[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syExoQ5DAk0]
If all has gone well, by the time you read this Mrs. Tuned In, the Tuned In Jrs. and I will be in sunny rainy Costa Rica, a destination I am not ashamed to say we chose at least in part because it had looked so attractive on the Prize Puzzle in Wheel of Fortune. Many of my early ideas of leisure and luxury, to be honest, were probably formed by watching game shows as a kid; to this day, I’m not entirely sure that Puerto Vallarta exists other than as a fabulous game-show-winner destination.
The Tuned In Jrs. get some of this through my occasional Tivoing of Wheel and Jeopardy, but they have come along too late for the heyday of Wheel merchandising: the famous “shopping round” of the ’70s and ’80s in which puzzle solvers had to blow their winnings on a showroom of prizes.
Above is a daytime Wheel excerpt from the 1970s Chuck Woolery era, which kicks off with a shopping segment. The fascinating thing, watching this with 30-odd years’ distance, is that the fabulous prize smorgasboard of 1978 looks pretty much like the garage sale of today: the teak serving set, the inlaid picture frame, the hi-fi with reel-to-reel[!] tape deck. Maybe the most poignant anachronism: the idea that someone would pay hundreds of Carter-era dollars for a physical set of encyclopedias.
Wheel long ago moved to the mostly-cash format that we now know today, and it’s probably a more appealing fantasy for the viewers at home. But there was something in that old shopping round that just played like a perfect metaphor for the consumer economy—Americans with money, being compelled to spend it all on something, anything, until there was nothing left to buy and they got to put the rest in the relative security of a Giorgio gift certificate. The most compelling part of those shopping sessions came at the end, when the contestant would realize that he or she still had enough money to buy something, and had to blow it, like or not, on a lawn flamingo.
There was an element of strategy here, I guess: decide quickly what you want most, shop wisely and don’t leave any money wasted. But whereas a show like The Price Is Right structures its challenges to reward careful, prudent spending, the was something more freewheeling and carefree about the Wheel sprees, which were like blowing a paycheck on a drunken Saturday night: easy-come, easy-go, get your windfall and turn it into a dinette set.
That may sound negative, but I don’t mean it that way. There’s something carefree and impractical about the shopping round that, in its way, makes me more nostalgic than, say, the old-fashioned airline graces on a show like Pan Am. Today’s Wheel prize system probably makes more financial sense—if, anyway, you trust the winners to spend or invest their winnings wisely—but it’s not the same kind of fun.
In any case, if you want to see one more example of how times have changed, look at this 1982 Wheel clip with a young Pat Sajak and his pre-Vanna letter turner, Susan Stafford, wearing an ensemble that somehow manages to combine harem pants and a Buck Rogers collar. Which, if you ever see something like it in a garage sale, you should snap up at any price.