BuzzerBlog

I may have not been the biggest fan of the Australian version of Millionaire called Hot Seat, but it’s grown on me a bit.  Plus it’s really hard to argue that it doesn’t work.  It’s regularly right beside if not beating Deal or No Deal down under each night so apparently it’s enjoyable.  But the fact still remains that the show makes it so the first 14 questions of the game matter to nothing.  All that matters is that final 15th question worth whatever prize money is left.  Yeah, it can lead to some rather crappy endings for little money.  On occasion it can lead to someone playing for a monster prize of $250,000 or $1,000,000, though, and that’s always exciting.  Here’s a clip of a contestant going for the quarter of a million dollar prize from a recent episode.

Wipeout Australia is basically exactly like US Wipeout and Total Wipeout, just with Australians.  And if you don’t know what Wipeout is, clearly, you’ve been living under a rock or something.

Anyhow, I present to you two clips from what could be considered the best episode in Wipeout history (yes, for all three versions).  In the first clip, a double Sweeper arm can do some interesting things; in the second, an extraordinary finish to the Dizzy Dummy round.

EDIT: Hey, these actually work now.

While we here are celebrating Who Wants to be a Millionaire’s 10th anniversary on ABC and getting frustrated by Regis nearly costing people $100 questions night after night, Australia’s Millionaire: Hot Seat is amazing me and doing well.  If you don’t know about the show, six people play the game.  One person sits in the seat at a time.  If a question is answered right they move up the chain but if they get a wrong answer he or she is out of the game and the highest value on the chain is eliminated.  Each player has a Pass they can use just once.  Whoever answers the 15th question correct gets whatever value he or she is on.  I’m not a fan because they really took a different game and shoved the Millionaire branding on it.  I figured it would fail because of it, but I was really wrong as it’s catching up to Deal or No Deal in Australia.  Here’s a recent moment from the show that shows everything I don’t like about the format.  The contestant has not been in the seat the entire show and by the grace of others missing all he has to do is answer one question during the entire half hour for $250,000.  Can he do it?

We’ve got two videos for you this weekend.  One is from the new British game show Divided which I’m sure will, aptly, divide the crowd here.  But first here’s one that seems to be pretty unanimous in its opinions: it’s Australia’s new show Millionaire Hot Seat.  It’s actually been remotely popular and got picked up for more episodes.  I say remotely popular because it’s still being beaten by Deal or No Deal by a decent amount, but it hasn’t been as god awful in the ratings as anything else has for them.  People will tune into anything with the word Millionaire apparently.  I left out the first part since it’s really boring.  Here are the final two parts.

It’s been Millionaire mania around here the past few days. The show seems to be booming this year. We posted the first bit of Australia’s Millionaire spinoff called Hot Seat early last week.  The show was competing directly against Deal or No Deal down under, and Deal is winning the battle.  Find out why as you can watch the rest of the episode right here.  The entire show just gives a feeling of, “eh”.  Too soon.

We’ve talked a lot about the new spin-off of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? called Hot Seat.  It finally aired today and we’ve got a video of it.  Luckily they changed the money chain at the last second so it’s not so unbearably cheap.  The top five figures are now $20,000; $50,000; $100,000; $250,000; $1,000,000.  It’s a huge improvement from the $15,000; $25,000; $50,000; $250,000; $1,000,000 that it was originally.  They redid the theme music a bit (with a really annoying bass slide before each cue), there are some set changes like the information tickers on every other show on the planet these days and the logo planted in more places.  The most hysterical change is the Hot Seat itself.  It’s absolutely puny right now.  It’s amusingly small.  But regardless, take a look.  It didn’t turn out as bad as I figured, but it’s still something I’d rather not see us take over permanently.

All the people that complain about the clock and new editions to this season of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? should really thank Michael Davies  personally that we’re not getting the new edition that 2waytraffic is shopping around called Millionaire: Hot Seat.  We’ve discussed it briefly before.  Thanks to a commenter, we got the specific rules to the show.  It’s tough to screw up Millionaire but 2waytraffic and Australia’s Channel Nine have done it amazingly.

We’ve gone over the rules previously.  Six players, all in a line of chairs.  The first in line comes to the Hot Seat.  If the player gets the question right, he or she stays on and moves up the money chain like normal.  If the player gets the question wrong, that player is eliminated from the game, the next player in line comes to the Hot Seat, and the top dollar value on the money chain drops off.  Each player has a “Pass” lifeline to use, where they can pass the question to the next player in line, and the player who used the “Pass” moves to the back of the line.  A wrong answer just eliminates the contestant when a “Pass” is used; it doesn’t knock off the top dollar value.  It’s not awful to start with.  It’s just a total ripoff of Millionaire that they shoved the branding with to gain some easy eye balls.  The money chain is where it gets screwed up.  They completely messed with it.  Here’s the chain.

15: $1,000,000
14: $250,000
13: $50,000
12: $25,000
11: $15,000
10: $10,000
9: $6,000
8: $4,000
7: $2,500
6: $1,500
*5: $1,000*
4: $500
3: $300
2: $200
1: $100

The $1,000 is starred because it’s the only milestone.  If you miss a question above that level you walk with $1,000.  There’s no walking away either.  Why this sucks is because everyone is going to be lucky to walk away with anything over $10,000.  It’s extremely cheap.  It’s at GSN level budget here.  Were they that afraid someone was going to win huge?  The money chain’s not even worth it at this point.  The chain won’t dip below $10,000 so the money chain is completely pointless.  The old $250,000 level is $50,000.  That’s a gigantic drop and makes it look flat-out cheap.

I wasn’t expecting them to go huge money, but this is almost embarrassing.   They are trying to compete against Deal or No Deal.  This looks cheap and pathetic compared to it.  I expected them to put a bit more effort into it.  Did we just manage to completely luck out with the daytime version of Millionaire?  No one seems to have tried it before, or if they have it’s failed for reasons I can’t figure out.  Did we just get lucky.  This doesn’t seem the way to do it.  2waytraffic, although they have a lot of other good shows, just seem to want to milk Millionaire for all they can, and it hasn’t worked yet.

Since production company 2waytraffic has taken control of the hit quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, they’ve been toying around with different ways to implement and use the format.  The first was a spinoff called 50:50 which was based around that Lineline and, quite frankly, blew.  The newest comes from a trial run in Italy but Australia as well as others have picked it up.  It’s the new fast paced, multiplayer edition of the show called Millionaire: Hot Seat.  For our Australian friends, the show debuts Monday, April 20th, at 5:30PM on Channel Nine, directly against Deal or No Deal.  Deal’s been a steamroller for basically anything else in its path so we’ll see how this does.  For the non-Aussie friends, the rules.

Six players line up to play the game.  Same 15 question chain to $1,000,000.  The player out in the Hot Seat answers questions under a time limit like before: 15 seconds for the first five, 30 for six through ten, and 45 for the final questions with an appropriate amount of time for the final one.  No walking away.  If the player is wrong, the top prize is knocked off the chain, whatever it is at that moment, he or she is eliminated from the game, and the next player in line comes out to try their luck.  Each player can Pass once a game which will let them move to the back of the line and let the next person in line play the question.  You can’t repass a question.  If a question that has been passed is answered incorrect, the money chain does not lose its top value, though.  The final surviving player wins the money.

It sounds OK as a show by itself.  But if this were any other production company’s show we’d be screaming it’s a total ripoff.  2waytraffic lucked out by owning Millionaire and they can basically use the branding of that show for this and avoid cries of ripoff.  It’s a spinoff instead.  I’m not exactly keen on the idea.  Millionaire’s not a dead show and people are going to remember the old format and wonder where it went.  I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, no.  I just think it’s too soon and a blatant usage of the Millionaire branding to cash in whatever dumb viewers that don’t realize it’s not the same old game they know and love.  Plus nothing has come close to beating Deal or No Deal. Not even Million Dollar Wheel of Fortune.  We’ll see if this does anything.  And you know we’ll have video when we can.

Thanks to the brilliant Brits at Bother’s Bar for this bit of information today.  I enjoyed FOX’s The Rich List when it was on for that one hour episode.  It got gobbled up by a total lack of faith from FOX, but deservedly so.  I think making it an hour long million dollar game show was a terrible idea.  It’s basically made to be a half hour decent budget show.  At the bottom of the post is a video of the Australian version so you can watch it and see why.  What amuses me is that it’s been a relative success in basically every other country it’s been on except here.  UK’s version is called Who Dares Wins and it’s a lottery show for them.

We might be getting a second chance.  On a ticketing website, it states a US version of Who Dares Wins will be taping on the British set.  It’ll have a top prize of $50,000 and have basically the same rules.  two teams of two wager against each other on how many items in a list of a specific category they can name.  If they are challenged and meet their wager, they get a list, but if they fail, the other team gets the list.  Whichever team wins two lists first plays the end game, where you have to name fifteen items in a list without messing up, for the top prize.

I’m going to do a bit of my guessing and wager this is going to GSN.  And sadly I have nothing to go by but the taping structure and just plain guessing.  Nine tape dates are set.  Enough time is sandwiched between each taping to get four or five episodes done.  GSN stereotypically orders 40 episodes of a show (at least recently).   I can see GSN ordering forty episodes, and just making them self contained, toughening up the end game, and making it a fifty grand top prize show.

Again, I have no idea who picked it up or what the deal is.  I’m just guessing about GSN.  We do know, though, that a US Rich List/Who Dares Wins show is being taped in three weeks on the British set for a fifty grand top prize and following the same basic format as the former FOX show.

We’ve been featuring foreign editions of Deal or No Deal a lot because, well, they are just a lot better than ours.  That is at least until the syndie version if it’s as good as people say it is.  But I digress.  Here’s a great clip from a recent edition of Australian Deal or No Deal.

In our on-going weekend series, the second stop on what NBC’s Deal or No Deal world tour should have been is the Australian version.  The show began in 2003 as a primetime series with a top prize of $2,000,000.  The next year the show was reformatted to a half hour daily edition for $200,000.  It follows the same format as ours except it’s a lot more brighter, a lot more high energy, and contestants hold the cases as they do basically everywhere else on the planet.  Take a look at some videos from the Australian take on the show.

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With the second season of “American Gladiators” on the horizon, I figure it’s time we see how it’s done somewhere else. The Australian version has already had a gladiator ejected from a show. See the incident below:

A lack of news plus a lack of any time to update anything leads to nothing done around here.  But hey, here’s a video of the Australian version of Power of 10 which was sadly canceled after just two episodes because of bad ratings.  Check out their version.

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Not to be remotely jingoistic, but hopefully we’ll get some American news soon.  However, I’m sure some of you will enjoy some news and pictures about the new Australian revival of the hit show Gladiators.  Seems like they are going for an even more British route than we did.  However, a large amount of their Gladiators look like the casting department said, “Look at what the American Gladiators look like!  Hey, I have an idea, let’s not be original.  Let’s get people who look oddly similar and have many of the same themes.”  Plus some of the names are downright crappy.  Angel?  Destiny?  Sounds like a girl group reunion tour.

Their list of games puts ours to shame, though.  They are basically getting a lot of the same events that we had, but they are including some great ones as well that we were missing, like Atlasphere.  There are also some games which Americans might not be familiar with, like Pendulum, Sumo Ball, Suspension Bridge, and Vertigo.  You can check out some pictures here.

And now the question to keep us all entertained.  What events would you like to see come back for season two of NBC’s American Gladiators?

Of all shows that could come back in recent times, for some reason this one I never figured.  There are talks that Channel 7, an Australian television station, is bringing back the hit quiz show Weakest Link.  While it’s still going strong in England, it fizzled out practically everywhere else.  A possible host is Gretel Killeen, who is the host of the Australian version of Big Brother.  She is known for a sharp wit and tongue, and has not signed back onto the show for 2008.  Sources are saying that the deal is basically done, so keep on the lookout.

I’d honestly really like to see a Weakest Link revival in America.  I am a backstabbing show fan, yeah, but it was still a pretty good quiz show regardless.  George Gray isn’t really doing that much recently it seems, I’m sure he’d come back given the opportunity.  I have noticed, though, that there is a rather sizable group of game show fans who really do not like the show.  Any particular reason (I’m just curious)?