By today’s standards, it can be argued that digital storage is paramount to historical preservation. Paper is fragile and vulnerable to deterioration. Objects can be misplaced. However, I believe there is something incomparable about the physical practice of remembering. Photo albums and scrapbooks become curated art pieces, designed to personally reflect what the author wishes to share in the most intimate setting: a physical space. Holding them in our hands or resting them on our laps, we experience a tactile connection. Handwritten notations become evidence of gesture and intention—a personal disclosure between the viewer and the author. These objects act as time capsules, allowing us—sometimes hundreds of years later—to intimately learn the truths and stories they preserve, which might otherwise be lost to time.

As a recently appointed collections specialist at The Strong, I’ve been fortunate to familiarize myself with our vast collection of photographs, albums, and scrapbooks. Recently, while browsing the stacks in one of our storage areas, I happened upon an old album quite literally bursting at the seams. This mammoth book sat on its back, pages arched like a discarded accordion. Its size alone made it difficult to ignore. Picking up the book, I felt its weight press against my wrists and forearms—a testament to the extensive collection of memories pasted between its pages.

The most obvious place to begin was the cover. The face is wrapped in warm brown fabric with two large red leather corners. I decipher “Shipment Ledger” embossed across the center, though the title is partially obscured by a torn paper sticker. The inscription on the sticker reads, “The Glynns doings July 1934 to —.” The interior cover bears an additional label stating, “Property of Alfred M. Glynn, Worcester, Mass.”

I took this information on a brief side quest to our archive and found that the scrapbook was donated by the family in 1986. Along with the scrapbook were other loose photographs and memorabilia, which currently reside in our museum archive. I learned that Alfred Glynn—also referred to as “Al”—and Maxine Glynn were a married couple who moved to Worcester in the early 1930s. Al was a humble store manager, and Maxine was a part-time teacher and housewife. Though the book states it is the property of Alfred, it’s uncertain whether he alone maintained it.

Page one is modest. The pages are an aged yellow hue, reflecting their near century of existence, but they have remained in relatively good condition. Since the Glynns chose a ledger over a traditional album, the backdrop for these memories includes faded blue and pink lines, along with printed header text. Each page is stamped with a number in the top right corner.

Adhered to page one are three pieces of folded paper: a summer school confirmation letter from July 1934, a vocational school certificate, and a paper driver’s license from 1933. Next to the license, a Glynn inscribed, “Still hanging on!”

Turning the page, the spread reveals a much more playful arrangement. Pasted directly onto the page are several envelopes. Inside one envelope is a colorful house illustration in pink and blue. At the bottom of the page is an invitation to the Worcester County Framingham Club’s “Hallowe’en Social,” dated October 27th, 1934.

On the right-hand page of the spread is a folded piece of paper, pasted on one side. I fold down the free half to reveal a request for used clothing articles—likely for a sale intended to raise money or provide clothing to the less fortunate. Two related newspaper articles are pasted nearby, accompanied by a handwritten comment: “Oh my! Thanks, Jo, for the gloves.” Below that is a handbill for a production of The Pursuit of Happiness, along with two pink ticket stubs dated November 19th, 1934.

Pages four and five provide more notations and offer additional context for the time period. A memento from a “Girls Reserve Dance” appears alongside a ticket listing a 35-cent admission. The author notes, “We chaperoned the dance—and then!” next to two bridge “cards” from the noted “Warners’ Xmas Bridge.” These bridge cards served as official tally sheets. One card refers to “Fritz,” and the other to “Mike.” Based on what’s printed on the cards, it appears there were multiple tables with varying names. Each person was assigned to a table and a partner, and scores were then jotted down next to the appropriate line.

Flipping through to page seven, it becomes abundantly clear that the Glynns really enjoyed playing bridge. The page is decorated with various bridge scorecards in a variety of designs and colors, each claimed by different Glynn family members. Many feature colorful tassels with fraying edges.

On page 18, I find a ticket and booklet for a senior prom semi-formal dance dated May 24th, 1935—marking the passage of a year across these 18 pages. The pasted booklet still has a pencil on a string attached, hanging freely from the binding. The author, who may be Maxine, jests, “Al certainly had trouble with his attire!” in a handwritten comment. Below, I see the first signs of travel for the Glynns: a postcard from Brandon, Vermont, a newspaper clipping of Lake Champlain, and a note reading, “Trips to Middlebury 1935.”

For the first time, photographs appear on page 19—seven small black-and-white prints, each about three and a half inches wide. A few images show three adults on a boat named Virginia, followed by landscape photographs of boats and islands. The author contextualizes the images at the bottom of the page: “Anniversary Weekend June 1935. Warners – Glynns. West Bath, Maine.”

These photographs continue on the following page in two-by-eight columns. More portraits appear by the water, alongside a large wooden ship and a car. The subjects in the portraits, along with the automobile, help create a more vivid visual context for the time period.

Though I could have spent the entirety of my day flipping through these pages, there was unfortunately more work to be done. For now, I’ll imagine it’s 1938. Alfred Glynn is sitting at his desk in Worcester, Massachusetts. In front of him is a large ledger—300 pages awaiting a long and meticulous chronology of Glynn family history. That object will become an artifact, preserved for 87 years and counting. That, my friends, is the glory of physical media

The post Committed to Memory: The Glynn Scrapbook, Part 1 appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

If you were watching Jeopardy! on June 23, you saw a game that ended with a strange coincidence. The Final Jeopardy! clue:

In 1896, the Vassar-educated wife of this man wrote, ‘Thousands of dollars may be paid for a copy of Shakespeare’

Contestant Emily Croke was the only one who wrote the correct question: “Who is Folger?”

After being declared the winner, Croke revealed to host Ken Jennings, “That was my great-great-great-aunt Emily.” Croke was named after her.

How could this possibly happen? Is it just a coincidence that she wound up with a Final Jeopardy clue about her own family?….Well, yes, it is. That coincidence involves a rarely discussed but very important aspect of a typical taping day on most game shows: a process called randomization.

Harry Friedman, the executive producer of Jeopardy! from 1997 to 2020, helpfully explains how the process works for that show:

“For each five-episode tape day, the writers would prepare six complete 61-clue games. Each game included a Jeopardy! round, a Double Jeopardy! round, and a Final Jeopardy! clue. Each game was assigned a unique five-digit number.”

Overseeing each tape day is Sullivan Compliance, an independent third-party company that specializes in game show production oversight. The firm supervises all aspects of production to ensure that each game is played honestly and fairly, and that no contestant plays with an advantage or disadvantage. (A representative of Sullivan Compliance, Alan Gerson, recently sat down for an oral history interview for the National Archives of Game Show History.)

Friedman continues, “At 6 a.m. on tape day, the head writer would call a representative from…Sullivan Compliance and provide the six game numbers. The Sullivan representative would then randomly select five numbers. The games corresponding to those numbers were the ones played that day. No other information about the games was shared. The unused sixth game became a ‘rollover’ and was set aside for future use.”

“The order in which the five selected games aired was determined by the head writer. This allowed for flexibility to ensure that a category tied to a holiday or special event could air on the appropriate date.”

Some shows prepare even more game material in advance. For many of Game Show Network’s original series, the writers prepare 65 full games of material before each season has even started recording. For each tape day, seven of those 65 games are used for a random drawing. Six episodes will be taped, meaning that six out of those seven games are drawn, and the seventh goes back in the pool with the other batches of material written for that season. And many game shows don’t even grant the head writer the flexibility that Friedman mentioned. For most game shows that tape multiple games in a day, the order in which the games are drawn is the order in which they will be played.

Friedman continues, “Alex Trebek typically arrived at the studio shortly after 6 a.m. to carefully review all five games. At 8 a.m., in the Jeopardy! library, Alex and I would be joined by a team of producers, writers, researchers, and a Sullivan Compliance representative for a final review of the day’s material. During this session, we addressed issues such as pronunciations, factual accuracy, clarity, and the acceptability of alternate responses.”

“No information about contestants was ever shared with the writing or research teams at any point. The two new contestants who would face the returning champion were selected randomly by the contestant team in a secure area backstage between episodes.”

That’s typical operating practice for game shows. The staff in charge of the game content and the staff in charge of conducting tryouts and booking contestants do their work separately. This isn’t to say they’re isolated, or that they aren’t allowed to speak to each other. There’s just simply no overlap. On most game shows, a contestant booker will never tell the writers, “We booked a history professor, so try to have a category about the Civil War.” The exceptions to this are games like The Floor, in which a contestant’s field of expertise is relevant to the game. For a show like that, the material is written according to the contestants’ perceived strengths.

To summarize, multiple batches of game material are prepared for every taping session, and a random drawing determines which game will be played by which contestants. Because of the sheer number of games that are taped, and the amount of material that those games use, coincidences can and do ultimately happen. A clergyman winds up with a category about the Bible, or a surgeon gets a shot at Anatomy. In Jeopardy!’s long history, Emily Croke isn’t even the first contestant to get a clue about a famous relative. In 2001, contestant Bill O’Donnell, asked to identify the inventor of the Ferris wheel, caught Alex Trebek off-guard by ringing in and responding, “Who is my grandfather?”

The post Jeopardy Coincidences appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Legendary game show host and producer Wink Martindale passed away on Tuesday, April 15, 2025, at the age of 91. The team at the National Archives of Game Show History looks back at his life and amazing career. (Martindale completed an oral history with the Archives in 2023.)

A NAME THAT YOU’D BAT AN EYE AT

When James & Frances Martindale brought a baby boy into the world on December 4, 1933, they didn’t name him Wink. They named him Winston Conrad Martindale. But “Winston” proved too tricky to pronounce for one boy in the neighborhood, who could only sputter out “Winkie.” Winston rather liked and embraced the mispronunciation. This didn’t make his parents entirely happy—his mother would only call him Winston—but the distinctive name, later shortened to “Wink,” would make him arguably the most identifiable man in his field in the decades to come.

A BOY FROM TENNESSEE

Wink Martindale was born and raised in Jackson, Tennessee. His formative years came at the tail end of the Great Depression, and by his own admission, he had humble beginnings. He later told The Jackson Sun, “There were five of us in our small house, and my three brothers, one sister, and I lived with our parents in a two-bedroom, one-bath house with no shower. All of our water had to be heated. We poured water into a tub to take a bath. My parents bought our groceries on credit at Woody’s Grocery Store. We used to go to church every Sunday morning and evening and on Wednesday nights we went to Bible study. When school was out in the summer, we attended Vacation Bible School.”

Wink recognized a specific gift—he had an impressive voice, even as a child. He and his mother were of different minds about that. Mother thought it was a sign that he should become a preacher. Wink, a devout churchgoer, said that a person should only become a preacher if he felt called, and he admitted to his mother that he wasn’t hearing a calling. Wink, who would read the articles and advertisements from each week’s Life Magazine aloud, was fixated on radio. He held a tin can on a stick to serve as his microphone as he reported the news and paused for commercials, straight out of the magazine in his hands.

As it happened, his Sunday school teacher owned a radio station, and at age 17, Wink became an announcer at WPLI-AM, and then WTJS, where he did sportscasting, and then WDXI, all in Jackson, Tennessee. Wink attended classes at Lambuth College while working at WDXI, but when a job opening came up in the big city—in this case, Memphis—he dropped out and became a morning DJ at WHBQ-AM.

MARS-TINDALE

Wink was probably the busiest 19-year-old in Memphis. Every day he got out of bed at 4 a.m. to host the morning radio show Clockwatchers for three hours on WHBQ. Then he went to Memphis State College to take classes in speech & drama. During the afternoon, he hosted a children’s television show, Wink Martindale and the Mars Patrol. Each day, Wink donned a space suit and climbed into a small rocket ship with a group of children, “blasting off” into an installment of the Flash Gordon movie serials from the 1940s, before returning for a final segment where Wink would share some facts about outer space.

ALL SHOOK UP

In the 1950s, dozens of television stations across the station had the same basic format for an afternoon show; teenagers would dance to Top 40 hits being played by an area disc jockey who served as the host. Dick Clark’s Bandstand out of Philadelphia would become the most famous of these shows, but Wink hosted substantially the same show in Memphis, Top Ten Dance Party.

Because Memphis had become a hub for rock and country music, music stars would frequently drop by Top Ten Dance Party for a live interview. At the time, most live local television programs were not recorded. With impressive foresight, a staff member at Top Ten Dance Party told Wink that it might be a good idea to preserve one upcoming episode. Elvis Presley had given his word that he would indeed come to the studio for an interview, as a personal favor to Wink, who had always given his records plenty of airplay.

Wink hired a photographer named Bob Zimmerman to film a 1956 episode in which Elvis Presley came to the studio for his first interview. Wink and Elvis would never cross paths on television again. The singer’s legendary manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was furious that Elvis had granted Wink a free appearance on television, and had done so without Parker’s knowledge.

WINK OUT WEST

Wink had been given some unlikely breaks while in Memphis. In 1958, he received a surprising phone call from a film producer offering him a role in a low budget feature, Let’s Rock. Despite the fact that Wink wasn’t a national name yet, he got to play himself in the movie. His character’s name was Wink Martindale and he was the host of an afternoon teenage dance show. Wink even got to sing in the film, although he was the first one to call himself “a lousy Elvis Presley imitation.”

He became restless in Memphis and his boss felt Wink was capable of building a big career for himself in Los Angeles. Wink’s boss pulled some strings to help him secure a job at Los Angeles radio station KHJ, and Wink made his big move in 1959. Wink wound up meeting his boss’ expectations and probably exceeding his own. As in Memphis, he had a regular disc jockey shift plus a weekly TV teenage dance show, The Wink Martindale Dance Party.

Dot Records had been a fledgling company when Wink had given some of their releases exposure on his Memphis TV show a few years earlier. Dot’s president never forgot the favor, and he felt Wink had some potential for a music career, even though Wink himself strongly disagreed. Wink recorded a cover of a single by T. Texas Tyler that had sold pretty well in 1948.

“Deck of Cards” was the name of the piece; it wasn’t exactly a song; Over a hymnal chorus of “Ooooooooh’s,” Wink narrated the story of an illiterate soldier who brings a deck of cards to church instead of bringing a prayer book, because he’s given a Biblical meaning to each card in the deck. “Deck of Cards” was a surprise hit, reaching #4 on the Billboard charts and eventually going gold with sales in excess of one million. No one was more surprised than Wink, who ended up performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show, the ultimate milestone for show business success at the time.

Wink would go on to release dozens of singles, plus five albums, but none of these efforts ever came close to the success of Deck of Cards. Wink was disappointed but not devastated; the success of “Deck of Cards” blindsided him and he had never expected to make a career for himself as a singer in the first place. That somebody wanted him to record songs was exciting enough; that even one of them had a million buyers was a thrilling bonus.

WINK FOR THE WIN

Wink had become a fan of Password with Allen Ludden in the early 1960s. Wink may have been joking, but he would say in later years that he had read a magazine article where Allen Ludden explained the taping schedule for TV game shows; Allen talked about how all five episodes for a week of Password were taped in a single day, leaving him six days a week to do whatever else he felt like. As Wink tells the story, he promptly called his agent and said, “Get me a game show!”

He hosted a local show in Los Angeles called Zoom, in which contestants had to guess what an object was based on an extreme close-up; the camera slowly pulled away until the object was identified. Zoom wasn’t a hit, but Wink was; in 1964, he became the host of What’s This Song? for NBC, although network executives disliked his name so much that he conceded to going by the name Win Martindale for the only time in his career.

A NOT-SO-DRY SPELL

Wink’s shows in the late 1960s were decidedly more “miss” than “hit.” He had a brief tenure hosting two game shows for Chuck Barris that even Wink would acknowledge were a bit odd for their own good—Dream Girl of ’67 and How’s Your Mother-in-Law? In 1970, game shows were in a bit of a dry spell. Only two game shows would premiere that calendar year—Words and Music, another song-naming game. The other was Can You Top This?, a revival of an old radio show in which home viewers submitted jokes by mail, and a panel of comedians tried to improvise jokes based on the same subject matter; the home viewer won prizes for every comedian who failed to get a bigger laugh than the original joke.

1970 didn’t exactly feel like a dry spell for Wink; he was host of both Words and Music and Can You Top This?

THE NEXT GAME ON DECK

In 1972, Merrill Heatter-Bob Quigley Productions received word that CBS was looking to revitalize their flagging daytime schedule with game shows, and sold an idea to the network that they called Gambit. Dick Clark auditioned for host but apparently wasn’t quite what Heatter-Quigley was looking for. Jed Allan of Celebrity Bowling won the job, but on the day of taping for the pilot, he showed up looking extremely irritated about something, and his attitude was so off-putting that Heatter-Quigley changed their minds and replaced him.

A 1972 interview with Jed Allan lends some clue about what was bothering him. He told a reporter, “I don’t want to become typed as a game show host. I want to act. Look what happened to Peter Marshall—he’s a very good actor. Since he’s been so successful with The Hollywood Squares, nobody will let him act.”

With Celebrity Bowling already putting him on TV screens as a master of ceremonies every week, Allan, it can be speculated, probably reasoned that hosting TWO game shows at once would probably end his acting career, and he probably wanted to get out of Gambit.

The job went to Wink Martindale, a talented host in search of a hit. In the past decade, he had hosted five games, none of which made it to a full year on the air. But good things come to those who wait, and Wink had waited long enough for a game like Gambit.

Married couples competed against each other in a game that combined trivia with blackjack. Heatter-Quigley, which had previously given the nation a giant board game on Video Village and a giant tic-tac-toe grid on The Hollywood Squares, now presented a game that made use of a massive deck of playing cards; but other than the size, it was, as Wink reminded viewers at the top of the show, “a normal deck of 52 playing cards.”

A correct answer earned a playing card for a couple, with the game going to the couple that came closest to 21 without going over; twenty-one on the nose won a cash jackpot. Two out of three games won the match and a chance to pick prizes from a 21-square board. The couple had to draw a card for every prize they picked, and busting meant forfeiting all the prizes won up to that point. Getting exactly 21 in the bonus round earned a car on top of everything else. Gambit survived more than four years.

WINNING GAMES WITH A WINNING HOST

In 1978, Wink began a seven-year run at the helm of Tic Tac Dough. Slowly, Wink became subconsciously entrenched in America’s mind when they thought of game shows. The first time you heard his name, you were sure never to forget it. And with his flawless head of hair, 300-teeth smile, and a rather eccentric wardrobe—plaid, pinstripes, a suit of nearly every color in the rainbow, and occasionally, white buck shoes—he just LOOKED like a game show host. He fit the stereotypes. An extraordinary series of episodes in 1980, in which champion Thom McKee amassed $312,700 in the span of 43 victories, drew more viewers to the show and further cemented Wink’s status as the definitive host.

For all that, Wink was a lot more than an empty smile. He had a sense of humor. He would conclude every week of Tic Tac Dough with “Hat Friday,” a ritual where he wore bizarre looking hats sent in by home viewers; if a hat was too big, he thought nothing of covering his entire head with it and stumbling around the set blindly as the credits rolled. He had an affinity for puns and asked a Tic Tac Dough writer, Mark Maxwell-Smith, to prepare one for every contestant interview—and Wink was just as satisfied with an annoyed groan from the audience as he would have been with a laugh.

He had no problem drawing attention to his own mistakes; he struggled with a Tic Tac Dough question one day because he had never seen the name for a particular type of great ape written down before, and eventually sputtered out “orange-you-tan.” And there was the day when he asked a contestant to name the James Bond movie that had been released in the summer of 1983.

“In the summer of ’83?” the contestant asked for clarification.

“No, sorry, it was Octopussy.” Wink not only laughed it off, he cheerfully told TV Guide about the gaffe for their 1984 cover story about game show hosts—Wink was one of the six who appeared on the cover. 

As much as the casual viewer may have viewed Wink Martindale as a stereotype, he was vocally resentful of how deeply those stereotypes imprinted themselves in show business, even among those that he felt should know better. He said in 1985, “I get sick of radio and TV commercials that do a takeoff on game show hosts. I was called to do a radio commercial, and when I saw the script was supposed to be a takeoff on a game show I just walked out. I will not do those. That bothers me. If that is what game show hosts are all about, then God forbid any of us should be doing it.”

Later in the 1980s, toy maker Galoob introduced Mr. Game Show, a battery-operated robotic toy that played a game show-style  game. Mr. Game Show was designed with thick brown hair and predominant teeth; he bore more than a passing resemblance to Wink Martindale.

But as Wink implored people to understand, there was more to him—and more to game show hosts in general—then perfect teeth and immaculate hair care.

He told interviewer Michael Hill, “I guess when you do learn your craft, and you do it well, producers keep calling you. You have to be able to ad-lib, to think on your feet. And you have to have fun with people, a real affinity for people, to be able to relate one on one to the contestant. The toughest part of my job is just learning the game so you have it locked in, all the rules, without thinking about it. But one of the hardest parts is to take thirty or forty seconds and make someone who is really nervous feel at ease and at home so that they will have a good time and the audience will have a good time…A good host can make the contestant feel at ease so they can go with the flow. It’s not as easy as it looks. If it was that easy, maybe everybody would be doing it.”

LICENSE TO PRODUCE

in 1985, Wink Martindale left Tic Tac Dough after seven seasons to host a show of his own creation. Wink was reading The Los Angeles Times one morning and came up with an idea for a game.

“There was a banner headline,” he explained that year. “And I thought, if I took some of those letters out, could I still come up with the headline? I tried it on my wife when she got up and she said, ‘I don’t know what the headline says, but that would make a great game show.’ I said, ‘I’m glad you said that because it’s exactly what I had in mind.”

Wink called the game Headline Chasers. Against tough competition—many stations aired it in direct competition with Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy!—the show lasted only one season.

In 2016, Wink remembered, “We got a phone call from the manager of the station that aired Headline Chasers in Miami, and he said, ‘Can’t you dumb it down a little bit?’ I knew we were finished.”

Wink had come up with Headline Chasers by thumbing through a newspaper. Thumbing through a magazine gave him the inspiration for his next game. He happened across an advertisement depicting license plates from all fifty states, which led to a train of thought about some of the distinctive vanity license plates he had seen. He created a game called License 2 Steal and joined forces with his former Tic Tac Dough bosses, Jack Barry & Dan Enright Productions, to sell the show to USA and Global. Under the new title Bumper Stumpers, Wink Martindale had another hit. Canadian newsman Al DuBois hosted the show in which contestants were shown a vanity license plate and had to decipher it after being told who it supposedly belonged to (for example, the license plate “KCNO” belonged to an odds-maker; the contestants had to figure out that KCNO had to be pronounced “Casino”).

WINK’S INTERACTIVE GAMES

Wink Martindale observed during the late 1980s, “Technology is very important to the audience now. You’ve got to have that modernistic stuff.”

And Wink went modern in the early 1990s with an extremely ambitious idea for a 24-hour game show cable channel, simply called The Game Channel. A 1992 press kit laid out the idea; twenty-four hours of game shows, a mix of original programs and reruns, and between shows, “Playbreaks” that would allow home viewers to call a 900-number and play the games at home for prizes.

The Game Channel never got off the ground, but the notion of Playbreaks would. In 1993, Wink began a successful partnership with The Family Channel, with Trivial Pursuit, an adaptation of the board game that featured ten Playbreaks per afternoon, allowing home viewers to call in and play Trivial Pursuit at home for prizes ranging from telephones to vacations and cruises. Trivial Pursuit was such a success for the channel that The Family Channel quickly introduced three more interactive games, Boggle, Jumble and Shuffle. All four were hosted by Wink. The economics of the Playbreaks were enough to induce some salivating for production company and the channel. The 900-number charged a flat rate of $4.98 per call, with a computer system designed to accommodate 2,500 players at a time. With ten Playbreaks each afternoon, a full complement of players would net $124,000 in a single day.

If there were high rewards involved for all involved, there were high risks. The Playbreaks were so lengthy that to accommodate them, The Family Channel aired only six minutes of commercials per hour (about half of the typical amount of commercial time in an hour during 1993) and that cost needed to be offset by a high volume of calls from viewers, many of whom, admittedly, didn’t want to spend five bucks on a phone call. As an enticement, Martindale emphasized that callers would be offered coupons for deals that would offset the $4.98.

Wink admitted later, “For the average viewer, $4.98 was too much for a phone call. We couldn’t keep that going.”

DEBT

Hey, it’s that Wink guy again!

In the mid-1990s, crooner Tony Bennett unexpectedly experienced a surge in popularity among Generation Xers thanks to a concert aired on MTV. Wink Martindale received an unexpected phone call one afternoon from his agent offering him “a game show that will do for you what MTV did for Tony Bennett!”

Wink’s new game was called Debt. Buena Vista Television built a game show that was part parody and part actual game, with just a dash of social commentary thrown in. In 1995, consumers had amassed a total of $1 trillion in personal debt, a selling point that Martindale emphasized while promoting the show in interviews; it was the unlikely core premise of the show. Each episode opened with the three contestants holding up slates with their names and personal debts, arranged to look like the contestants were posing for mug shots. Each contestant fearlessly revealed what it was that caused them to go so far into the red—a car, back taxes, student loans, and, in one case, a bald man who remorselessly admitted he had spent a fortune on a toupee—and then Wink would make his entrance to inexplicable disco music on a set with 1950s-inspired décor.

“Men Who Wear Dresses,” “Must See TV If You’re Three,” “Deodorant and Antiperspirant” were some of the categories that the contestants navigated on the game board, with correct answers knocking money off their debt (with their debts actually on display and treated as their scores).

Debt was an overnight hit for Lifetime, no surprise to Wink Martindale because, he reasoned at the time, “Debt is something everyone can relate to.” The show won a CableAce Award, and the first season’s contestants were happy with the $850,000 worth of personal debt that the show erased in its first year. Debt’s contestant line rang off the hook with hopeful players getting in line for their shot. Theoretically, you could pay off your debt by doing well on Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, or Supermarket Sweep, but there was something surprisingly enticing for many about going on a show called Debt, announcing your struggle to the world, and winning the chance to dig yourself out.

Executive producer Andrew Golder told the Associated Press, “Getting out of debt in some weird way is almost a new version of the American Dream. Since we’re attaching the winnings to their debt and personalizing it, a big burden is lifted off their shoulders. It’s not just ‘Here’s $6,000, go do something.’ It’s tangible, we know how you got there.”

Debt managed to make a few enemies in high places, however. It was slapped with a lawsuit from Visa after only a few weeks on the air, arguing that the show’s logo was far too similar to the credit card giant’s logo. Debt designed a new logo, only to get hit with more litigation from the producers of Jeopardy!, who felt that the game’s rules bore a few too many striking similarity to their game, forcing Debt to change its first round quite a bit before launching its second season. The show disappeared after that second season, which Wink would later attribute to a lack of focus. A new game, Win Ben Stein’s Money on Comedy Central, had become top priority for the production staff, which was running both shows, and Debt’s whimsical question writing suffered. The magic of the game had disappeared quickly.

LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING BACK

In the 2000s, Wink found himself in the unusual position of being a perennial nostalgia figure. Many of his television appearances in the new millennium would involve looking back on his past work. He co-hosted prime time specials showcasing memorable game show bloopers and talking at length about his old boss Chuck Barris for an E! documentary. He was a panelist for “Game Show Week” on Hollywood Squares. He appeared on morning news shows to watch clips of Tic Tac Dough and Gambit. Wink was living television history. If the subject wasn’t game shows, it was almost certainly Elvis. Wink was more than happy to talk about the friend from Tennessee that he had crossed paths with so early in a historic career.

Over a decade after Debt, Wink found himself revitalized yet again with a quirky Game Show Network series, Instant Recall, “the game show that you don’t know you’re on.”  Co-created by Richard Dawson’s son Gary, Instant Recall would pit unsuspecting people in Candid Camera-style hidden camera pranks, culminating with Wink emerging from hiding and grilling the victim with questions about what they had just been subjected to.

Wink had since taken to connecting with fans through social media, with a YouTube channel showcasing games from the past and a Facebook page devoted to discussing them. Periodically, a fan will ask, “When are you going to retire?”

Wink always had the same cheerful answer. “From what?”

On April 15, 2025, Wink Martindale died at age 91…or as we’d prefer to think, he retired. Three years prior to his passing, he reflected on his extraordinary career in an oral history interview for the National Archives of Game Show History, available for viewing on the Strong National Museum of Play website.

The post Remembering Wink Martindale appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

When I was knee-high to a grasshopper, the hours spent listening to old men sing long meter hymns off-key, followed by even older men yelling prayers, interspersed with an A and B selection from the choir, felt like an eternity. My toys were considered too much of a distraction beyond my toddler years, and sleep was forbidden. It did not help that my mother and I were often seated in the front row because she was married to the pastor. I share all this to contextualize the swamp of stimulus I was experiencing. On the one hand, I was overstimulated by the sounds and physicality of the liturgical expression; on the other hand, they were illegible to a 5-year-old, and no one attempted to explain. However, because it was Texas, there was always heat.

Where there is heat, there are fans. I was especially fortunate to have grown up in the era where funeral homes advertised their services on the backs of hand fans. Simple in their construction, they consisted of either wood or plastic sticks with a square foot of cardstock glued to the front. These fans often bore the visage of interchangeable scions: Martin Luther King, Jr., or a version of white Jesus. Or, in fancier churches, I would find fans featuring a staged photograph of the perfect Black family standing in an empty church, backlit by stained glass windows. This did not matter to me, because the primary function of this fan was as a vehicle to my imagination, which ironically took the shape of actual vehicles.

More often than not, the fan would transform into a fighter jet. Unfortunately, the dogfights with an imagined second jet would attract too much attention. To stay out of trouble, I would shift from fighting on Earth, to preserving life in space—as the fan’s wider portion would represent the colony of survivors from Earth’s final cataclysmic event. As it touched down on the unknown planet, known as my knees, the whooshing from the reverse thrusters of the ship would interfere with the exegetical work of the sermonic moment. I would again be forced to transition the vehicular abilities of the fan to something less apt to arouse attention. Since the fan/spaceship had already landed on the surface of my knees, shifting to more terrain-centric vehicular exploration only made sense. The impossibly thin dump truck that resulted from this shift was probably the most successful, even if not the most exciting. If I could get away with it, I would place one foot on the seat of my pew to create a mountain for expert shuttling of mining debris. The fan was not my only found plaything, but it was the most commonly accessible and most utilized.

I was also known to flap the halves of hymnals like doves, send tithing envelopes down rushing flood rapids as Noah’s Ark, and ride the A train along the back of pews via the pens provided to the congregation. (I will admit that the last one took some flexibility.) This type of play continued until I was initiated into the culture of the Black Church by way of the rituals and rhetoric of play that configured and protected the space.

I am not unique. This type of play was the lived experience of many children in churches across the nation, kids who found ourselves immersed in a culture we couldn’t understand. So, we made ourselves at home in the ways that we knew how. As millennials, we would leave the church to find that our Transformers were “more than what meets the eyes.” They could take the shape of vehicles, household items, or weapons of mass destruction. Taking a cue from our friends at Hasbro, church kids like me could see something just below the surface of something as unpromising as fans. While our elders may have been immersed in the meaning of religious rituals, kids repurposed the materials around us in the pews for our own purposes. We made the sanctuary into a playground for our imaginations.

The post Fanfare for the Fan appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

As someone who indulges in a lot of fantasy-related media and folklore podcasts, the term brownie rang a bell to me as a type of faerie, originating in Scotland with the bwbachod or bwca as their Welsh equivalent. When you think of faeries you probably picture characters like Tinker Bell from Disney’s Peter Pan, small creatures with wings who cause mischief or are helpful. This is a very modern-day depiction of fae creatures! Fae as it turns out in folklore come in l different shapes and sizes, categorizations, and alignments towards intending harm or aid for humans. Brownies were solitary fae that would work in people’s homes secretly. They are described as “small men, about three feet in height, very raggedly dressed in brown clothes, with …. shaggy heads, who come out at night and do the work that has been left undone by the servants,” according to Katherine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies. They would perform housework and were believed to ensure prosperity in the home. However, they did not do this for free, and it was recommended the human residents leave offerings of cream or porridge by the hearth. But if homeowners offered them clothing, the brownie would leave the house and move on to another one. (Talk about touchy!) Thomas Knightley in The World Guide to Gnomes, Fairies, Elves and Other Little People also mentions that these small men reside in “the hollow of an old tree, a ruined castle, or the abode of man. He is attached to particular families, with whom he has been known to reside, even for centuries.”

What is interesting to learn is that creatures such as these appear in folklore all around the world, not just Great Britain where most of our stories of them originate. Knightley mentions brownies being the same as kobolds and goblins in other European folk tales and in Nordic folklore there are the Nisse (or Nis) which, according to Vaesen: Nordic Horror Roleplaying, are “little old men with long beards, shabby gray clothes, and red hats. They are grumpy, vindictive, and proud.” The legends around these creatures, no matter their names, all reflect small fae-like people who helped around the house or farm, but if they encountered lazy farmhands or housekeepers, the brownies would scold them, pinch them while they slept, or cause mischief for the humans.

Turning then to Palmer Cox, the Canadian illustrator began depicting his whimsical characters in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1883 and eventually the poems and illustrations from the magazine were published in his book The Brownies: Their Book in 1887. This would be only the first of a lengthy list of titles from Cox with the Brownies as the main characters. While there are many differences between Cox’s Brownies and the folklore he drew upon from Scotland, Eileen Margerum in Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Narratives in North America (Studies on Themes and Motifs in Literature) from 2005, sums it up best by saying that Cox’s stories were “not about ‘the brownie’ by rather about ‘Brownies.’ No longer potentially malevolent, and no longer solitary, the Brownies have become the quintessential American belongers. There is never dissent; they always act as one.” Cox would show them going on adventures in the United States in The Brownies at Home from 1891, or on a global trip in The Brownies Around the World from 1892, one stop being Scotland funnily enough. Cox would begin each story with this quote: “Brownies, like fairies and goblins, are imaginary little sprites, who are supposed to delight in harmless pranks and helpful deeds. They work and sport while weary households sleep, and never allow themselves to be seen by mortal eyes.”

These little characters were such a hit in his illustrations that they started “Brownie-mania” in the 1890s that swept across the nation and resulted in Cox’s characters being adapted into various toys, games, plays, and household products. Many of these renditions of the Brownies were authorized, but many were not. However, this was not illegal due to Cox being unable to copyright the folklore creatures’ name. And in 1900, George Eastman in Rochester, New York, would appropriate the name for Kodak’s new product, invented by Frank A. Brownell: the “Brownie” camera.

When the Brownie Camera was advertised, Eastman wanted it to show that photography was something so simple that even children could take pictures, and Kodak wanted to aim their ads towards this demographic. As such, many of the advertisements for Brownie cameras featured little elf-like characters on and around the cameras or on the packaging. However, there is no official source indicating that Eastman was drawing on Palmer Cox’s little fae characters for the product’s name. Cox never seems to have been asked about authorizing Kodak to use his style of brownies in their advertising and naming of the camera, but the resemblance is uncanny and certainly makes one see a direct connection between Cox’s Brownie-mania and Kodak’s famous camera!

Researching these characters that were popularized by Cox’s illustrations, where they originated in folklore, and tracing them to the Brownie-mania of the 1890s that eventually led to George Eastman was a fascinating dig into history that even extends further into Girl Scout ranks and more as it turns out! It is always a joy to find the unknown connections between points of history we may not have realized were connected to begin with.

The post Brownies: From Folklore to Kodak Cameras appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

“What’s in it for THEM?”

Have you ever watched Password, The $100,000 Pyramid, Match Game, or any other celebrity game shows and wondered why the celebrities are there? They can’t win the car, the cash, nor the washer/dryer combo, and with the workload involved for the TV shows on which they’re already appearing regularly as cast members, being on a game show is costing them a precious day off. A few celebrities have explained the incentives for being on a game show over the years…

IT HELPS NAME RECOGNITION—Actors often find themselves disappearing into the characters they play; when they’re recognized in public, fans address them by character names, not their real names. Game shows helped establish an identity beyond their characters.

Dick Gautier (Hymie the Robot on Get Smart, among many other roles) explained in 2013, “You were visible, the host said your name…and in my case, pronounced it correctly, which was a big plus…And the audience saw you for five straight days.”

Jamie Farr, who began appearing on game shows during the height of the popularity of M*A*S*H, said, “Before I started doing game shows, if people recognized me on the street, they would say, ‘Hey, it’s Klinger! It’s Klinger!’ After I began appearing on game shows, they began saying ‘Hey, it’s Jamie Farr!’”

IT CAN LEAD TO OTHER GIGS—In a 1962 TV Guide profile of the stars who frequently appeared as game show panelists, Betsy Palmer, a regular on I’ve Got a Secret, explained what had happened in her theatrical career since she started appearing on game shows.

“Panel shows have made me what I am today…When I played Columbus (Ohio) in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes last summer, we filled the auditorium to capacity—4,000 seats every night. They shouldn’t pay us for being on Secret. We should pay them.” Random House founding publisher Bennett Cerf, who amassed a full schedule of paid speaking engagements because of his weekly appearances on What’s My Line?, told TV Guide, “I’ll deny it if you print it, but I would do [game shows] for nothing.”

Possibly the definitive example of what game shows can do for a career was Burt Reynolds, who traced his two decades of film superstardom to an appearance on a game show. Reynolds, who was playing the title role on TV’s Dan August, appeared on The Hollywood Squares to promote that show. A talent booker for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson found Reynolds witty and engaging in his Squares appearance and extended an invitation for Reynolds to appear as a guest of Carson. A casting director saw Reynold’s appearance on The Tonight Show and thought Reynolds would be perfect for a film that was about to start production; that film was Deliverance. The success of the film sent Reynolds into the stratosphere. At a time when many A-listers shied away from game shows, Reynolds famously harbored a sense of loyalty toward the genre, popping up on Match Game, Password, and even surprising the audience by modeling a new car on The Price is Right.

IT’S JUST PLAIN FUN—Charles Nelson Reilly famously said of Match Game, “This isn’t a job, it’s a social engagement.”  A six-episode taping day on that show involved catered lunch and drinks after taping the second episode, catered dinner and more drinks after the fourth episode, and a chance to swap stories and jokes with the other stars. And during all that, you were asked to play an uncomplicated game that didn’t require memorizing a script or any rehearsals. You just waltzed right in and played the game. And for all that, you’d collect a few thousand dollars for your time.

Some truly loved the games. Betty White said she thought the mental exercise involved was good for her. Chuck Conners was so addicted to Password that he offered to pay for his own travel arrangements to appear on the show.

Shelley Herman, a longtime writer for TV game shows, says, “Actress Debralee Scott told me the proudest moment of her career was when she scored 234 points and became the first celebrity who won Fast Money without her partner’s help on Richard Dawson’s version of Family Feud.”

GOTTA PAY THE BILLS—While the general public thinks of actors as multimillionaires across the board, the truth is a great many performers in the public eye are thinking about getting their rent paid like the rest of us. David Narz, who designed the stunts for All-Star Beat the Clock, remembers, “Celebrities are like any other people—some of them are comfortable doing silly stunts. Some of them aren’t. And the ones who aren’t end up doing the show because they need a gig, they need exposure. So, we had some weeks where we already had a host who wasn’t that fond of the show, playing the game with some celebrities who didn’t want to be there.”

“I remember a taping of All-Star Beat the Clock where the celebrities were behind the curtain waiting to be introduced. One of them was an actress that I won’t identify. But she was there because her agent booked her on the show. And I remember she just looked at me and said, ‘Tell me who I need to talk to and what I have to do with him in order to get out of doing this show.’”

Bill Bixby, who found employment difficult to come by in the years between My Favorite Martian and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, once credited his appearances on The Hollywood Squares with keeping him above water during those lean times.

Shelley Herman tells us, “While the syndicated game show Liars Club gave up-and-coming talent, including David Letterman, some of their first national television exposure, executive producer Larry Hovis, best remembered as Lieutenant Carter on the ‘60s comedy series Hogan’s Heroes had a soft spot in his heart when hiring celebrity panelists. He often got phone calls from actors, some of whom were close friends, who confided in Hovis that they needed just one more job to qualify for their health insurance benefits from the union [AFTRA, now SAG-AFTRA, paid health insurance benefits based on how much work you had done in television during the past year]. Hovis could empathize with his fellow performers.”

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE—There’s one other union benefit to keep in mind: the pension plan. Jamie Farr explained in a 2019 interview, “AFTRA determines what kind of pension you qualify for by the amount of work you do on radio and television. I did so many appearances on game shows that it pushed me over the line, and I became eligible for a huge pension.”

Bill Cullen, as prolific a game show panelist as he was a host, was said to have “maxed out” the pension plan because of the sheer volume of his work. He and his wife Ann enjoyed a very comfortable life-after-television thanks to his thousands of game show episodes.

But our favorite answer to the question, “Why do game shows?” came from actress/comedienne Jo Anne Worley, who said this in 2019: “”I’ll tell you why I loved doing game shows so much. A week ago, a woman recognized me and she comes up to me and says ‘You don’t know me. You were my husband’s partner when he was on The $25,000 Pyramid. He paid for college with that show. Thanks for helping him.’ I got to help people by doing game shows. And they paid me a few thousand dollars per shot for doing it. And they paid for my lunch while I was in the studio. I don’t think you could ask for a better job than being on a game show.”

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER CLASSIC GAME SHOW GUEST STARS?

NIPSEY RUSSELL—Born Julius but nicknamed “Nipsey” by his mother, Russell was a maverick stand-up comic who refused to do stereotypical comedy in his early career, insisting on wearing stylish suits and doing jokes mocking racism at a time when neither was common for black comedians. Russell’s way with rhyming phrases earned him the nickname “the poet laureate of television.”

CHARLEY WEAVER—Cliff Arquette was an accomplished actor who performed as “Charley Weaver,” an old hayseed, for a skit on Jack Paar’s Tonight Show. The skit was so popular that Arquette virtually never appeared on television as himself again. The character took on a life of its own in a manner similar to Elvira or Pee-Wee Herman in later years. Weaver was a fixture on the original Hollywood Squares from its launch in 1966 through Arquette’s death in 1974

FANNIE FLAGG—Patricia Neal of Alabama decided to pursue a career in comedy. Because there was already a famous actress by that name, she stitched together her alias from comic actress Fannie Brice, and Lily Flagg, an Alabama town named after a cow. She became a fixture on Match Game. A fan wrote her a letter observing that Fannie must be dyslexic because of the odd way that she spelled some of her answers. Flagg, who had never heard of dyslexia prior to reading the letter, got a life-changing diagnosis and ended up pursuing a new career as an author. Her best-known work was Fried Green Tomatoes.

The post Why Celebrities Like Game Shows appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

These terms that originate within the social sciences help to explore the phenomena associated with race as it applies to Black people. “Phobia” is a suffix that should be familiar to most readers, as it is used in words that describe fears related to small spaces (claustrophobia) or of spiders (arachnophobia). In the case of the latter, the phobia also does the work of objectifying. The spider is no longer a life to be considered in its complexity, rather it is a phobic object ripe for destruction. Similarly, Negrophobia, and the antiblack racism that animates it, flattens the dynamism of Black life to an object to be feared. The suffix “philia” may not be as familiar, as it tends to show up in more scientific settings. In fact, my first time encountering it was while working at a science museum. I was charged with conducting a science experiment that helped kids see the difference between a special hydrophobic sand, and the regular hydrophilic, beach sand. “Philia” in that context meant that the water was easily absorbed by the sand. In the case of Negrophilia, it stands not in opposition to Negrophobia, but in support of it—a sublimation of fear into phantasm. Negrophilia is the idealization of Black people as servile, simple, yet magical. The personhood of Black people is absorbed by the imagination of the dominant group. In either case the humanity of Black people is lost. This alone is a type of violence enacted upon Black identity. However, it lends itself to other forms of violence. 

The Jolly Darkie Target Game, produced by McLoughlin Brothers in 1890—a paltry 25 years after the passing of the 13th amendment and the legal abolition of slavery—is an example of a Negrophobic game. Like many games of its time, the eponymous Darkie is presented as a phobic object draped in fancy dress that mocks the player, begging to be hit by one of the game’s balls. An outlet for the racial tensions to which it also contributes, games like The Jolly Darkie Target Game rely on insidious visual language to communicate the implicit directive to inflict harm. The underlying tension is relieved when the specter of the Darkie is vanquished by the balls.

Unique Art Manufacturing Company’s Jazzbo-Jim “The Dancer on the Roof” (about 1920) mechanical toy is an example of a Negrophilic object. First arising to prominence as a movement of the early 20th century, Negrophilia played on the plantation fantasy of happy enslaved people. Jazzbo-Jim is one of many tap dancing, jigging, or otherwise entertaining toys that feature a dark figure in action from the early 20th century. His dazzling abilities are animated by the white gaze, in that he cannot operate without winding. This type of coerced merriment mirrors life on the plantation, where enslaved persons were often forced to perform joy through song and dance for their enslavers’ amusement. The owner of the toy enacts a similar power dynamic that sublimates the fear of Negrophobia into the fantasy of jovial subservience, which serves as the basis of Negrophilia.  

That returns us to the question of what determines the Blackness of a toy. I think there are a few ways, but my favorite is what I like to call the afterlife of playthings. Drawing upon Saidiyah Hartman’s conceptual framing “the afterlife of slavery”—which she uses to discuss the holistic and longitudinal effect of slavery upon the formerly enslaved—the afterlife of playthings aims to do similar work with respect to the practices and materials of Black play. Negrophobic and Negrophilic playthings are how most of the public is exposed to play. For members of the African Diaspora, as the plaything of the imaginations of toymakers and toy consumers, we find ourselves in need of objects that allow us to shape play according to our own gaze. That often looks like a practice or function that redefines the plaything. Though typically not considered in the development process, the needs of marginalized people often dictate the way things are used. The example that is often circulated around The Strong Museum is double Dutch jump rope, a game with special popularity in urban Black communities. Collecting a jump rope or two doesn’t elucidate the public on the value of that toy to the community that holds it dear. How do we collect beyond the object? How do explore the afterlife of playthings? These are questions that are currently informing our development of a metric for a Black toy.

The post Toyetic Oppression: Black Toys and Black People appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

While play foreshadows culture, design shapes culture. Both have the potential to transform society. For the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1949), play amplifies life. Hence play is necessary to individuals as a life function and to societies as a cultural function, by virtue of its meaning, expressive value, and its spiritual and social associations. Conversely, for other scholars such as American design historian Victor Margolin, designs acquire meaning by shaping the social environments (i.e., habits, practices, lifestyles) where they are introduced, to form the culture framing people’s lives.

Understanding how play and design shape culture enhances innovation practices. Play’s engaging characteristics makes it a friendly conceptual “Trojan hobby horse” for design project stakeholders—an inclusive way to think about problems for users, producers, or designers alike. Building on previous research and reflecting on my own shift from “design for play to play for design” as a designer, I identified various themes exemplifying the conceptual bridges linking play and design. Like playmaking, designing requires one to: think (critically and analytically), care (empathize and advocate), feel (experience materiality, gestalt), act (as a sociocultural agent), create (manifest possibilities), shape (articulate visual literacy), make (model and produce), share (communicate knowledge, tell stories), deliver (implement innovation).

Research Fellowship

While designers have applied play to their own ends, few play scholars have focused on the cultural relevance of this relationship. To ascertain how, if at all, play scholars examined the now obvious relationship between play and design, I reviewed writings available at The Strong National Museum of Play’s Brian Sutton-Smith’s Library and Archives of Play over a 10-day research fellowship. The fellowship aimed to help consolidate a conceptual framework that promotes “designerly ways of knowing” informed by play, and how an optimal, inspirational form of design for play, proposed as a “superlative” form of design, could be useful as a transdisciplinary Design Play relevant to addressing contemporary challenges.

The research also aimed to enhance understanding of either discipline through the lens of the other; one uncertain, the other ambiguous. To compensate for the lack of research available linking play to design, I investigated references around play, discussing its multifarious nature, including imagination, creativity, storytelling, art, strategy, or social engagement, to connect play to design through their multidisciplinary manifestations. Brian Sutton-Smith’s papers constituted my main references, along with others from fellow educationalists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and biologists. Anchoring the research in practice, I also examined toy and game playmakers’ testimonials to discern how their practice could exemplify or inform design innovation.

Sutton-Smith’s Playful Design Paradox

A social science polymath and one of the foremost play scholars of the last 100 years, Sutton-Smith scrutinized much of his peers’ work while meticulously documenting his own. The resulting library he bequeathed to The Strong provides a nonpareil resource for anyone investigating the multidisciplinary nature of play to contextualize it within broader networks of theory and practice.

His contribution to play studies, rooted in the games and stories of his New Zealand childhood, developed a consilience of the ways of thinking and speaking about play. He proposed playing evolved genetically as theatric representative forms of culture, mimicking or mocking real-world challenges, to aid us in our struggle for survival, to overcome life challenges, or just to feel life is worth living.

In Toys as Culture (1986), Sutton-Smith investigated the embodiment of play in toys and how, as manipulable mass-media, toys channel culture in modern family life, through technological innovation, as educational props, or as consumer objects. In the process, he critiqued how playthings acculture children to rational, information-oriented consumer societies and their alienating work practices. Paradoxically, Sutton-Smith barely broached the subject of design in his work aside from a brief consideration of whether a “technology of toys (is) possible,” given the technological and marketing motivations driving toymakers over the sociocultural factors driving toy and game designers. Nevertheless, his groundbreaking study is relevant to designers, for whom the play of semantics is a core concern.

With the International Toy Research Association (ITRA), which he co-founded in 1993, Sutton-Smith saw an opportunity to refresh play studies. He felt the classic toy paradigm as conveying “progressive” didactic, socializing, or therapeutic functions—those set against (or within) a work ethic rejecting play as waste of time—had dogged play research and rationalized an oversized belief in play stages and appropriateness where “toy play becomes a child capsule set to one side.” Encouraging researchers to focus their attention beyond toys as cultural text or on players as social agents, he urged ITRA to broaden play’s research scope to look for larger patterns in Homo Ludens’ life, new forms of leisure intelligibility. Seeing that “toys are for child researchers the particular nets through which all of the rest of this leisure map can be brought to light,” he proposed the Festival of Toys as a metaphor for an ongoing, reflective event amplified with episodic bouts of reflexive engagement to raise issues about the adequacy of research assumptions. He envisioned the festive “procession of variegated toy events” as a monumental cybernetic merchandising involving adults, children, media, and industry, leveraging gift giving and fantasy characters to invigorate toy research.

Thirty years later at ITRA’s 9^th conference, held at The Strong in August 2023, members corroborated his 2008 realization that “all of a sudden, (play) had become among other things a sociopolitical matter of some complexity.” The scope of topics, under the umbrella “Toys Matter: The Power of Playthings,” comprised sociopolitical conflict, cultural identity, sustainability, toying with museums, research through toymaking, and the ever-widening reach of design as an academic field.

Playmaking for Design Play: Tools and Props and Rules and Tropes

Research through design entails researchers reading and writing, empathizing with stakeholders while thinking and making. As critical—playful—makers and transformers, they harness the human sciences to probe culture, map contexts and adapt to circumstances to facilitate the creation of preferrable ones. They leverage art to access the subconscious, playing with surrealism, nonsense, whimsy, and pleasure, to discriminate value and explore affordances. They organize resources and harness technology to optimize interactions between humans and images, objects, bodies, and spaces, thus shaping our artificial environment: culture.

How do toys help? While toys are the tangible tools for or props of play, games are the intangible rules of or tropes for play; the former embodying materiality, the latter channeling storytelling, both serving as twin metaphors promoting design research. Designers tamper the effects and temper the affects of technology: comfortably navigating the uncertainty of design processes, they are well suited to embrace the ambiguous nature of play. Alternating divergent and convergent modes of thinking/playing, designers iterate between letting go and maintaining control, focusing on changing current conditions into preferred ones. Balancing a situationist urge for authenticity and a celebration of the moment  designers may counteract design’s rationalist envy and its cybernetic illusions of control over nature.

Echoing The Strong’s curation of things play, especially its Toy Halls of Fame, Tim Walsh’s interviews for his 2004 The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys—a “book about entrepreneurs who dreamed about creating fun and who did it!”—and his Toyland videos produced with Ken Sons are all celebrations of “designed play,” viewed through the lens of opportunity manifest in capitalistic individualism. This is encapsulated in the book’s selection criteria: 1) high sale numbers (over 10 million), 2) market longevity (more than 10 years), 3) identifiable inventors, 4) inventing outside institutions or corporations, and 5) significance to the author or his friends. Enlisting individual players-as-users, starting with himself, to define plaything success, mirrors that projected by the playmaker, as in his Author’s Note whereby Rules of the Game are described as “How I Chose the Toys I Chose.” Whether book, video, or museum, such interpretations of playmaking success read like a situational assessment chart plotting the internal, external, desired, and happenstance forces enabling an individual inventor’s potential to create for play:

• Personal passions: He-Man was a childhood dream; Etch-A-Sketch, an engineer’s pet project.
• Accidental inventions: Play Doh, a serendipitous chemical discovery; Slinky an engineering one.
• Marketing adaptations: Barbie, of risqué merchandising; Ant farm, of mail order trading.
• Breaking rules: Twister allows close-up body play; Nerf permits indoor ball play.

Unlike their toymaking counterparts’ stories of opportune invention, game designers, while also often solo inventors, appear to be motivated by more predetermined objectives. The conceptual, strategic, abstract (if only visual) nature of games requires their creators to plan and articulate narrative structures for player engagement and experience, allocate resources, rewards, obstacles, and to balance skills and challenges in order to sustain players’ interest in the game. This applies to less strategic games such as digital art gameplay, for which designers also need to specify intent and encode play in software on the get-go to create ludic aesthetic experiences. Game design practice is often an independent one, reinforced by the fact that games can be produced with fewer resources than those needed to produce a toy. While toy production requires more resources (materials, tools, processes, labor), games can be created with a pen and paper or on a personal computer.

These aspects of playmaking have several agentic implications for the relationship between design and play:

• Toy invention, the ability to identify in one’s environment novel possibilities for play, is a tangible manifestation of a keen sense of observation and creativity, fundamental assets for any designer and a way of seeing the world that nurtures design fluency.
• Game design builds experience. A game is always free, freeplay is always bound by rules—somewhat. No activity, however much “freely” performed for its own sake, is devoid of operational steps, environmental factors, social rules, or interpretive codes. Designing a game forces one to plan the architecture of experience, from resources to usage.
• People play. Design for play inspires creative practices in design because of the nature of play: there is no designing for play without playing for design. When applying such cues to other disciplines, innovation becomes a social practice bringing together motivated actors, quirky characters, and engaging personalities, helping other stakeholders to open and thrive, contributing diversity, variability, redundancy—enabling creativity to organize and develop.
• Playmaking is meaningful. Inventor, designer, maker, seller, curator, scholar, player—play industry individuals create meaning, market allowing. Playmaker successes read like stories of personal affirmation and empowerment, offering everyone the opportunity to broaden perspectives on design—including inclusive, creative, or agentic alternatives to established practices.

Perhaps the latter point could be emphasized by turning the spotlight on one of The Strong’s unique assets. While the past century abounds with male playmaker success stories, the Archive’s testimonials of female playmakers, including in the Women in Toys and Women in Games Initiative papers, mirror male player practice and celebrate inclusive playmaking’s common and complementary values. This includes validating body and life choices (Barbie’s Carol Spencer), engaging with deduction and narratives skills (Her Interactive Nancy Drew games), designing for social interaction (multiplayer game designer and programmer Dani Bunten Berry), sustaining a successful business (Slinky’s Betty James), stimulating artistic expression (computer artist Ruth Leavitt Fallon), revealing design’s political nature (Barbie Liberation Army), or reclaiming home economic traditions (doll creator Patricia Biasuzzi). Each tells a tale of personal perseverance and affirmation, claiming a place in the fun and fantasy industry, ipso facto celebrating personal herstories for everyone—community allowing?

By Rémi Leclerc, 2023 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow

The post Design Matters to Play Matters to Design appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Have you ever teased a friend who was about to make a bad decision by saying “You’ll be sorry”? And you probably didn’t just say it. You probably said it with an odd, sing-song inflection. “You’lllllll be soooooooo-rrrrrrrryyyyyy!”

It was probably just something you picked up. You’ve heard friends say it. You’ve heard characters say it in movies and TV shows. But when you said “You’llllllll be sooooooooo-rrrrrrrrryyyyy” in that distinctive way, did you ever ask yourself why you’re saying it like that?

When you say “You’ll be sorry” like that, you’re quoting a game show catchphrase that has enjoyed a stunningly long life beyond that of its show.

Take It or Leave It debuted on CBS Radio in 1940 with host Bob Hawk. An audience member’s name was drawn from a fishbowl, and that person would select a category from a simple blackboard onstage. Hawk asked a question valued at $1. The show’s title came from the dilemma attached to a correct answer. The contestant could quit with the money they won, or leave it for a chance to answer another question worth double the value, from $2 to $4 to $8 to $16 to $32, all the way up to the famous “$64 question.”

“Sixty-four-dollar question” itself became a common phrase, being invoked at sports events, Senate hearings, and political press conferences. Today, “Sixty-four-dollar question” is listed in Merriam-Webster’s dictionary with the definition “Noun: a crucial question expressing the basic issue on a problematical subject.”

A new host took over the show in December 1941, Phil Baker, the man generally credited with “You’ll be sorry.” He began saying it to contestants who opted to forfeit their money to go for another question. The audience picked up on it and began saying it with him. As the years went by, the delivery of the line grew more exaggerated, until it reached the strange sing-song tone that we know today. A 1943 report mentions that the older soldiers at military induction centers were known to stand near the barber chairs and yell “You’llllll be soooo-rrrrrrrryyy!” as the new recruits got their heads shaved.

With a popular host, a big audience (35 million listeners a week by one estimate), and catchphrases that permeated the language, Take It or Leave It achieved a rare level of success for a game show—it was adapted into a movie. In 1944, 20th-Century Fox treated moviegoers to Take It or Leave It, a movie co-starring Phil Baker as himself. The movie’s premise was simple and inexpensive: a contestant selected the category “Scenes from Motion Pictures of the Past,” with each question leading to a musical scene from a past 20th-Century Fox film.

Baker departed the show in 1947, replaced by Garry Moore, who hosted it until the series ended in 1950. Five years later, plans were being made for the CBS television network to introduce a new version of the show, with a thousandfold increase in the cash prizes. Moore was offered the job of hosting the new series, but declined, saying he suspected that with prizes that big, “hanky-panky” was inevitable. He called it. The $64,000 Question would be one of the defining shows of the Quiz Show Scandal.

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER GAME SHOW PHRASES THAT ENTERED OUR VOCABULARY?

“Is it bigger than a breadbox?”—What’s My Line? panelist Steve Allen had established that a contestant’s line of work involved a product. Trying to figure out the product, Allen tried to zero in on the size of it by asking “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” For a question asked in such a specific set of circumstances, it became a common phrase in the English language, as a simple way to try to establish facts about an unknown thing.

“Will the real (____) please stand up?”—To Tell the Truth ended every game with a simple request to reveal which of the three contestants was the person that they were claiming to be. Within five years, Rod Serling presented an episode of The Twilight Zone titled “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” An animated series, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down? showed up on Saturday morning TV in the 1970s. And Eminem had a signature hit in 2000 with the classic “Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?”

“The password is…”—When Password was originally developed in 1961, producer Bob Stewart wanted to do something helpful for his mother, an immigrant who spoke English fluently but had never learned how to read it. Stewart had the show’s announcer whisper each password while it was displayed in the lower third of the screen, so his mother would be able to understand the game at all times. It became a common way to say that the reason or solution for something was so simple, it could be expressed in one word.

The post You’ll Be Sorry! appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.

Last month, our National Archives of Game Show History blog post shared excitement about the release of our oral history interview about Jack Barry & Dan Enright Productions. Because of that, we didn’t get a chance to acknowledge an important milestone in the month of September. It may already be getting into the next month, but we want to revisit September 18 and 19, 1983. In hindsight, they were two of the most important days in game show history, although at the time, none of the people involved could anticipate just how special any of it would become.

On Sunday, September 18, 1983, Alex Trebek walked onstage to host his first game of Jeopardy! The game had previously enjoyed 12 years on NBC with original host Art Fleming. In the 80s, the popularity of the board game Trivial Pursuit convinced Jeopardy! creator Merv Griffin that the audience was hungry for a tough trivia quiz on television. What better quiz than the classic game that they already knew and loved?

Art Fleming would sit out the new version, replaced by Alex Trebek, best known to viewers at that point for High Rollers and Battlestars. The game he hosted on September 18 never aired, nor was it intended to; it was a pilot, for Griffin and King World (the company that would sell the show to local stations) to evaluate. The first outing was a strange looking one. The game board for the pilot was designed to look like a gigantic Apple home computer, with the contestants seated at three smaller “computers.” Despite the high-tech look, it was a low-tech operation. The clues on the board were printed on cardboard slabs (as on Art Fleming’s incarnation), with concealed crew members revealing them by hand.

But one familiar element was there—the confident, erudite hosting of Alex Trebek. Jeopardy! went on the air the following autumn and became—well, explanation unneeded. 

Another note about that pilot; before the audience arrived, a rehearsal game was played to help acclimate Alex Trebek to the game. One of the contestants for that rehearsal was National Archives of Game Show History co-founder Bob Boden.

The following morning, Monday September 19, saw the debut of a modern game show classic: Press Your Luck, the game of big bucks and Whammys. CBS daytime boss Michael Brockman (who spoke with us for an oral history now available for viewing on our website) had originally bought the show for ABC in 1977, under the title Second Chance. The show had a short run due to commitments that Brockman had already made to other productions, but the executive saw something special in the game and kept it in mind. By 1983, he was at another network, with a 30-minute gap to fill in the morning schedule. He asked Second Chance creator Bill Carruthers to modify and modernize the game slightly.

Carruthers reinvented the static 18-square board of the original series to a lively, flashing, 54-square board that mixed and matched different prizes, cash values, instructions, and the vile Whammys, those little red monsters that taunted the contestants and took away all their money. The host was commercial pitchman Peter Tomarken, who later quipped that he was the host of the most popular game show whose title nobody remembered (most fans didn’t know the title Press Your Luck when they recognized him in public; they all thought the name of the show was Big Bucks No Whammys). Press Your Luck became a cult classic, running for three years before enjoying a phenomenal afterlife through reruns in syndication, on USA Network, Game Show Network, and Buzzr. It would be revived twice in the 21st century, as Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck for Game Show Network, and again under its original title for ABC, where it is now beginning its fifth season in prime time.

That evening, game show fans settled in for the nighttime debut of Wheel of Fortune. Wheel had been a daytime game on NBC for the past 8 ½ years, and while 8 ½ years is certainly a respectable tenure for any show, it had never been a particularly noteworthy success.

And that’s why the TV business was blindsided by what happened when nighttime Wheel quietly debuted in the fall of 1983. The show exploded. It became a national phenomenon; by 1986, it was averaging 40 million viewers per night. To put that in perspective: on an average night in 1986, more people saw Wheel of Fortune than saw the movie Star Wars in all of 1977. “Vanna-Mania” swept the country, with letter-turner Vanna White releasing an autobiography and even a line of Barbie-style dolls in her own image. Host Pat Sajak’s bone-dry wit was a unique style that made him stand out in his own way in the television landscape. And a simple game—hangman with a wheel, a game that anybody could play—turned into a game that everybody would watch.

Jeopardy!, Press Your Luck, and Wheel of Fortune: Three iconic game shows that have almost nothing in common except for two details. They all got their start in that two-day stretch in 1983—and all three of them are still on the air in the fall of 2023.

DO YOU REMEMBER…THESE OTHER GAME SHOWS ON THE AIR IN SEPTEMBER 1983?

DREAM HOUSE (NBC) – Bob Eubanks hosted a Q&A game played by young married couples. Winning the game earned a room’s worth of furniture and appliances. The winners played the bonus round for the grandest grand prize on television: a house, to be constructed anywhere that the couple wanted.

TATTLETALES (CBS) – Bert Convy hosted this series, in which celebrity couples played a game similar to The Newlywed Game. The studio audience was divided into three rooting sections, one for each couple onstage. All the money that a couple won by correctly matching answers was divided among the audience members in their rooting section. CBS installed a check-cutting machine in the back of the studio, and the audience collected their winnings on the way to the exit.

SALE OF THE CENTURY (NBC) – Jim Perry was the host as contestants answered trivia questions worth $5 apiece. The game would be interrupted several times by Instant Bargains, in which players were given the chance to buy prizes at extreme discounts: A sailboat for $6, or a dream vacation for $13. The champion accumulated money in their “savings account,” with bigger prizes available as they won more games—a Cadillac on sale for $530, or a briefcase stuffed with $75,000 for $650.

The post 48 Hours that Changed the Game Show Landscape (40 Years Later) appeared first on The Strong National Museum of Play.