Top 5: Game Shows of All-Time

Carmine’s Top 5 Game Shows

5. Stump the Schwab: This is your classic sports trivia show. However, once the contestants weed out one another through games like “Coaching Ladder” and “Odd Man Out,” they then face-off against the “Sultan of Sports Trivia” Howie Schwab for a chance to win a measly $5000. Make no mistake, I’d do a lot of things for 5k, things I would sorely regret, but I say measly because shows like “Deal or No Deal” give out hundreds of thousands of dollars for nothing. In this show you have to take-on a former editor-in-chief of College and Pro Football News Weekly who knows an ungodly amount about sports for pride, because the money ain’t the draw. I equate the Schwab to Mike Tyson in Punch-Out. You gotta go through much lesser opponents, who can be dangerous if they catch you off guard, and once you pound through them you’re faced with a challenge that is nearly unbeatable. With Mike Tyson, its one punch and you’re done. With Schwabby, you better not get a question wrong, because he will make you pay. I would put this show possibly in my top 3 if it weren’t hosted by Stuart Scott. The man makes me cringe at least once per show, with his obnoxious efforts to unsuccessfully merge his marginal knowledge of hip-hop with sports.

4. Supermarket Sweep: DanO, a prestigious writer for The Flow holds the opinion that Supermarket Sweep had only one good thing going for it…the sweep. While the all-out bedlam that is “the sweep” certainly is the climax of the show, Supermarket Sweep was riddled with exciting and ultimately significant tidbits. One of which was how they chose the contestants. They used a Price is Right style random selection from the audience except instead of using names they would say “would the audience member holding the Depends undergarments come on dooooooooooooooooooooown!!!” It can be said that the little mini-games for the first half of the show are just filler material, but they did hold significance when it came to the sweep. A team with a 2 minute head-start was nearly unbeatable. During the sweep, we were blessed with the opportunity to see men, women, and homosexuals alike pounce on everyday products, get extra points for getting “special products” (a la the coffee grinders) and run into gigantic BONUS items (one that comes to mind was a fucking life-sized jolly green giant). Once the winner of the Big Sweep is determined (quite often the gay couple because they have two men, and clearly know the most about shopping), the winners would get a chance at…. You guessed it $5000 (notice a theme?). This was very challenging however, as they were given a clue that only someone giving a Holmes-ian effort could decode and find the subsequent product. Once they solved the first clue, they had to solve two more clues. Supermarket Sweep: We. Know. Drama.





3. Double Dare: Fact. Marc Summers was a germaphobe. Keeping that in the back of your mind makes this show that much more enjoyable. Since Double Dare went off the air, all the major slime companies have since been put out of business, except of course for Taco Bell. All joking aside, Double Dare, unlike most game shows started off with a fucking bang. As the show began, Mr. Summers would shout “ON YOUR MARK, GET SET, GOOOOOOOO!” and anarchy would ensue. Families would wage war in a physical challenge (usually filling some container to a certain point with slime or a liquid that looked suspiciously like semen). This was mainly for bragging rights (and control of the buzzer). After that, you had some questions, but if I were on a team, I’m hoping for some young country boy with a rat-tail or a mullet from the other team (that accurately described 80-90% of the Double Dare contestants) to try my ass in a physical challenge. I think my favorite physical challenge was “Pie in the Pants” if just for the name alone. The team with the most points at the end of regulation got to participate in the obstacle course…..



My immediate thoughts when watching any Double Dare obstacle course is “how many sweatshops are they running to make all this fucking slime?” or “how many alien bukkake’s are they cleaning up after to get all this fucking slime?” Because of Double Dare, Nickelodeon had so much excess goo that they started marketing it as a toy! No joke. Anyone remember Nickelodeon Gak?



2. Match Game PM: When I watch this show I think one thing… “I wish I was alive in the 70s.” For those of you who don’t know about this show, you’ve got to check it out. I described it to my boy Kenny Kobes as “it was a bunch of c-listers sitting on a panel getting sauced up and smoking cigs, and the point was for the contestants to come up with the same answers that the celebs would write down, except the celebs got so drunk they always made their answers about booze or titties.” Anyone who has seen the show can say that this description is spot fucking on. The host, a masterful Gene Rayburn, would ask a fill-in the blank style question, except the question almost always had a very sexual or drug related connotation. Flirtatious Frannie was so flirtatious. HOW FLIRTATIOUs WAS SHE? Flirtatious Frannie was so flirtatious, when Billy the Bellboy showed her to her room, she showed him her_________. I just made that up but I can attest that the ones on the show made it even easier to shout words like “pussy” and “tits” at the TV. Except this was the 70s, so they called parts of the anatomy much more obscure names by today’s standards. For boobs, they used words like “dunes,” “humps,” and “buzzums.” Besides the humorous answers provided by their cast of characters, there was so much else going on to make this show pure gold. There was the obviously drunken and stoned celebrities, as well as the stoned Gene Rayburn. The drug use is made apparent by watching any video of the show (see below). In fact, Match Game would make for one helluva E! True Hollywood Story. I find it impossibly hard to imagine that the backstage area consisted of anything but a gigantic mound of yayo that hosted several orgies before and after each show (remember: the 70s). Another great piece of unintentional humor was the contestant. The contestents were one of two types of people. On the one side there was the straight-edge “deer-in-the-headlights-what-did-I-fucking-get-myself-into” contestant. Then there was also the “Jesus let’s get this over with so I can get high with Charles Nelson Reilly and then fuck Fannie Flagg” contestant. This game show is legendary because no one cared about the prizes, or the pride, everyone just wanted to have the time of their lives and get as messed up as possible doing so.



1. Jeopardy: For my piece on Jeopardy, I am just going to refer you to my colleague Kenny Kobes’ flawless commentary on what is truly the #1 game show of all time.

Kobes’ Top 5 game Shows

5) Debt

This little-known gem ran from 1996-1998 and was hosted by game show legend Wink Martindale. The premise of the game was an interesting one – three people deep in debt play the game with the winner having their spending problems paid off. It was Jeopardy style, with a board of categories and questions. Unlike Jeopardy though, it was all pop-culture which meant you could easily play along – no-matter how dumb you were.

In the end, the winner had the option of walking away debt-free OR answering a bonus question from their area of specialty. If they got the question correct they would not only pay off their debt, but would also double the amount to take home. If they got it wrong, they walked away empty-handed. This part always pissed me off because of the stupidity these people showed in picking their categories. Why would you choose a vast topic like The Simpsons, when you could just as easily say your specialty was a 2-hour movie like Home Alone? Morons…

4) Family Feud

Its time to play the Feud!!!

Hell yea, it doesn’t get much better than this. Everyone knows this long-running series, though I would only include the Roger Dawson and Ray Combs versions as respectable – sorry Al Borland.

The show was simple, a question was asked to 100 people and 2 families had to figure out the most popular answers. Easy, right? Well no, because this show gave us some of the worst answers in game show history. Don’t believe me? Check out this clip…



The Fast Money round at the end was the best with 2 family members going for the $10,000 prize, which most of the time had some great drama since the damn thing was so hard to win it seemed.

No doubt a classic show.

3) Legends of the Hidden Temple

You could say ‘Legends’, and anyone between the ages of 25-20 is going to know what you’re talking about. This was the SHIT when we were young.

The premise was 6 teams of 2 searching an ancient artifact which has somehow got lost in a temple guarded by a talking boulder and…

You know what, who gives a fuck?

The premise didn’t matter. In fact, the first 3 rounds didn’t matter and actually, they sucked. The Steps of Knowledge were particularly horrendous – is this a game show or history class? Not to mention the host looked like a kid-toucher if I ever saw one.

Everyone watched this show for one reason and one reason only – the Temple Run. The Temple may very well be the most elaborate piece of equipment ever built in game show history (rivaling the Finders Keepers set… look it up). It had everything: secret doorways, puzzles, the always pain-in-the-ass Silver Monkey and the Temple Guards. Goddamn those temple guards always popping out of nowhere and scaring the shit out of me.

If a team somehow made it through the Temple in less than 2 minutes they won a trip to Space Camp. Hell yea! Word to Olmec.

Here is a team falling juuuuust short – sucks for them, right Reed?:



2) The Price is Right

Grandma Betty come on down!!!

Johnny Fratboy, you are about to play Plinko!!!

If you stayed home from school as a kid, your TV was turned to CBS at 11am because ‘Bob Barker and the fabulous 60 minute Price is Right’ was about to hit the airwaves.

I can’t even begin to describe what made this show so great, but I’ll try.

It all starts with Bob Barker. He was amazing in the role of host. The old women loved him and the college kids idolized him. It always seemed like he was genuinely happy when people won a big prize. He may have been inappropriate with a few of Barker’s Beauties backstage, but so what? Hell, they were probably asking for it.

The games were classic. There are too many to name, but some of my favorites were: Golden Road, Plinko, Punch Board, Hole in One (or Two), Clock Game, Cliff Hanger, Dice Game the list goes on an on.

Then came the Big Wheel and the Showcase Showdown… Fuhgetaboutit… This game had it all.

You could play along at home and cheer for the people playing on your TV. You felt their pain when they lost or joy when they won – that, my friends, is why this show was so special. (Note: I say WAS special, because without Bob Barker there is no Price is Right. Ya heard?)

There are so many great videos on YouTube to choose from, but I think this one really expresses all I have written about:



1) Jeopardy

The greatest game show of all-time... What is Jeopardy? (see what I did there?)

We all know the rules and how the game works. We all know how simple it is. We all know who hosts it.

So how has the game managed to survive all these years without ever changing its format?

Simple, answering Jeopardy questions makes people feel smart.

It’s true. Have you ever been in a room with a group of people when Jeopardy was on? Watch someone when they get a question right – it’s like they just split the atom. I don’t know how to explain this phenomenon but it happens. The show has managed to market itself as the ultimate test of knowledge -- despite the fact that it’s just useless trivia.

Still, like many others, I can’t get enough of it. In college it was a dorm room ritual that we would watch Jeopardy every night. I’m not lying when I say that disputed answers sometimes came close to full-out brawls. And the winner? Forget it. You could expect to hear shit-talking from him until the next day when another episode aired.

After all, winning an episode of Jeopardy proves you are smarter than someone.