What The Heck Was....

[ray...@icanect.net]

The NBC gameocide??? Did Programming Genuis Brandon Tratakoff
(sp.?) (The man who put Family Ties and St.Eleswhere on the air) had
anything to do with this ????

----Gracias
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Sonny Bono (R.I.P)
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[Zach Horan]

The NBC "Gameocide" was when due to a lack of storage space at NBC, thousands
upon thousands of tapes of old NBC game shows from the 1950s-1985 were
destroyed. Among them: Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy!(Fleming), Wheel of
Fortune(1975-85), Eye Guess, Match Game(1962-69), and Concentration(1958-73),
and many other titles. About The only NBCgame shows not affected were
Goodson/Todman shows other than the 60's Match Game, and the Gong Show(Chuck
Barris has kept a large part of his library intact). Other non-game show
programming was erased as well, including old Tonight Shows with Jack Paar and
Steve Allen and the first ten years of Carson, which were done in NYC in those
days.
Brandon Tartikoff was the most powerful man at NBC at the time(1985-ish),
so he has been blamed(especially in the almost five months since his recent
death from Hodgkin's disease) for the loss of all these hours of game show
programming. However, it was the doing of staffers/interns.
Some ABC game shows saw their tapes destroyed for the same reason, and a
few CBS shows and some syndie shows' tapes befell the same fate.

[M. Edward Soulsby]

> ray...@icanect.net writes:
> The NBC gameocide??? Did Programming Genuis Brandon Tratakoff
> (sp.?) (The man who put Family Ties and St.Eleswhere on the air) had
> anything to do with this ????

I'd have to say no. In fact, when Tartikoff left NBC in 1991-2 for Paramount, that was
the same year the t*** s*** trend unmercifully accelerated to full swing. Even if he
had stayed, I don't know if there was a lot that could be done; the market became
overly cynical after the failure of the 1990 game shows (which I thought were great;
we need a day-to-day pop culture show like the Challengers).

:)
Marcus