Normally, I will retire for the day around 5PM, but I was very restless yesterday. So I ended up flipping through the channels and came across "Wheel Of Fortune", one of my old favorites.
It has come a long way since I watched it feverishly, only the long way heads downstream. The only way I could sanely watch yesterday's installment was to mute the volume, and to limit its viewing to two minutes.
Wheel, along with Jeopardy, have ran back-to-back in the same time slot here in Detroit for nearly 20 years. Though I thought Jeopardy was OK, I liked Wheel better. I can remember first watching it in 1975 at age four, when I would get my plastic magnetic letters and try to match the letters being shown on the puzzle. It was a big part of the reason that I grew to be a good speller in later years.
For some reason, I also liked the shopping portion of the old show. Vanna White, when she actually turned the letters, was cool. It was also neat when you actually got to see the puzzle greater than 25% of the time, and from fewer than ten different angles. The contestants, when they weren't trying to out-shout Pat Sajak, weren't bad either.
How the mighty have fallen. Wheel is now an exercise in eye strain. You can't get comfortable watching it because the cameras are all over the place; zooming, panning, never standing still. It's as if the choreographer is on Prozac. The contestants, as I mentioned, come close to having heart attacks or voicebox strain when they shout out those letters. I mean, Pat is only a few feet to your right; I'm sure he can hear you (then again, who knows).
And what's with the new strategy? Buying a vowel three times in a row, then solving the puzzle? What good does that do? You earn all that money the hard way, making good guesses and avoiding "bankrupt", only to blow $750 or $1,000 a pop on vowels, then solve it? You just lost $1,000; how can you be happy?
Oh, right... the 21st century contestant.
I could clean up on that show if I wanted to by employing the old strategy of picking my times to buy vowels and calmly letting Pat know. But then why would I want to get involved in it, since I'd probably be seen as too old-school by the producers?
Give me Jeopardy any day from now on. Every day, and with class, it can teach you something new.
