Game shows have entertained and thrilled audiences since the early days of television.
It's irresistible to watch regular folks use their skills and smarts to win cash and prizes.
Making a game show is a huge endeavor involving lots of people and moving parts to create
all that TV magic day in and day out.
Here's a look behind "Door Number One" to see how they pull it off.
Smoke and mirrors
A game show is an exciting, fast-paced, brilliantly-colored spectacle that lets viewers escape their lives
for 30 minutes.
But it's all just an illusion, of course, and in ways that might surprise you.
Camera angles, lighting tricks, and other image-manipulation techniques are used to
make things look a lot grander than they really are, for one thing.
A game show set, like the one used for Jeopardy!, is, according to one former contestant, only
about half the size of a school gym.
The studio audience that thunderously claps and cheers consists of, on average, about
100 people.
That seemingly massive wheel on Wheel of Fortune?
It's really only 6 feet across — just two inches taller than Pat Sajak.
Not just a guessing game
In 2008, a The Price is Right superfan named Terry Kniess was asked to bid on a backyard
smoker/grill combo, and he got it exactly right before making it into the show's final
round.
His potential prizes included a pool table, a trailer and a karaoke machine; Kniess bid
$23,743.
Then host Drew Carey revealed the actual total ...
"Actual retail price: $23,743.
You got it right on the nose."
"What?"
Per the rules of the game, Kneiss won both showcases, a value of $56,437.
So how did he do it?
Homework.
According to an Esquire profile, for four months, Kneiss and his wife, Linda, recorded
The Price is Right every day and reviewed the tapes.
They quickly noticed that the show tended to reuse products as well as prices.
The "actual retail price" was always revealed, and Terry just memorized every item's value
as best he could.
That, combined with "743," the couple's lucky number, did the trick.
Google to the rescue
Who Wants to be a Millionaire's famous "Phone-a-Friend" option, while it lasted, was an amusing way
for puzzled contestants to stay in the game by calling up a friend at home who just might
know the answer.
But let's be real: 30 seconds is plenty of time for that friend to just Google the solution.
If one Redditor is to be believed, the producers were just fine with that.
A user named "Toastwaver" who claims he was picked as a lifeline for a contestant on Millionaire
says the official preparation documents from the show's producers included
"no mention about Googling.
In other words, it was understood that using the 30-second window to Google the question
would be acceptable."
White lies
Part of the fun of Cash Cab is the sneak attack: Contestants get into a seemingly normal cab
and then get hit with the flashing lights.
They're delighted, they play the game, they win.
What a lovely surprise.
Yeah, it's a bit more complicated than that.
Producers can't just grab anybody off the street — it could be a tremendous waste
of time and money, after all, if they're not willing to go along with the game.
Former contestants told Mental Floss that production coordinators for the show approach
potential contestants in well-populated spots, like New York City's Union Square.
Instead of saying they worked for Cash Cab, they said they were in search of participants
for some other fictional reality show.
A former contestant told TV.com that a production coordinator approached him at the Union Square
Barnes & Noble about a travel show.
A few weeks later he got a call from the coordinator of the fake show telling him he'd been picked.
He was given a time and place to get picked up by a driver, and it turned out to be the
Cash Cab.
Car complications
While The Price is Right often awards exotic and fabulous vacations, there's nothing more
exciting than when a contestant wins a ...
"BRAND NEW CAR!"
In an interview with AV Club, former contestant Andrea Schwartz revealed that winning a car
on the popular daytime show is more complicated than you might think.
For instance,
"You don't just drive off the backlot with the car like I thought the entire time I was
growing up."
Here's what really happened: The show connected her with a Mazda dealer near the show's Los
Angeles-area studio, who then shipped her a car to a dealer near where she lived in
Nevada.
Regardless of where you live, the show requires contestants to pay California state income
tax on their prize right then and there.
So to get her not-quite-free car, Schwartz had to fork over some of her savings along
with $1200 she'd won minutes before playing Plinko.
So it's more like a "heavily-discounted new car," which is still nothing to sneeze at.
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