charles van doren history of knowledge follow up

If the quiz shows made celebrities out of ordinary folk, they also sought to engage the services of celebrities. Joyce Brothers, not then an icon of pop psychology, whose encyclopedic knowledge of boxing won her (legitimately) $132,000. Matching an incongruous area of expertise to the right personality was a favorite hook, as in the cases of Richard McCutchen, the rugged marine captain who was an expert on French cooking, or Dr. Among the famous for fifteen pre-Warhol minutes were opera buff Gino Prato, science prodigy Robert Strom, and ex-cop and Shakespeare expert Redmond O'Hanlon. (Who wrote 'Hope is a thing with feathers/it whispers to the soul'?) Since victors returned to the show until they lost, risking accumulated winnings on future stakes, individual contestants might develop a devoted following over a period of weeks. Almost all the questions involved some demonstration of cerebral aptitude-retrieving lines of poetry, identifying dates from history, and reeling off scientific classifications, the stuff of memorization and canonical culture. The big winners-like Columbia university student Elfrida Von Nardroff who earned $226,500 on Twenty One or warehouse clerk Teddy Nadler who earned $252,000 on The $64,000 Challenge-took home a fortune in pre-inflationary greenbacks.īy the standards of the dumbed-down game shows of a later epoch, the intellectual content of the 1950s quiz shows was downright erudite.

Armed police guarded 'secret' envelops and impressive looking contraptions spat out pre-cooked questions on IBM cards. Tight close-ups framed faces against darkened backgrounds and spot lights illuminated contestants in a ghostly aura. Contestants were put in glass isolation booths, with the air conditioning turned off to make them sweat.

Set design, lighting, and pure hokum enhanced the atmosphere of suspense. Its success spawned a spin-off, The $64,000 Challenge, and a litter of like-minded shows: The Big Surprise, Dotto, Tic Tac Dough, and Twenty One. When the Q and A sessions were exposed as elaborate frauds, columnist Art Buchwald captured the national sense of betrayal with a glib name for the producers and contestants who conspired to bamboozle a trusting audience: the quizlings.īroadcast live and in prime time, the big money quiz show presented itself as a high pressure test of knowledge under the heat of kleig lights and the scrutiny of fifty-five million participant-observers. From its premiere on CBS on 7 June 1955, The $64,000 Question was an immediate sensation, racking up some of the highest ratings in television history up to that time.

The new medium raised the stakes a thousand fold. In the 1940s, a popular radio program had awarded top prize money of $64. No programming format mesmerized televiewers of the 1950s with more hypnotic intensity than the 'big money' quiz show, one of the most popular and ill-fated genres in U.S.

Charles van doren history of knowledge follow up