Blankety Blanks (US game show)

Infobox_television
show_name = Blankety Blanks


caption =
format = Game Show
runtime = 30 Minutes
creator = Bob Stewart
starring = Bill Cullen
Announcer: Bob Clayton
country = USA
rating=TV-G
network = ABC
first_aired =1975|

:"Not to be confused with the Australian game show with the same name hosted by Graham Kennedy, or with the British game show Blankety Blank, both of which were adaptations of Match Game."

Blankety Blanks was an American game show that aired on ABC from April 21 to June 27, 1975 hosted by Bill Cullen. Bob Clayton was the announcer. The program was a Bob Stewart Production.

Gameplay

The game was played with two teams (each with a celebrity & contestant) trying to solve puzzles & fill in the blanks (better known as "Blankety Blanks") on puns (an example: "When Richard Nixon spilled the coffee on Gerald Ford's lap, he said "Pardon Me!")". To start, a category along with keywords and a puzzle was revealed, the puzzle itself had numbers (1-6) (letters in the pilot) that hide six clues (which are all parts of sentences (the letters in the pilot were parts of sentence parts)) to that puzzle. Host Cullen then pulled out from a rotating wheel of 100 cards a single card and placed it into an electronic reader that chose at random one of the four players and revealed a dollar amount, anywhere from $10-$100. The chosen player (either the contestant or the celebrity) in control picked a number in order to reveal a clue that would help him or her identify the mystery subject; unlike some celebrity-civilian games of the period, a partner on the same team could not assist the contestant or celebrity playing at the moment. A correct answer won the team the designated money amount, but an incorrect answer, or none, meant the game continued as Cullen pulled another card, allowing another player (possibly the same one in the previous turn) to take a chance. Play continues until the puzzle is solved, at which point the team who solved the puzzle got a chance to double the money amount won by solving the Blankety Blank in a pun; in this part of the game the celebrity and the contestant were allowed to work together. The first team to reach $2,000 won the game.

Another format had the dollar values range from $100-$750, and any money won from solved puzzles went into the team's bank. The bank could only be claimed by filling in the Blankety Blank; also, each correct fill-in gave the opposing team a strike. If a contestant got three strikes, he or she was eliminated.

Broadcast history

"The $10,000 Pyramid's" success on ABC's daytime schedule since May 6, 1974 prompted the network to order another show from packager Stewart. "BB" replaced reruns of "The Brady Bunch" at 11:30 a.m./10:30 Central, opposite the top-rated "Hollywood Squares" on NBC and the soap opera "Love of Life" on CBS. In an unusual move, when ABC cancelled "BB," "Brady Bunch" returned to that timeslot, in preparation for its eventual huge success in syndication later that year.

Cullen himself has been quoted in a magazine saying that this show "didn't get a fair shake." Most daytime games of that era normally were given a thirteen-week minimum run to prove themselves; "BB" earned such low ratings that ABC pulled it after only ten weeks.

Theme

The theme to this show was later used on another Bob Stewart show, "Double Talk," via a practice known in the trade as "recycling."

Episode Status

Only one of the pilots (With Anita Gillette and Soupy Sales) and the premiere episode with Anne Meara and William Shatner are known to exist. It is assumed that the rest of the series is destroyed, due to a common practice known as wiping, which the major networks did with most of their daytime shows prior to the late 1970s.

External links

* [http://www.curtalliaume.com/blankety.html Blankety Blanks @ Game Shows '75]
* [http://userdata.acd.net/ottinger/cullen/shows/blankety.html Blankety Blanks info on the Bill Cullen Homepage]
* [http://www.gameshowutopia.net/blanketyblanks.htm Blankety Blanks Rule Page @ Game Show Utopia]