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PART 2 AUDIO ARCHIVES Power of 10 millionaire Jamie Sadler That's the Question! host Bob Goen Jeopardy Summer Teen champion Meryl Federman Camouflage host Roger Lodge Jeopardy! College Champ Cliff Galiher $343,000 1 vs. 100 winner Barry Lander Player of the Year Michele Falco Scott St. John, Executive of the Year Richard Hayes of The Baby Game Ira Skutch, Match Game producer Miguel Ferrer of Celebrity Jeopardy! Geoff Edwards of Treasure Hunt and Jackpot! Bob Harris, author of "Prisoner of Trebekistan" Johnny Gilbert of Jeopardy! Bob Goen of That's the Question Ken Jennings, author of "Brainiac" Sara Bronson of Deal or No Deal $1.86 Millionaire winner Ed Toutant Network TV's top winner Dr. Kevin Olmstead Kathy Garver of Family Affair Burton Richardson of Family Feud Dylan Lane of GSN's Chain Reaction Author Wesley Hyatt on Emmy-winning game show players Laird MacIntosh of Treasure Hunters Ricki Lake of Game Show Marathon Wink Martindale Michael Davies Peter Marshall Lin Bolen |
 4 FORGOTTEN EMCEES: A SAD COMMENTARY ON CONTEMPORARY TV With the advent of network television now beyond 60 years old, three generations of viewers have watched the medium change, not always for the better. Perhaps the most underappreciated and slapped-in-the-face element of entertainment, politics, science or America itself is their rich history and the people who paved the way for the achievers of today. As comedian George Kirby said: "I went through a lot of back doors so people today could go through the front door." In a 2007 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, results showed only 47 percent of high school seniors have mastered a minimum level of U.S. history and civics, while only 14 percent performed at or above the "proficient" level. In the survey, more than 30 percent of the respondents said their abandonment of history centered around the cliche, "I only care about what's happening today." The names Garry Moore, Hal March, Art Fleming and Bill Leyden may draw blank stares from today's under-50s. Yet, the history they created made possible what today's emcees do. In a pentultimate Cover Story, TVgameshows.net focuses on the careers of four men who receive little mention today aside from those who watched their work with loyalty and admiration. ---Art Fleming  Art Fleming came from the Bud Collyer School of Emcees. He may have had his detractors but one would have to dig deep to find them.With each passing year, fewer game show enthusiasts remember the energy and sincerity Collyer brought to his shows. The same goes for Fleming, increasingly a nostalgic figure only for the over-50 crowd. Jeopardy! fans are largely aligned in two camps: those from the Fleming Era and those from the Trebek Era. Because Jeopardy! is entering a quarter century in syndication, Alex Trebek is considered synonymous with the quiz by people 35 and under. Don't tell that to anyone who perpetually ended a morning by hearing, "Thankya Don Pardo, thankya players, goooooood morning, let's play Jeopardy!. A devout Christian who was a deacon in Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, Fleming truly followed the Golden Rule. His enthusiasm was genuine. His belief in the good of his fellow man was reflected in how he rooted for all of his contestants. When he urged a trailing player making a rally, "C'mon, get out of that minus," he meant it. His good-natured ribbing of announcer Don Pardo at least once a day in response to a question was a part of the gentle humor of the man. Last summer at Game Show Congress, Pardo reflected on his 11 years with Jeopardy! and Fleming. "I wouldn't have done Jeopardy! if I'd accepted Mark Goodson's offer to go with The Price Is Right over to ABC," Pardo said. "That would have been the end of my lifetime contract as a staff announcer with NBC. Art was one of the nicest men you would ever meet. He was always cheerful, always interested in you, always cared about the people around him." Fleming defined the language of Jeopardy!. In more than 2,700 shows, Fleming never failed to preface each clue with "the answer is...." A smart response to a Daily Double would earn "welllllll-wagered, welllllll-questioned." Cautioning his players to follow the game's rules of responding to the Final Jeopardy! answer with a question, Art always reminded: "Please be sure it's in that form." Today's Jeopardy! rarely offers the category Foreign Phrases. It popped up at least once a week with Art. Watching him navigate through complex pronunciations was a work of art. He could switch from French to German with the fluency of John Charles Daly explaining why a panelist was receiving a "qualified yes" on What's My Line?. Viewers embedded in Alex Trebek's low-key performance have no frame of reference of why viewers in the 1960s and '70s could never picture anyone but Fleming before the Jeopardy! board. Art was as entwined with Jeopardy! as was Allen Ludden with Password and Gene Rayburn with The Match Game. In his 1984 book of Jeopardy! questions, Fleming detailed how his most nerve-wracking moment in broadcasting came when he was the Secret Square on The Hollywood Squares in 1969. More than $16,000 in cash and prizes were on the line. "When Peter Marshall asked me the question, I whispered a prayer. For all of those years, people were accustomed to me giving away all the money and now my answer could make the difference in whether a contestant went home with a lot of money," he wrote. What didn't help was when the female contestant said, "I've always trusted Art Fleming with all of those answers all the years. I know he won't be wrong." When Fleming answered, Marshall offered the emcee's pause before revealing the player was right to agree with Art. "Peter gave me a wink as if to say, 'You lucky stiff,'" Fleming wrote. "He knew the pressure I felt." In an interview seven years ago with Marshall, the Hollywood Squares host shared kind remembrances of Fleming. "Art was one of the really good guys. It sounds like a cliche to say he was a nice man but he truly was. I didn't see him much because his show was in New York and ours was in L.A., but he came out a couple of times to do our show and he was always a pleasure." The genuine side of Fleming appeared most prominently when he was a co-host in 1974 on The Mike Douglas Show. He told Douglas one of his favorite pastimes was to scuba dive. "I love to go down, find a rock and just sit and watch all the beauty of God's creatures in the water," he said. "You just get away from every care in the world and nothing is any more relaxing." When the show ended after 11 years in 1975, Fleming displayed nothing but graciousness. Victimized partly by age and partly by two ill-advised time period moves, Jeopardy! quietly left on a winter afternoon to the strains of the Charlie Chaplin theme "Smile." In late 1977, CBS announced plans for a remake of Jeopardy! but ultimately passed on it. NBC picked it up for a start in the fall of 1978. The show switched to Hollywood but Art was back, about 25 pounds heavier than in his New York days but just as energetic and enthusiastic. Jeopardy! 2.0 only lasted six months, largely because the game was altered so much from the earlier era, it lost some of its uniqueness. Gone was the classic think music that Merv Griffin revived for the syndicated version in 1984. The low scoring player was eliminated after the first round. Final Jeopardy! became Super Jeopardy!, in which the winning contestant had 10 answers, side-by-side next to Fleming, to score five in a row, either across, up and down, or diagonally. The end game was more akin to Bingo than Jeopardy!. Art did everything he could to make the show work. Ultimately, in an era when nothing on NBC daytime appeared to work, the new Jeopardy! failed after three months opposite The Price Is Right and three months opposite The Young and the Restless. When he waved goodbye repeatedly alone onstage during the long closing theme music, the final show would be the last time many viewers would see Fleming, save for a few infomercials. He was the perfect choice to host a CBS Radio remake of College Bowl, revived in the late 1970s on Saturday afternoons but only hardcore listeners migrated to a weekly network radio game show against wall-to-wall sports on television and leisure activities. Some former colleagues and admirers were stunned when Fleming spent some of the later years of his life as a greeter in a restaurant. However, he put some of the same skills that made him a television favorite into making people feel at home before a meal. In the 1980s, Fleming spent six years hosting a Sunday night call-in trivia show on KMOX in St. Louis. Shortly after the new Jeopardy! premiered, Fleming was asked by viewers what he thought of the new version----which was a shock in the early going without the tall, familiar figure presiding over the board. He was nothing but praising of Trebek, though he candidly admitted he was not enthralled with some changes in the format. "Alex is doing a good job," Fleming said on a 1985 Sunday night broadcast, "but the material is a lot more trivia than the information we did. I also don't like the fact that only the winner gets to keep the money." When he died in 199 , the tributes were limited, largely because Fleming had been out of the public eye for 20 years. The cruelties of being from an earlier era have been magnified in contemporary culture. Even Bob Hope, arguably the longest-running performer in the history of NBC Television, was only given the bone of a two-minute video montage prior to Fear Factor. The network obviously felt today's viewers far more interested in young people eating worms and roaches than in heralding the achievements of an entertainment genius. Art Fleming is largely a forgotten emcee because the body of his work is lost and gone forever. Only a few scattered Jeopardy! episodes survived in Merv Griffin's library and except for a couple of the 1978-79 shows in tape trading circles, Fleming's years are cast into oblivion. Once, a listener called Sunday Night Trivia on KMOX and asked Fleming, "How do you want to be remembered?" With a laugh, Art said, "Well, I hope you don't know something, because I'm not ready to leave yet. But I hope people would say he was someone who truly liked people, who treated them with the same kindness with which he enjoyed being treated and who loved God and counted all the blessings every day He has given me." Art Fleming was a joy and a blessing for those who invited him into their homes every day. Oblivion is indeed a cruel state of mind.  As was the case with Larry Blyden, Bobby Van, Bill Malone and Hal March, Bill Leyden left us much too early. Mention his name today and the reaction from almost anyone under 55 is "who?"Yet, Leyden was NBC's midday man for more than a decade and enjoyed a prime time run as well. His journey began in 1955 as the host of Musical Chairs, a summer evening game which actually was closer to Steve Allen's and Johnny Carson's Stump the Band on The Tonight Show, rather than the game of the same name two decades later on CBS. Musical Chairs faded into the woodwork quickly but NBC and producer Ralph Edwards liked Leyden's work. In 1956, Edwards opted to develop a hybrid clone of his own This Is Your Life and Truth or Consequences. It Could Be You tugged at the heartstrings in much the same fashion as Life but employed reunions of long-lost relatives or servicemen with their families as on T or C. The difference: all of the surprised candidates were in the studio audience. Leyden was the perfect choice to pull the hijinks. Tall, handsome and appealing to the huge majority of women in his audience, Leyden's low-key and sympathetic style was the perfect counterpoint to the sometimes frenetic pace of Truth or Consequences. While never outgunning CBS's Search for Tomorrow and The Guiding Light opposite, It Could Be You possessed enough melodrama to provide excellent counterprogramming from 12:30 to 1 for NBC for nearly six years. From the moment announcer Wendell Niles introduced "your host........Bill Leyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyden," the audience was entranced with a sense of expectation. In a TV Guide interview, Leyden said: "The key to making It Could Be You work is knowing that your audience is the star of the show. I'm just the storyteller. Their reactions are what the viewers want to see." Just 35 when It Could Be You began, Leyden's star was on the rise. NBC added a nighttime version in 1958 which bounced back and forth between the regular season and summer replacement status until 1961. It Could Be You ran its course in December 1961 but Video Village host Monty Hall was packaging his first game show as a producer. Your First Impression earned a slot on the NBC schedule at noon. Hall tapped Leyden, still an NBC favorite, for the host's desk on the Monday after It Could Be You was canceled. Leyden proved he could do a different type of game, handling a celebrity panel regularly populated by Dennis James and comedian George Kirgo. One of the many variations on To Tell the Truth, Your First Impression required a lower-key, almost straight man host in the manner of Peter Marshall a few years later. Leyden's understated style on It Could Be You made for an easy transition. The game earned a run of nearly three years but Hall did not forget his host. To some degree, Leyden may have wished Monty had forgotten him. Hall's Let's Make a Deal had been on less than a year when the emcee was injured in an auto accident. He called Leyden to substitute. The It Could Be You experience of working in the audience made for a perfect segue for Leyden. However, he told TV Guide he did not anticipate how differnt the Deal audience was. "This woman won a car," Leyden said in the article. "The next thing I knew, she was grabbing me and jumping up and down. Before I could turn around, she had pushed me down the stairs." Leyden suffered torn cartilage in a knee as a result. He recovered well enough to take on another noonday NBC game, Call My Bluff, in 1965. Again playing the straight man, Leyden had to handle the likes of comedy writer Selma Diamond---a game and talk show favorite in the '60s with a Brett Somers-style personality. In an Associated Press story on the show, Leyden said the challenge was to keep the celebrity comedians from overpowering the show. "You have some heavyweights out here," Leyden said. "If the host doesn't pay attention, they're off in a different direction." Leyden was away from most of the country for nearly four years after the short life of Bluff ended. He worked in local television and radio in Los Angeles and was heard in a bundle of commercials. In 1969, NBC tapped him again for an early afternoon Bob Stewart game, again based on comedy, You're Putting Me On. The show began in late June and opened with Goodson-Todman favorites Betsy Palmer and Orson Bean on the panel. Leyden's well-wearing personality and every skill as an emcee he possessed could not have saved You're Putting Me On. Slotted at 1:30 in the afternoon, You're Putting Me On was the third NBC show in less than a year to face the show NBC let get away. The megaheaded monster of Let's Make a Deal, which Hall moved to ABC in December 1968 after a contract dispute, was mowing down the competition like a DR trimmer. Leyden's new game was easy prey. Yet, not even Leyden could have anticipated the battle he was about to personally face. In September 1969, with NBC already committed to a second 13 weeks of the game, Leyden suffered a massive brain hemorrhage. He died the following year. Broadway star Larry Blyden, who had just wound up a two-year run as host of Stewart's Personality, finished out the run of You're Putting Me On through Christmas week. In an ultimate irony, Leyden, Van---a future game show host who turned up once on It Could Be You, Blyden and March---a friend of Leyden's---all died at 49. Leyden and March passed away only a few months apart in 1970. Eight years ago, in recounting the shows he produced other than Let's Make a Deal, Hall talked fondly of Leyden. "He was a talented man, a fine man and to know him was to like him," Hall said. Because his work came in the era when game show episodes were considered disposable, Leyden's work is gone. The saddest part is a vast audience of future generations will never know what it was to like him.  Miss Francis' gowns by Bonwit Teller © Copyright 2008 TVgameshows.net. All Rights Reserved. |
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