The Joker’s Wild

Last Update: January 29, 2006 – all links have been updated.

Airing: 10-10:30 a.m. Monday-Friday through June 13, CBS.

Personnel: Jack Barry, host; Johnny Jacobs, Johnny Gilbert, announcers. A Jack Barry Production. Taped in Los Angeles.

Description: Q&A game with a big slot machine deciding the questions.

Game Play: Two contestants competed, a returning champion and a challenger, with the challenger going first. Each contestant, in turn, spun by pulling a lever, putting three wheels in motion, similar to a slot machine. After the wheels stopped, the windows showed one of six possibilities: five categories (different in every game) or a joker. The dollar value of the question corresponded with what came up on the wheels: three different categories, $50; two different categories and a joker or two of the same category, $100; three of the same category (a natural triple) or two jokers and a category, $200. Contestants could also opt to go "off the board" when a joker came up paired with a category they didn’t like, and answer a question in a different category for half the amount. Spinning three jokers gave the contestant a chance to automatically win the game by answering a question in the category of their choosing. $500 won the game, and the player who went second always had the final spin to try to catch up.

The show originally began with a "Joker’s Jackpot," which began at $2,500 and increased every time a champion lost (they could opt to retire with the cash they had won in the main game or risk that cash if they lost to a new contestant, with their cash winnings going into the Jackpot). This originally required five victories to win, then three. Eventually it was dropped altogether.

End Game: For the 1975 "Face the Devil" end game (there were two different end games before), the wheels contained only dollar amounts between $25 and $200 and devils. The contestant could continue to spin as they pleased or stop at any time with their accumulated winnings. Hitting a devil meant the game was over and the contestant lost all the money accumulated in the end game; winning a total of $1000 meant they kept the money and won a bonus prize as well.

Background: Joker debuted in 1972, part of CBS’ first foray back into daytime game shows, along with The Price Is Right and Gambit. It was Barry’s first daily game in 14 years. As most readers know, Jack Barry had been a major television producer and personality in the 1950s, producing and starring in children’s fare such as Winky Dink and You and Juvenile Jury, as well as a panel show for the elders, Life Begins at 80. When the big money quiz craze hit, Barry hosted (but did not produce) The $100,000 Big Surprise for a time (he was succeeded by Mike Wallace, of all people), then began hosting and coproducing Twenty-One with Dan Enright. That series and Tic Tac Dough (Barry also hosted and coproduced the daytime TTD) became two of the hottest games on television, and two cause celebrés by 1959 after it was discovered the contestants had been given answers in advance – in other words, the shows were rigged (Twenty-One more so than TTD – its format was such that it wouldn’t have worked otherwise). All the Barry-Enright properties were dropped by NBC (except Concentration, a new Barry-Enright game hosted by Hugh Downs, which the network bought and ran for 15 years).

Barry was pretty much an untouchable to the networks during the next ten years, while Enright produced shows in Canada. Barry was unable to get a regular hosting job again until 1969, when he was tapped by ABC to run the last several weeks of a failing evening quiz, The Generation Gap. A previous Barry-created show, Everybody’s Talking, was credited to a different production company to avoid appearing tainted with the Barry name. (Longtime Goodson-Todman director Ira Skutch describes in the 1995 book The Box a show Barry was to do with Mark Goodson that sounds suspiciously like Everybody’s Talking, in which Barry’s man-on-the-street interviews done for the pilot were funnier than the ones submitted by Skutch and Howard Felsher, because Barry had been giving them funny answers. "Mark said to him, ‘You know you can’t do that.’ Jack said, ‘What difference does it make? It’s only a pilot.’ He never learned his lesson.")

Although no longer seen nationwide, Barry was frequently seen in Los Angeles, courtesy of KTLA. He hosted something called "The Jack Barry Show" at KTLA in Los Angeles, probably in the 1960s. A ticket on eBay noted the show was from Paramount Television and starred "Jack Barry and His Interesting Guests – Exciting Hollywood Celebrities" (better than the dull ones, I suppose). "A Wonderful Hour of... Music... Paramount Panel... Fun... See Yourself on TV. Jack Interviews People in the Audience Who Win Lovely Gifts." Most importantly, the parking is free. He also hosted a local version of You Don’t Say! for KTLA in 1963, only to see Tom Kennedy take over after NBC picked up the series on a national basis. Later in 1963, Barry hosted a KTLA-only game called Something In Common, which featured four celebrity guests. I have only seen a ticket for the show, so I have no idea how the game was played.

Anyway, Barry had originally come up with The Joker’s Wild at least three years before – in fact, Ira Skutch claimed in his 1989 autobiography I Remember Television: A Memoir that Barry had actually developed the game during his brief tenure working for G-T after the scandals. The 1969 pilot featured Allen Ludden as host (Barry was still considered a risk by the networks as an on-air personality), celebrities asking the questions for each category, and an odd end game with a maximum of three spins and nothing but prizes on the wheels, with the contestants either accepting the prizes on a given spin or taking another (which was also the first CBS end game). A reworked version, which was called The Honeymoon Game and set to run for 90(!) minutes, also missed the mark as a 1970 pilot with Jim MacKrell as host. Even when Joker was picked up by CBS in 1972, other candidates such as Wink Martindale and Tom Kennedy were briefly considered before Barry was given the nod.

A Devil of a Time (Slot): Joker had battled NBC’s Dinah’s Place for two years before the Peacock dumped Ms. Shore, and had routed Name That Tune. When NBC shifted Celebrity Sweepstakes into the 10 a.m. spot opposite Joker early in 1975, however, the wheels started coming off. CBS bounced Joker in June, along with G-T’s Now You See It, replacing Barry’s program with a new Nicholson-Muir production, Spin-Off. Barry’s next on-air job was hosting the weekly syndicated Break the Bank, which he produced together with Enright.

The Joker’s on You, CBS: At the end of 1976, Barry and Enright (reunited full time) sold reruns of the last year of Joker to several markets, including KTLA in Los Angeles and WOR in New York. The popularity of these recycled episodes convinced B&E Joker may have been dropped before its time, and cranked up a new version for first-run syndication in the fall of 1977. This version became a nine-year hit, running on some of the same CBS stations that had lost it two years before. Never giving away huge prizes (the maximum win in the end game was generally less than $4,000), the show still had big money winners by not setting a limit on a contestant’s winnings (which had always been the rule for games airing on CBS). It spun off a weekly show for the small fry, Joker! Joker!! Joker!!!, with Barry hosting, in 1979. A studio audience segment was added in the early ‘80s, and a home audience game in 1984 (which may have been to compensate for Barry’s successor Bill Cullen being unable to walk around to the audience members).

With the exception of occasional vacation breaks (when Jim Peck substituted), Barry hosted The Joker’s Wild until his death in 1984 (while jogging in Central Park); Bill Cullen took the reins for the final two years, the last game Cullen hosted. Repeats of the Barry and Cullen syndicated shows ran on USA on and off from 1985 to 1991.

A Wild and Crazy Game: A vastly different version premiered in 1990, hosted by Pat Finn (Shop Till You Drop), with more difficult questions (generally presented in the form of definitions) and three competitors beginning the game, with the low scorer eliminated halfway through. This lasted one season in first-run syndication, with rule changes late in the run bringing the show closer to the original. This version also found a second life rerunning on USA from 1991 to 1994.

Key Phrases:

Memories From the Set: "I believe that I was part of the first and only Kids’ Week [in April 1975]. We answered mostly multiple choice questions and some regular quiz and answer questions. After winning, I spun, not against the devil, but for prize packages much like the original 1969 pilot according to what I have read. There were three prize packages and if you did not select the first, you spun for the second, but could not return to the first, etc. I won a $500 bond, a shopping spree at Toys ’R Us (bought a jungle gym set for my back yard), police band walkie talkies, a two-person Sabbath sailboat (we later sold for about $500), and a black-and-white TV set." -- Craig Enenstein

The Home Game: Milton Bradley released three editions of The Joker’s Wild in the 1970s, most (if not all) with the second end game (in which contestants had to spine three jokers three consecutive times to win a prize package). One edition of Joker! Joker!! Joker!!! as well. I had the first edition once; it’s okay but nothing exciting (and I believe there were only three questions per category in each game, so if someone liked a particular category, tough luck). Philips also released adult and children's CD-i versions of the game in the early 1990s.

Reruns: As far as we know, all the episodes still exist. The CBS episodes were thought destroyed for many years, but they popped up on the GSN schedule for about nine months starting December 2000. It’s currently off the schedule.

Revivals: The rights to Joker are now owned by Sony, who mounted a pilot a few years back that they chose not to pursue. The fact that they tried it, through, indicates the thought of bringing Joker back to television has crossed their minds.

Curt Alliaume, Executive Producer: My revised version of TJW would have three players that would compete for the entire show. Spins would be worth $50, $100, and $200 in the first half of the program, $100, $200, and $400 in the second half, with three jokers worth $500 and $1,000 in those rounds, respectively. If the person who spins doesn’t have the correct answer, the other two contestants can buzz in to steal the question, but with a catch: an incorrect answer from a contestant that buzzes in has the dollar value of the question deducted from his or her score. (This would not apply to the person who originally spun, only to the person who buzzes in, thus eliminating the random guess.) The high scorer would face the devil for a chance at a jackpot of cash and prizes that starts at over $5,000 and increases for every program it isn’t won. No home audience or studio audience end games. And the questions will be relatively tough – the original was famous for its relatively easy questions.

My 1975 Grade: B.

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The Joker’s Wild is a copyrighted title of Jack Barry Productions. This page is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Jack Barry & Dan Enright Productions, Columbia/Tri-Star Television, their subsidiaries, affiliates, or successor organizations. No challenge to their ownership is implied. Home game copyright 1973 by Milton-Bradley. Photo originally shown on eBay.