Random "old" wheel thoughts/questions

1. I believe the official reason given was that they wanted to give more people a chance to get on the show. You figure that there are 195 shows in a modern season, which means only 585 players per season if they do three new ones per show as is the case now. With Friday Finals, you lose about a fifth of those spots, so that would drop the pool to 468 (a loss of 117). Returning champions is even worse for the player count - while some shows may end up with three new players due to an undefeated champion's retirement, the best estimate is that about a third of the player slots would be eaten up by champions, dropping the pool by 195 and leaving just 390 slots per season for new players. When you only have 585 slots to fill a year and probably see more faces than that at the average Wheelmobile visit, you have to get the most out of your openings, which meant that returning champions of any kind became less and less feasible as the years went on.

2. With all of the guaranteed money that's awarded on the show nowadays (thousand-dollar house minimums, the Prize Puzzle, etc.), I imagine there were some level of budget concerns involved in retiring the bonus categories. Thinking off the top of my head, I might also speculate that the difficulty factor in writing for those categories might have played a part also.

3. I don't know if we've ever put much thought into the reasoning behind this change, but if I had to guess a reason, that'd be the one I'd go for first. Some interesting notes on this change - originally it only affected $3500 (the Bankrupt was not there in R1 and removed for R4), and that wedge was actually BEHIND the Bankrupt. The next season, top dollar moved to be in front of the Bankrupt, but it took a second season of tweaking to extend the additional Bankrupt to all rounds where it would also affect $2500 and $5000.

4. I tend to disagree with that, simply because the silence allows the tension in the studio to come through to the viewers at home. Also, it kept Pat from making silly jokes about the music whenever the round started running long.

I'd rather have music in the background than not during the speed up round, I could definitely see what happens without it. Case study: when Express first came out and there was no music.......a lot of dead air when the contestants were deciding which made it seem dull.

But at the same time, the type of music can make or break the tension.......look at Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; that show wouldn't have had half the tension in it if it wasn't for the music, especially when getting into the big money.

Also, this discussion of "tension" is reminding me of WarioSajak 's comments in your recap thread about Wheel being a little more high-stakes/pressurized for "modern" contestants than older ones. (MDBR, etc.) Can you hear the music in the studio/is it distracting??

...there was music playing in-studio? Man, what planet was I on when I played?

Hi. Yeah, the big difference between the past seven years and most of the first 25 is that Wheel used to be more freewheeling (ahem) and way less about winning a lot, despite airing in the timeslot Lin Bolen's $100,000-touting Winning Streak held -- "If you won stuff, hey, great! If you didn't, we hope you had a fun time and we've got some nice gifts for you. "


That's the website's reason, pretty much. The other part, according to Pat, was that good players could hit penalty spaces while bad players could luck into a runaway game. Me? I think it's so they can tape in any order they want.


It was probably budgetary, yeah, but to be honest I think they just couldn't really find a way to shoehorn each week's theme into 'em.


This. Music can help with tension, if done right. Wheel's music just feels too generic to pull it off well, IMO, and like you said having no music created tension as the guesses, scores, and buzzer sounds piled up...or hilarity in the case of that BUTTINSKY Speed-Up round many years ago.

They overlap the edited round with the raw cue and mute the original "music" track, but usually, you can still hear the music picked up by other mics in the other audio tracks, so after a cut, the music can often sound overlapped.

^I'm not sure of the exact date but wasn't SLOGAN last used in season 25 with the puzzle EAT FRESH?

I'm not sure if anyone can answer this but what wheel layout lasted the longest without them making any changes to the colors or amounts?