Tic-Tac-Dough/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



  • Adaptation Displacement: The 1978-86 version is far better known than the original 1956-59 era.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The 1978-86 theme.
    • Averted in the 1990 version. Although Henry Mancini composed the theme, it sounds more like the cheesy theme to some bad 1980s children's show.
  • Funny Moments: At the end of a 1983 episode, Wink donned a hat sent in by a fan that was so large it covered his whole head. He then spent the entire credit roll blindly fumbling through the set, nearly running into the gameboard and bumping into one of the contestants.
  • Memetic Mutation: See the quotes at Replacement Scrappy, below.
  • Moment of Awesome:
    • April 3, 1958 (nighttime): The circulating Jay Jackson episode, where both contestants keep getting questions right to cause tie games and build the pot to about $25,000...or it would be, had about 75% of the nighttime series not been rigged. (Only one question is not answered correctly in the entire half-hour, but only because the contestant claimed someone in the audience had shouted out an answer — a claim that Jackson quickly backs up, saying he heard it as well.)
    • 1980: Thom McKee's 46-day run, where he won $312,700. For more than 20 years this was the longest time that a contestant had been on a game show, until some guy named Ken Jennings blew it out of the water.
    • 1984: Kit Salisbury, in the final question of the final game of the final episode of the 1983-1984 season, names all 14 United States that border the Atlantic Ocean in the Auction category.
  • Replacement Scrappy:
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
    • Many fans' opinions of the Caldwell version, which added more red boxes that ground down gameplay.
    • The 1990 revival reset the jackpot to $0 after each tie (each box's value was doubled instead), and made other changes which many fans disliked (mostly the Bonus Round {a harder variant of the CBS version} and theme music)...to say nothing of Wayne. But then about six weeks in, the Dragon and Dragonslayer started rapping their purpose and made the show nigh intolerable. Oh, and did we mention Divorced Couples Week?