You know, I had a feeling one of these episodes would surface someday thanks to one of the contestants or their relatives (the latter in this case) ripping the DVD, but I didn't think we'd see it so soon. I liked how Pat went into further detail explaining everything (since these people didn't have to pass an audition), but the pre-PP spiel was just trolling.
It's nice to see a current day episode that isn't edited to pieces.
I think it's funny how some things were not accounted for because it was going to air, yet other stuff was still done.
Like, because this show wouldn't air, Pat didn't force Guy to place his Mystery Wedge with the $10K side up like he would do on a normal episode (as he always does with that, the MDW, and the golden $10K back in the day), all the puzzles were direct repeats from recent seasons (save for changing an & to AND), and they didn't seem to trim down the spins like they always do on TV, so that's nice to see, plus they left in three consecutive duds in Speed-Up and various pauses of contestants thinking about what to do next (it was pretty common through the late 90s but it's almost-always trimmed now).
Of course, because there's no broadcasting of this, the episode isn't pressed for time, yet of course they decide to have R4 be a full Speed-Up round without letting $5,000 have any action.
However, they did still do one thing they do for broadcast episodes despite no point: the audience was STILL sweetened. -_- Listen closely at 0:20 and you can hear a distinct female scream that's heard during intros and outros of just about every modern-day Culver City episode, plus laugh tracks here and there.
The generic Prize Wedge and Gift Tag were pretty interesting to see, but I wish when the prizes were cash, they would refer to them as "Bonuses" to distinguish them from the "direct" cash they earn from the Wheel.
This episode was pretty weird, but it could have been worse. I'm just glad I was able to see one of these. I would have liked to see the other "games" the winners played, as mentioned in the official rules. One of these games was having each winner spin the Wheel once and they would win whatever it landed on. The rules stated that the cash ranged from $300 to $10,000, so I wonder if they took the three TDV wedges and the reverse of the Mystery $10K (or maybe they even took the actual golden $10K wedge out of storage?) and stuck them over the penalty wedges and normal TDV spot.
Here are the dates of the puzzle repeats...
- THE GANG'S ALL HERE: 01/20/10 TU1
- MILLIONS
& (not AND :eyebrow:) BILLIONS: 11/09/10 TU1 [S28]
- REACHING FOR THE STARS: 03/03/09 R1 [S26]
- TIPTOE THROUGH THE TULIPS: 09/15/10 R1 (also the very first Same Letter puzzle) [S28]
- A GLASS OF FRESH PINEAPPLE JUICE: 04/10/07 R2/PP [S24] (also, FRESH PINEAPPLE JUICE was R3/PP on 01/23/09 [S26])
- THE INCREDIBLE HULK: 04/20/10 R4 [S27] (also used as TU3 on 04/25/13 [S30] under "Character", taped less than 7 months after the unaired shows)
- LABRADOR RETRIEVER: 10/07/09 R4 (also, CHOCOLATE LABRADOR RETRIEVER was R1 on 09/20/11 [S29, same season])
- SHOULDER PADS: 11/11/10 BR [S28]
