France's La Roue de la Fortune

Oh, it sure does. Anyway, I came across a site with four pictures during the first bar-backdrops era.

www.lachasseauxtresors.tv/site/exclusif/appenzell/exclusif_appenzell-principal.htm

Found a listing of Tiger's 1996 French counterpart of their 1995 game on France's Ebay, complete in its original packaging. The bad news is that it's 99.90 euros ($108.34 in US currency) before shipping. On top of that, the seller may not ship to anywhere outside of France. This doesn't mean the seller won't. So in case anyone's willing to spend the money and is also able to find a way to have it shipped to the United States or somewhere outside of France (or just simply wants to see the pictures like I did), here it is.

www.ebay.fr/itm/JEU-ELECTRONIQUE-LCD-TIGER-LA-ROUE-DE-LA-FORTUNE-TIGER-1996-NEUF-RARE-/252206196920?hash=item3ab8a928b8:g:RloAAOSwNphWaEY1

The listing won't last long, but if I find more information about this, particularly about the packaging Wheel layout and the in-game Wheel layout, I'll be sure to let you guys know.

Got the game today. As promised, here are some pictures. Sorry the bottom two won't rotate properly for me. As you may notice, all but one of the in-game values (the blue 1000 next to Joker which should've been 800) somehow correspond to their American counterparts.

As for the cardboard Wheel, if I could make guesses to the sliced-off values going clockwise from the Joker to the pink 1500, my initial, based off of every other source I have so far as well as the rest of this layout, would naturally be 8000-2500-3500-5000-1500-6000.

Someone uploaded a collection of TF1 stuff a few days ago which included clips of a French Wheel episode (starting at 0:30). The stripe backgrounds are present, but if you take a look at the left of the video at 0:41, you'll notice that the Wheel has two 500-franc spaces adjacent to one another. Knowing that the blue 500-franc space was usually valued at 3000 francs, this certainly suggests that these clips are from very early in the show's run.

While Googling for photos and information about the Debanne era, my most favorite era of the French version, I came across this photo that clearly appears to be from a magazine article, and I now know some more information about the Wheel itself.





Perhaps the biggest thing I noticed here is the magenta space next to the Banqueroute. If I'm right, it's valued at 10,000 francs. Originally, I believed the numbers were black, but this photo proves they were white if not a color close to white.

Other things I now know include where the second Banqueroute is placed and the space next to the Passe space appears to be silver instead of lavender. Because of the split, I don't know whether the space is worth 15,000 or 20,000 francs.

I got the article back on Tuesday, but since much of Round 4's top value has been snipped out, I don't know for sure exactly what the value is, but it does show signs of being 15,000 francs as opposed to 20,000 as this article stated.
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Roue_de_la_fortune#Les_cases_de_la_roue

Even so, the article goes on to state that the 15,000 space is colored silver, but in the photo, the space appears to have the same golden bronze color as the Bonus space (the second photo showing where that space usually sits when introduced in Round 2), although it may be because it's reflecting off of the yellow contestant area. Have a look and tell me what you guys think. In the meantime, I'll be looking forward to seeing a full episode at some point in time. When that finally happens, all my questions about this era will be answered.

The set and audience layout remind me of Millionaire.

It's been just over a year since anything was said in this thread, but check this out. Most of a 1997 episode with their take on our old $10,000 prize as well as our Jackpot!

If I had to guess as to their Jackpot worked, it may have started at 1000₣ or maybe 10,000₣ and went up by 1000₣ until won, similar to how our daytime Jackpot worked, although it may have had a max cap. As for how it was won, it may have been similar to our daytime Jackpot, our nighttime Jackpot, or maybe even something else. Romania's ProTV version was very similar to France's version at the time, and they too had a Jackpot wedge which was awarded similarly to our daytime Jackpot. So my best guess would be that France's Jackpot worked very similarly if not exactly like our daytime Jackpot.

I find a regular-sized 10,000₣ and an Oreo-style 10,000₣ a bit odd myself. Even odder than that, however, was Croatia's 2015 version on RTL. They had a Bankrot/1000/Bankrot wedge despite the fact that they also had a regular-sized 2000-kuna space. To add to all that, in the couple years before the old $10,000 prize gave way to the Million Dollar Wedge on our version, I was asking myself that if the Mystery Round was also offering $10,000, what was the point?

Finally, it would be nice if we had a few more $1000 spaces besides the Mystery and Express wedges, similar to what France's layout had numerically at the time. In fact, after the retirement of the Half Car tags, I felt that the two $500 spaces that previously housed them should be brought up in value, perhaps to $750, $850, $950, or even $1000. I also feel that we're overdue having $4000 be the top dollar value for Round 3. If we did some value increases such as the ones mentioned, it would hopefully give the Prize Puzzle less of an impact on who goes to the Bonus Round.

Another thing that I like to mention is the split-screen method France's version used. Many European versions had a shot of the Wheel in the bottom-right corner of the screen, similar to our Express wedge. Germany's version was one of the first to adopt such a thing although Italy and the UK had it towards the top-center. If we used this, it would certainly allow home viewers to play along better rather than have shots of the Wheel and contestants disrupt their view of the Puzzle Board.