Memetic Mutation/Live-Action TV/Game Shows

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Memes on the Game Show front:

Please add entries in the following format:

  • The name of the show.
    • Meme name: description of meme and how it's used.
      • Source of meme and fandom it relates to in the form of a hot tip.
      • Further mutations and successor memes, if any.

And because The Price Is Right is the granddaddy, it gets the most memes

  • "[Name], come on down!" [67]
  • "It's a new car!" [68]
  • "Telephone pole screamers".[69]
  • "$1, Bob/Drew!" [70]
    • "$X+1, Bob/Drew!" [71]
    • "$420, Bob/Drew!" [72]
  • "Gentlemen/Ladies/O mighty sound effects lady..." [73]
  • "Hold my hand. Say Alakazam!" [74]
  • Samoans lifting Bob Barker and inflicting all sorts of damage on him.[75]
  • Holly Hallstrom and her tendency to trip up.[76]
  • "Help control the pet population: Have your pets spayed or neutered!" [77]
  • Ezekiel Barker.[78]
  • Fansite golden-road.net has a lexicon that has attained meme status as well.
    • "Exacta"
    • "Wipeout"
    • "El Skunko"
    • "Can't Stop The Dob/Fool The Fingers", which declines to "Dobstopper/Fingerstopper" when a contestant is Genre Savvy (or lucky) enough to beat Roger Dobkowitz's or Kathy Greco's Nintendo Hard setups. Also applies in hindsight to "Can't Jive The Jay", for original producer Jay Wolpert's own hard setups (most notably, as seen on the DVD set, a $7,010 car used in Lucky Seven).
    • "WSD" [79]
    • "First Four Breakfast Club/Midday Revue" [80]
    • "Garf Of The Century" [81]
    • "Friggin' Random Boat/Trailer/All-Trip Showcase", commonly shortened to "FRBS", "FRTS", and "FRATS" respectively.
    • Golden-Road.net's posters also have embarrassingly cutesy nicknames for the pricing games on show recaps.
  • The losing horns. [82]
  • "...all this can be yours, if the price is right." [84]
  • "You bid on the merchandise we present. Go as high as you like, stop whenever you like...it goes to the one who bids highest to the actual retail price without going over, and the big winner comes back tomorrow/next week and takes on three new challengers." [85]
  • "FRIED CHICKEN!" [86]
  • "Once it's stopped, we can't start it again for 37 hours." [87]
  1. ↑ Karn's Large Ham explanation of the Double round, where the value of each survey answer is doubled. He did the same thing with "triple the points" in the Triple round.
  2. ↑ Also from Karn; his way of saying which family will score the points first.
  3. ↑ Usually said by the other members of the family, no matter how far off-base the answer is. Some families even seem to say it ironically because they know the answer can't possibly be up there.
  4. ↑ Catch Phrase heard in every version of Feud, when asking how many points an answer scored in the Fast Money Bonus Round. May be used in conversation when "revealing" the answer to a question.
  5. ↑ Shortly after Steve Harvey became host, the show's YouTube channel began posting clips. Among them was a man who gave this as a response to "Name something a burglar would not want to see when he breaks into a house" — it lit up as "Gun/Occupant" for 33 points. Now, nearly every video on Family Feud's channel has someone offering "nekkid grandma" as an answer in the comments.
  6. ↑ What Louie Anderson would say after just about EVERY answer given in the main game.
  7. ↑ From the 1990 revival of Tic-Tac-Dough, a couple choice quotes from host Patrick Wayne, another Large Ham of a host whose name often crops up when bad game show hosts are mentioned. The latter is from the run's Divorced Couples Week.
  8. ↑ From the 1985-86 season of the same show; when Jim Caldwell took over from Wink Martindale as host, Caldwell became obsessed with the red box Bonus Spaces.
  9. ↑ The mantra of many a contestant on Second Chance, Press Your Luck, and Whammy! — hitting a Devil/Whammy on the game board wiped out one's score.
  10. ↑ Often considered the least desirable prize on the board, an opinion even mentioned within the show itself.
  11. ↑ Message board posters would come up with similar titles for hypothetical revivals, such as Dragon! The All New Tic-Tac-Dough.
  12. ↑ Early meme dating from the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows, referring to the quiz show scandals of the late 1950s. While Twenty One was a big offender, this also applied to Tic-Tac-Dough, The $64,000 Question, and the smoking gun itself — Dotto.
  13. ↑ Title Scream at the top of each show since 1983.
  14. ↑ A popular way of saying that a piece of game show news is old. The reference is to former Wheel of Fortune host Chuck Woolery, who left on Christmas Day 1981.
  15. ↑ A humorous missolve from 1999 that has shown up in countless blooper specials. The actual answer was A GROUP OF WELL-WISHERS.
  16. ↑ Pat's reaction to the above.
  17. ↑ Catch Phrase from contestants. Another is "I'd like to solve the puzzle."
  18. ↑ Chuck Woolery's rundown of the show's rules from the earliest days. He even recited this in full on an April Fools' Day episode of Scrabble.
  19. ↑ In the early days of the Bonus Round, contestants were asked for five consonants and a vowel to help solve the bonus puzzle. RSTLN are the most common consonants in the English language, and E is the most common vowel. This achieved Ascended Meme status so that contestants are now given those letters, in that order, and then asked for three more consonants and another vowel.
  20. ↑ An Prize Letdown when the show still had contestants shop for prizes after each round. Very few contestants wanted it at first, but by March 1987 it became famous enough that some deliberately bought it. Although the shopping was removed in the late 1980s, it has been referenced in several game show parodies, and repeatedly by the show itself. His name is Sheldon, by the way.
  21. ↑ Refers to a Troll on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows, who would make nonsensical posts asking how "hat putato" was played.
  22. ↑ Another recurring troll post on the same newsgroup.
  23. ↑ Catch Phrase from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to ensure that the contestant is actually going for the answer s/he has said.
  24. ↑ One of the Lifelines available to contestants to aid in picking the right answer. This Lifeline was eliminated in some versions after too many Phone-A-Friends began Googling the answer.
  25. ↑ In reference to a "50 Greatest Game Shows" poll conducted by GSN. This was one fan's reaction to the fact that Studs ended up on the aired list, as it wasn't a long-running or well-remembered series.
  26. ↑ Title Scream at the top of the show.
  27. ↑ Reference to the format of Jeopardy!, which inverts the typical question-and-answer format of quiz shows.
  28. ↑ On an episode of Cheers ("What Is... Cliff Clavin?"), Know-Nothing Know-It-All postman Cliff Clavin appeared on Jeopardy! and had a runaway lead. He lost after wagering all of his winnings on the Final Jeopardy! clue and writing that as his response. Jeopardy! has made this episode into an Ascended Meme of sorts, as "Person As Verb Pulling A Clavin" is now the term for an all-in Final Jeopardy! wager from a runaway lead.
  29. ↑ During a special set of episodes in February 2011, a computer named Watson competed against former contestants Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Despite amassing a runaway lead, Watson was stumped by Final Jeopardy! and guessed Toronto. Since then, this has become the successor to "never been in my kitchen" for contestants who are stumped in Final Jeopardy!
  30. ↑ Common method of requesting the next clue to be revealed.
  31. ↑ What "Keanu Reaves" bid in a Saturday Night Live SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch. This "number" is often used among game show fans to spoof the trend towards very high payouts.
  32. ↑ Jack Barry's over-dramatic read of the giant slot machine on The Joker's Wild.
  33. ↑ A rarely used tactic; anyone with one or two Jokers showing could go "off the board" and ask for a category not shown on the slot machine.
  34. ↑ The origin of "for the win", originally said by many contestants on the celebrity tic-tac-toe game when three-in-a-row was imminent.
  35. ↑ From a 1999 episode where Gilbert Gottfried was the only star left on the board, but the contestants kept whiffing the increasingly easy questions and falling for Gottfried's obvious bluffs. Every time they whiffed, he would scream "YOU FOOL!"
  36. ↑ Whispered by The Announcer in most versions of the word-association game.
  37. ↑ Title Dropping question asked by any host of the show, when asking if the contestant wants to take the Banker's deal or keep eliminating suitcases or boxes in hopes of finding one with the top money prize in it.
  38. ↑ In reference to the Panel Game where a celebrity panel would ask yes-or-no questions in attempt to determine a contestant's job. "Bigger than a breadbox" existed well before that, but the show helped popularize it thanks to Steve Allen.
  39. ↑ Double Entendre letter request from the British version of Blockbusters, which involves a board full of letters — each answer begins with the letter selected. "P" of course refers to "taking a pee"; "U" as in "I'll have you" and "E" was a common slang for the drug Ecstasy.
  40. ↑ Catch Phrase on Hole In The Wall, where contestants must contort their bodies to fit through holes made in an Advancing Wall of Doom.
  41. ↑ From the game show Quicksilver, and used as an expression of surprise; impressive as the show was cancelled decades ago.
  42. ↑ Spoken by the host of the show in question, when the "weakest link" player has been voted off by the others.
  43. ↑ From a game show parody sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look called "Numberwang", the premise being a complete Non Sequitur number-guessing game. References to Numberwang have bled over into the game show fandom, to the point that many consider it an overused meme.
  44. ↑ From The Dating Game, in which a bachelorette inquires three mystery bachelors before deciding which one she wants to date.
  45. ↑ A notorious 1978 question from the show that asked prying questions of four sets of newlyweds; one wife answered "in the ass". For years, it was believed that this question and answer were Urban Legends as host Bob Eubanks denied that it ever happened, until footage of the actual question and answer surfaced.
  46. ↑ Although the "X was so Y..." "How Y was X?" construct originated with Johnny Carson, Match Game help popularize it whenever the show had a question about "Dumb Dora" or any other personality made up for the show's humorous fill-in-the-blank questions. The "How Y was X?" portion was usually asked by both the celebrity panel and audience, and host Gene Rayburn would typically rate their performance (e.g., "You blew it").
  47. ↑ Host Gene Rayburn's Catch Phrase when asking for the top answer to be revealed in the Audience Match portion of the Bonus Round, where a contestant has to try and pick the top answer given by an audience in response to a fill-in-the-blank question.
  48. ↑ The name Match Game used whenever the sentence to complete involved an old person. Gene Rayburn would usually do an old man voice for him.
  49. ↑ From the kids' show Legends of the Hidden Temple, the end of the Rules Spiel given by "Olmec", an animatronic stone head voiced by Dee Bradley Baker.
  50. ↑ Another recurring Large Ham statement from Olmec while describing the path through the temple.
  51. ↑ From the "Bid-a-Note" round of Name That Tune, where contestants bid on how many notes they need to identify the song.
  52. ↑ Hugh Downs often said this on Concentration when a contestant's chosen numbers did not have the same prize behind them. David Letterman helped get this phrase here, as he says it occasionally when a joke falls flat.
  53. ↑ Said by Downs early in games when two matched squares reveal blank spaces on the puzzle side.
  54. ↑ Hugh says this after a contestant correctly solves the puzzle.
  55. ↑ Catch Phrase in reference to the a cappella group Rockapella, who provided the music for Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
  56. ↑ Reference to the three numbered doors on Let's Make a Deal, which may conceal a Zonk or a prize.
  57. ↑ Phrase used on University Challenge to indicate the next question is a basic, ten-point one.
  58. ↑ Phrase used by Dick Clark to start the Winner's Circle round on various incarnations of Pyramid.
  59. ↑ Dick Clark adding up the amount of money won in a Pyramid Winner's Circle round. Or words to that effect.
  60. ↑ What the host of Card Sharks will usually say prior to turning over the next card.
  61. ↑ What confident Card Sharks contestants will say when playing the Money Cards, the bonus game where you call high/low on the cards, but this time you bet money on each call. Aces or deuces, the little-to-no-fail cards in the deck, usually get the "all" bet.
  62. ↑ What the host of To Tell the Truth says to find out who's telling the truth and who the imposters are.
  63. ↑ Said by Whew! host Tom Kennedy to players before attempting the Gauntlet of Villains for $25,000.
  64. ↑ What a Charger on Whew would say when time was running out and s/he couldn't reach Level 6 in time. This forced a Sudden Death single-pick of three possible bloopers to decide the round.
  65. ↑ What the Gaunlet said to a Charger if their time ran out.
  66. ↑ Rod Roddy's famous line in place of the contestant plug on said show's Grand Finale.
  67. ↑ The call for a contestant who is picked out of the audience.
  68. ↑ Intoned by The Announcer whenever a pricing game offers just that.
  69. ↑ Drew Carey chewed out the Fan Dumb on his personal blog in June 2009, and for at least the rest of that Summer, the sane fans used this term from the blog entry.
  70. ↑ Often said in the "One Bid" round, ostensibly when the fourth contestant thinks that the other three have overbid on the item up for bids. Most, however, seem to say "$1" just for the sake of saying it.
  71. ↑ Conversely, if they thought all three had underbid, they would bid $1 above the highest bid. If two players had, they'd bid $1 above the next-highest. Players absolutely hated being hit with this, but c'est la vie. Consider it game show cruelty potential.
  72. ↑ Some contestants think it's funny to repeatedly make this bid. Other similar-minded bids include various numbers containing "69", as well as outrageous bids like $2,000,000.
  73. ↑ Said in the pricing game One Away, when asking if at least one of the numbers in the price is correct. Bob used "Gentlemen" and later "Ladies", while Drew changed it to "O mighty sound effects lady..."
  74. ↑ Another Drew-ism, usually used on reveals in pricing games.
  75. ↑ After a contestant from Samoa did just that, many more Samoan contestants followed suit.
  76. ↑ One of the show's early models, who was clearly the Cute Clumsy Girl of the bunch.
  77. ↑ Spoken by Bob, an animal rights activist, at the end of each show. Drew has carried on in this tradition as an homage.
  78. ↑ After Drew referred to Barker's Bargain Bar as being named for "Ezekiel Barker", many fans began referring to Bob Barker as Ezekiel. Shortly after the retirement of Barker's Bargain Bar and Make Your Mark, a few Golden Road.net users began making a Real Person Fic that showed the "history" of the Barker family.
  79. ↑ a Showcase bid that is over by $250 or less; inversion of "DSW", shorthand for "Double Showcase Winner", someone who wins both Showcases of prizes because his or her bid was within $250 of the actual retail price without going over
  80. ↑ Any First Four contestants (the first four called down at the top of the show) who are still in Contestant's Row following the sixth One-Bid; Mimi Bobeck got her own wing when Drew became host).
  81. ↑ Used for contestants who underbid on their Showcase by $10,000 or more. The icon used on the forum is based on the Sale of the Century logo.)
  82. ↑ Said Losing Horns are played whenever a contestant loses most pricing games, and when there's a Double Overbid in the Showcase. Many other works use them as a sign of Epic Fail.
  83. ↑ A series of loud bells and sirens that sound whenever someone wins the top prize in a high-stakes pricing game (Grand Game, Punch-A-Bunch, Triple Play), a cash bonus on the "Big Wheel", or both Showcases.
  84. ↑ The end of The Announcer's description of each Showcase, a set of prizes that the top two contestants get to bid on near the end of the game. The object is to bid as closely to the actual retail price as possible without going over. Also used after one-bid descriptions for the first few years. Was used on the original Bill Cullen version as well, along with the name of the manufacturer/distributor as its price authority.
  85. ↑ Bill Cullen's explanation of the game on the original series.
  86. ↑ In a pair of particularly off-kilter Showcases from Season 37, Rich Fields built up the prizes by asking Drew questions (i.e. "Do you know what makes fingers look great?" for a diamond ring), to which he would consistently respond "Fried chicken". Drew would go on to randomly shout this phrase for the remainder of that week, and this would get continuously referenced and mocked by game show fans.
  87. ↑ In his later years, Bob Barker made this joke every time he explained the rules of Range Game, to emphasize that the contestants can only stop the range finder once. Drew Carey attempted this joke on his first playing, but butchered it; to be fair, this had become a Discredited Meme by this point anyway.
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