreaders with Chain Reaction, another short-lived game which later became successful in reruns and produced a five-year revival from 1986-1991.

Pilot

A pilot produced for CBS in 1975, also called Mindreaders, was hosted by Jack Clark and featured a different format: contestants predicted the majority response to a hypothetical question asked of the entire audience (a similar format was used as the main game of the 1981-1982 series Pitfall).

Details on the second pilot attempt, produced in August 1979, can be found below (see "External links").

Theme and sounds

The show's theme music is a slightly re-arranged version of a commercial cue from the short-lived 1979 game show Celebrity Charades. The sound signifying that the jury locked in their answers was later used as the solo player buzz-in sound on the Bill Cullen version of Blockbusters.

Episode status

Mindreaders is believed to have been wiped due to network practices of the era. The pilot (taped August 3, 1979 with Charles Nelson Reilly and Sarah Purcell), the third episode, and the December 13 episode (with Joyce Bulifant and Jack Jones) are the only three known to exist in full, along with the first two minutes of the December 31 episode (with Bill Daily and Brett Somers). In contrast, most of the other Goodson-Todman game shows are well-preserved and (mostly) intact.

A birthday tape produced for Mark Goodson in 1992 featured clips from shows he produced over his career; notable among them is a Mindreaders opening featuring Patty Duke-Astin and Nipsey Russell, who were on during the first week.

References