Concentration/Trivia


 * Hey, It's That Guy!:
 * Hugh Downs was already well known as the announcer/sidekick on The Tonight Show during Jack Paar's tenure as host.
 * Bob Clayton was the host of a short-lived ABC game show, Make a Face, in 1961.
 * Ed McMahon was, in 1969, known across the country as Johnny Carson's sidekick on The Tonight Show.
 * Jack Narz, no stranger to the game show genre (Seven Keys, Dotto, Now You See It), was Tom Kennedy's brother (Tom's given name was Jim Narz) and Bill Cullen's brother-in-law.
 * Alex Trebek was already well known as the host of Jeopardy! Strangely, he seemed much more intimate than usual on this show. He also had a deer-in-the-headlights look when contestants would snipe at each other.
 * Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who in 1951 surrendered the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" home run to New York Giants' Bobby Thomson (sending the Giants to the World Series), was a competitor in 1963 and progressed to the show's first Challenge Of Champions.
 * Hey, It's That Voice!:
 * Johnny Olson and Gene Wood were prolific announcers for Goodson-Todman over many years; Johnny is most well-known for The Price Is Right, while Gene announced the 1976-95 versions of Family Feud.
 * The show's first announcer, Art James, became an emcee in his own right. He left Concentration in 1961 to host Goodson-Todman's Say When!! and do many more (Blank Check; The Magnificent Marble Machine; The Who, What, or Where Game; Super Pay Cards!, Catchphrase) henceforth. In 1991, things came full circle when he filled in for Gene Wood on Classic for a week.
 * Hey, It's That Sound: Several sounds on Classic: The bonus timer beeps were recycled from Blockbusters, the square-reveal from Trivia Trap and the Speed Round buzzer from Family Feud.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: Very few episodes from the first 20 years circulate, and no clips have been seen in blooper specials. Because Goodson-Todman (later Fremantle Media) does not own the rights to the show (NBC does), the Jack Narz era hasn't been rerun. None of the other versions have ever been rerun, either, save for Classic from 1991-93 on NBC and for a time on the United Kingdom's Sky One. NBC has zero interest in either reviving the show or selling repeat rights to GSN (much less anybody).
 * Episodes from the first 20 years that circulate include October 15, 1958; February 9, 1959 (hosted by Art James and surfaced in January 2012); September 13 and 16, 1963; a 12-minute clip from 1966; September 1967; October 2-3, 1967; Christmas Eve 1968; September 1969; Christmas Eve 1969; March 23, 1973; Spring 1978. Also on YouTube are the last five minutes of a 1974 show and the last two minutes of a 1976 show.
 * A few shows from Spring 1971 are at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, paired up with that day's Sale of the Century.
 * The Pete Best:
 * Diana Taylor, the first Classic model.
 * Everyone remembers the Red and Green Classic Takes. But hardly anyone remembers the one Purple Take that was used for about two weeks between having no Takes and two Takes.
 * Throw It In:
 * There were many times during the 1958-78 era where the board "malfunctioned", such as a trilon turning the opposite direction from the others after a puzzle was solved.
 * The Classic computer board "malfunctioned" in an oddly similar way. Near the end of the run, the last four squares in a game were one prize and two Wild Cards. The contestant matched the prize with one Wild Card, revealing those three spaces...however a glitch in the program wouldn't allow the last Wild Card to be removed, and it kept flipping back to the number square. Alex commented that "In the four years we've been presenting this show, that's the first time that ever happened!" (Luckily, the contestant was able to solve the puzzle with out that one square.)
 * For a themed week, the Classic set included large neon-lit palm trees. Even after the week was over, the trees stayed because the set designers thought the combination looked cool. After this addition, the set designers decided to go further with the "California Fresh" motif by adding more foliage to the set (especially in the "winner's circle" where the bonus round was played) and letting Trebek be more laid back and dress more casually (often with sweaters)
 * This car round where things go awry. First, the board revealed the wrong number so they had to stop the clock and reset both it and the board to where they were before she called her numbers. Then, in the last 15 seconds or so, the main monitor went out and she had to squint at a board 30 feet away, losing all her momentum. Alex pointed all of this out to the home viewers and commented that, since he thought she would've won had the technical difficulties not come up, he let her take the car of her choice.
 * Originally, Alex would insist in the car round that contestants select one number at a time. As the series went on, contestants started selecting two at a time and Alex decided not to fight it.
 * Screwed by the Network: Lin Bolen wanted to cancel all games hosted by middle-aged men on technologically-obsolete sets; on September 4, 1972 CBS replaced daytime repeats of The Beverly Hillbillies with The New Price is Right, which won over most of the Concentration audience. The first victim of Bolen's agenda, Concentration bowed on March 23, 1973.
 * To this day, NBC owns the rights to the show and refuses to ether let anyone create a new version or show reruns of existing episodes.
 * What Could Have Been: The first ideas bantered about was to have drawings of famous people gradually revealed for each match, then just simple phrases. Neither concept worked, and it was through Blumenthal's drawing talents that the rebus puzzle concept came about.
 * Word of God: Original series producer Norm Blumenthal started a thread on a popular game show forum, in which he has discussed nearly every detail of the series.