Masha wrote: ↑February 4th, 2023, 3:30 pm
Some seasons of:
What's My Line and:
I've got a Secret are sporadically available for streaming.
One thing that I noted on:
What's My Line is that the difficulty of guessing the occupation was occasionally based on sex, i.e. a woman who was a bail-bondsman or a man who sold lingerie.
I read once that: Steve Allen once commented that he could never have guessed the identity of some celebrity guests because it was some young starlet whom he did not recognize even after seeing her and hearing her name. It was obvious an attempt was made to promote that person's career rather than provide a legitimate challenge to the panel.
Many game shows taped multiple episodes on one day. There is a man who claims he can instantly identify how late in the day that an episode of:
Match Game was taped by how drunk or stoned: Gene Rayburn was. He was apparently much more expansive after a few martinis or a joint while the set was being prepped for the next episode.
This YouTube user's channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChPE75 ... dAsO7Nzb8w
has, I believe, every available
What's My Line from the 17-year-long CBS primetime era. You can even watch them in chronological order if you want. Freemantle (Goodson-Todman's successor company and the owner of the Buzzr diginet) tried (and continues to try) to get them taken down, but they were never copyrighted (as I understand it) and are therefore in the public domain. The syndicated version of WML was copyrighted.
The celebrity mystery guest, nearly all the time, was there to plug either a play, musical, film, nightclub appearance, album release or other project (sometimes a charity), especially for those who resided on the west coast and were "in town" for one reason or another. This is why Dorothy Kilgallen was so good at these, because she knew, due to her gossip columnist's connections, who was "in town" and who wasn't. Most times she knew very early on, but let the questioning go on anyway. Very few times was she stumped by a celebrity guest.
Match Game taped a week's worth of shows - 5 or 6 shows - per taping day (6 when there was a night time syndicated version (MG PM) and daytime version running in parallel). They would tape two days in a row and then take two weeks off. The host and panelists would often be a little tipsy for the later tapings because they'd take a dinner break about halfway through and libations were served with dinner. Gene Rayburn would fly back home to the east coast and repeat the process two weeks later. Most half hour game shows did 5 tapings a day (and still do, as far as I know). It's the most efficient way to utilize studio time.