Get the Picture

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Nickelodeon Game Show that had two teams of two kids identifying pictures on a large 16-panel screen. Each round featured a main picture, parts of which were slowly revealed as teams answered questions correctly.

The first round was called "Connect the Dots". A series of dots were shown on the screen. For every question a team answered, they received $20 and chose one of the sixteen panels, and the dots in that box would be connected to form part of the outline of the object in the picture. Guessing the picture correctly awarded $50, guessing incorrectly cost a team $20, and not guessing at all did not affect a team's score.

The second round was called "Dots" and was based on the classic drawing game of the same name. In this round, the corners of each panel were marked with a dot ranging from 1 to 25 in order. Each question in the round had a two, three, or four part answer. A complete correct answer awarded the team $40 and the opportunity to use as many lines as parts of the answer to connect neighboring dots on the board. Every time a box was formed, the piece of the picture it enclosed was revealed. In this round, guessing the picture was worth $75, with an incorrect guess still costing $20.

Additionally, in each round there were one or two "Power Surges", which if found required a team to complete a mini-game in order to complete the square and have a guess at the board.

The winning team advanced to the Bonus Round, "Mega Memory", for the chance to win additional cash and prizes.


The following Game Show tropes appear in Get the Picture:
  • Bonus Space: The "Power Surges," which offered the team that found it a chance at a (usually) timed mini-game for one question's worth of money/points. Failure at the mini-game handed the money/points and the opportunity to guess the picture to the other team.
  • Bonus Round: Mega Memory. Teams had 10 seconds to memorize the location of nine pictures, then had 45 seconds (35 in Season 2) to correctly identify the location of the picture that matched a clue read by O'Malley. The first six questions were worth $100 each, with the next three awarding increasingly valuable prizes.
  • Consolation Prize
  • Double the Dollars: Partially; questions were raised from $20 in the first round to $40 in the second. The pictures, however, were more like one-and-a-half times the dollars ($50 in round 1, $75 in round 2), with wrong guesses always costing $20 (except in a sudden death situation; see below).
  • Personnel:
  • Promotional Consideration
  • Speed Round / Sudden Death: When the time buzzer rang at the end of a round, if there was a picture in progress, it would be revealed one square at a time. The teams could buzz in as often as they wanted (with no penalty for a wrong answer) and the team that guessed the picture got the $50/$75.
  • Think Music: During the Power Surges; also the 10-second timer used while the winner was given the answers for Mega Memory.
Tropes used in Get the Picture include:
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The orange team and the yellow team, each identified by matching jumpsuits.
  • Nintendo Hard: Mega Memory's time limit in Season 2 was brutal. 35 seconds to remember 9 pictures? That's asking a lot. On at least one occasion, a team got all nine answers in a row and still managed to finish with only one or two seconds left on the clock.
  • No Budget: They slashed the budget big-time for Season 2. The game was played for points instead of dollars, and teams split the possible $600 in Mega Memory instead of each player receiving that amount - not to mention the drastic cut to the time limit as mentioned above.
  • Timed Mission: Almost all the Power Surges were played in 30 seconds (a couple were played in 15 and 20 seconds, and one, which required putting together a jigsaw puzzle, was played in 45 seconds). Mega Memory was originally played in 45 seconds, but in season 2, it got cut to 35 seconds.