Three for the Money
Last Update: August 28, 2000 – "Memories From the Set" added, Background information added as well.Airing:
12:30-12:55 p.m. Monday-Friday, September 29-November 28, NBC.Personnel:
Dick Enberg, host; Jack Clark, announcer. A Stefan Hatos-Monty Hall Production. Taped in Los Angeles.
Description:
Rapid-fire Q&A (given the amount of time NBC invested in the show, it had to be).Game Play:
Two teams competed, with one celebrity guest and two contestants per team, identfied by wearing red and yellow shirts over their street clothes. All six players stayed on for the full week. Each team chose the number of opponents they wanted to challenge trying to identify answers in three different categories (state capitals, birds, and movie stars, for example). The team in control of the category decided whether to have one person on their team challenge one, two, or all three players on the opposing team, with correct answers worth $100, $200, or $300 accordingly. If the challenged team got the correct answer first, they won $100. The identities sought were posed as a series of three clues. The challenges went back and forth, with the trailing team given a final chance to catch up. The team with the most cash at the end of the game was declared the winner, although their scores accumulated over the course of the week (in other words, the score could be $1,300 to $900 Yellow team after Monday, $2,200 to $1,900 Red team after Tuesday, etc.)End Game:
This was also an identification game, with the three players on the winning team alternating turns and identifying subjects based on revealing one letter at a time. The jackpot started at $5,000 and increased $1,000 for every day it wasn’t won. The four contestants remained on the show for a full week, regardless of the results in the main game or end game, and split the winnings equally, with the winning players over the full week also winning new cars.Background:
This was the first sale made by Hatos-Hall Productions to NBC since their less-than-amicable departure to ABC over rights paid for Let’s Make a Deal in 1968. The show’s genesis, from what I can glean from Monty Hall’s autobiography Emcee Monty Hall, comes from an idea he worked on with Stefan Hatos in the early 1960s called Three of a Kind. Hall describes it as a show "in which teams of three butchers of three truck drivers faced teams of three schoolteachers or three waitresses in battles of wits." Sure sounds similar to Three for the Money (not to mention the first version of Barry & Enright’s Hot Potato, but he also added, "Incidentally, Three of a Kind led us to Split Second, which sold in 1971 and is a smash destined for a long run." (The book was published in 1973, but the observation was correct.)Three for the Money replaced
Jackpot! at what was turning into a brutal 12:30 time slot for NBC, which had shuffled five previous games in and out of that time period in less than two years. Dick Enberg, NBC sportscaster and host of Sports Challenge and Baffle (which had been one of the 12:30 also-rans), was selected to host.Three Strikes and You’re Out:
In all likelihood, NBC never earmarked Three for the Money for a long run, but it’s almost shocking that the show only lasted nine weeks – even Blank Check was given six months. It’s likely that with the expansion of Wheel of Fortune to an hour and with Take My Advice waiting in the wings, one game was needed as the sacrificial lamb. By all rights, that should have been a show that didn’t work at all, a show that was costing a small fortune, a show that looked downright silly – the game that preceded Three for the Money, The Magnificent Marble Machine. But since NBC was so committed to making that show a hit, and since all their other games were doing reasonably well, Three for the Money was the odd game out. Pity – at the time, it was the only true question-and-answer show on the air, with the demise in the previous three months of The Big Showdown, Jeopardy!, and Split Second.Having actually seen the one remaining episode in circulation, it’s obvious the show’s flaws existed, but could be overcome. Surprisingly, the toughest was the 25-minute format (NBC ran a five-minute network newscast at 12:55 p.m.). It seems shows that straddled games between episodes (Eye Guess and
Jackpot!, for example) worked better there, as the shorter running time was harder to notice. With Three for the Money, it seemed the show was in the final stages of the game in the blink of an eye. Nevertheless, it was one of NBC’s better new games of the year, and the network showed a lack of patience in not waiting for the audience to arrive.Memories From the Set:
"Oddly enough, after reading a reference to this game show in my satellite guide, I decided to plug the title into Google and see if any taped episodes were available."I enjoyed your synopsis and analysis of the show – even more so when I realized that the week of episodes you'd seen was one on which I was one of the four non-celebrity contestants. Our side won the the week, even though we lost the first four days.
"Several things I remember about the show were that I had to participate in at least four or five run-throughs before being invited to the show. This was understandable since the format required keeping a contestant for a whole week even if they proved a dud.
"Next, I remember that standards and practices required that the contestants be chosen by lot from a small group. Watching the producers with the network rep on the set conferring, I strongly believed that nothing was left to chance in the choosing of the contestants.
"The format of the game which allowed a team to "block" the best player of the opposing team allowed us to win and made for an exciting climax and a "good game" which the producers desired. The female opponent on Barbara Feldon’s team was unquestionably the best player, but we effectively kept her from running up the score.
"P.S. two of our prizes were a year’s supply of Veg-All (canned mixed veggies) and a Lava Lamp." – Dann Thomas
Note: Dann (who played the game as Danette Couto) is looking for a tape of the one existing episode; I can’t go tape-to-tape on my system. If you can help out, please e-mail me.)
Big Money for Enberg:
This marked Dick Enberg’s last network game show (he would last a few more seasons with Sports Challenge), but despite two failed NBC game shows to his credit, NBC Sports was happy to have him around, signing him that year to broadcast NFL games. 1975 was a tumultuous year for him, as he was divorced from his wife Jeri, an experience he referred to in Curt Smith’s Voices of the Game as "the only crisis of my life."Enberg is quite well educated, with master’s and doctorate’s degrees in health sciences from Indiana University, and a teacher and coach at what is now California’s Northridge State. His announcing career, however, took center stage by his early thirties, working on Western Hockey League play-by-play and weekly boxing from the Olympic Auditorium, then becoming the voice of the Los Angeles Rams on radio and doing UCLA basketball and California Angels baseball. Enberg would do it all for NBC Sports in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s: Wimbledon tennis, boxing, college basketball, major league baseball, college football, and, of course, professional football. He just recently signed a contract with CBS in order to resume NFL football (NBC lost NFL rights two years back, leaving him with just college basketball and tennis on his plate). Ironically, Enberg was thought to be an early favorite for a new game hosting job – the revival of Twenty-One which eventually went to Maury Povich.
The Home Game:
None, obviously. Games requiring participation of seven people are hard to pull off.Reruns:
Probably another victim of NBC’s reuse of videotape, although Hatos-Hall Productions have saved other games from that era. One episode featuring Barbara Feldon and Jim MacKrell is traded around – having seen it, my judgment is Feldon appears to be playing the big star, doing the show for "the little people," whereas MacKrell is more excited about his team’s success than the players themselves. I really hope I’m wrong.Revivals:
Dubious. Hard to get excited about a nine-week run that no one remembers. Not beyond the realm of possibility, but realistically, don’t bombard the networks with letters demanding its return.Curt Alliaume, Executive Producer:
A thirty-minute format. Celebrities are unnecessary – three contestants a side. Returning champions, but they don’t stay all week. And you’ve got a pretty decent game.My Grade:
B-.E-Mail Me With Your Memories of Three for the Money
Three for the Money is a copyrighted title of Stefan Hatos-Monty Hall Productions. This page is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Stefan Hatos-Monty Hall Productions, its subsidiaries, affiliates, or successor organizations. No challenge to their ownership is implied. Photo originally appeared on eBay.
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