Post by MarioGS on Apr 13, 2023 10:54:33 GMT -5
There is evidence that at least one special celebrity episode of Wheel was produced exclusively for KGO-TV during the 1996 San Francisco remote.
A KGO recording of the beginning of 11/8/1996 episode of Jeopardy!, uploaded to YouTube in August 2015, shows the tail end of a Wheel promo with the show billed as "Celebrity Wheel of Fortune in San Francisco", airing in the show's regular time slot of 7:30 PM.
Apparently, one of the celebrities was Melissa Joan Hart, then 20 years old, and 25 years before she became Wheel's fourth million dollar winner. This particular episode would have aired the same night as Episode 7 of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
In October 2021, a Facebook user named Tim Leano commented the following on the CWOF page: "In 1996 Melissa Joan Hart did a special show for San Francisco Edition".
On May 26, 2021, the day the modern-day CWOF episode taped, Melissa tweeted this:
And on April 13, 2023, Melissa mentioned her various game show appearances on a podcast. She insists that she was on Wheel before modern-day CWOF, even though the current Wheel staff couldn't find evidence of it.
The promo snippet is the only evidence we have of this special existing, but it does beg the question: If a KGO-exclusive episode aired on a weeknight at 7:30, what happened to the episode that aired in every other market? Since it would have been displaced, did the nationwide episode (SF Best Friends Week's Friday Finals) get delayed to the weekend, or did it air in a different time slot that same day? Hopefully the locals didn't have to wait long to see it after the rest of the country, if that was the case. Being an ABC O&O, I doubt KGO was still airing Wheel out of order with bicycled tapes in 1996; surely they were receiving the show by satellite by then.
This wouldn't be the first time a nationwide game show produced an episode exclusively for one market. There was a special episode of Family Feud in the Combs era that was produced this way (I want to say for their Seattle affiliate). I remember this surfaced on YouTube a couple of years ago, but I can't find it now.
Do we have access to any old Bay Area newspapers or TV listings that may show something about this? Google turned up nothing.
A KGO recording of the beginning of 11/8/1996 episode of Jeopardy!, uploaded to YouTube in August 2015, shows the tail end of a Wheel promo with the show billed as "Celebrity Wheel of Fortune in San Francisco", airing in the show's regular time slot of 7:30 PM.
Apparently, one of the celebrities was Melissa Joan Hart, then 20 years old, and 25 years before she became Wheel's fourth million dollar winner. This particular episode would have aired the same night as Episode 7 of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
In October 2021, a Facebook user named Tim Leano commented the following on the CWOF page: "In 1996 Melissa Joan Hart did a special show for San Francisco Edition".
On May 26, 2021, the day the modern-day CWOF episode taped, Melissa tweeted this:
And on April 13, 2023, Melissa mentioned her various game show appearances on a podcast. She insists that she was on Wheel before modern-day CWOF, even though the current Wheel staff couldn't find evidence of it.
...But then I think I was on "Wheel of Fortune" one other time, although they couldn't find any evidence of it when I was there [in 2021]. But I swear I've been there before and spun that Wheel, and lost.
The promo snippet is the only evidence we have of this special existing, but it does beg the question: If a KGO-exclusive episode aired on a weeknight at 7:30, what happened to the episode that aired in every other market? Since it would have been displaced, did the nationwide episode (SF Best Friends Week's Friday Finals) get delayed to the weekend, or did it air in a different time slot that same day? Hopefully the locals didn't have to wait long to see it after the rest of the country, if that was the case. Being an ABC O&O, I doubt KGO was still airing Wheel out of order with bicycled tapes in 1996; surely they were receiving the show by satellite by then.
This wouldn't be the first time a nationwide game show produced an episode exclusively for one market. There was a special episode of Family Feud in the Combs era that was produced this way (I want to say for their Seattle affiliate). I remember this surfaced on YouTube a couple of years ago, but I can't find it now.
Do we have access to any old Bay Area newspapers or TV listings that may show something about this? Google turned up nothing.
