There have been three iterations of Break The Bank, each as distinct and different as night and day.
We've previously covered the two series that aired from 1976-77 (ABC & syndication) that employed nine stars and a game grid. The use of the celebrities was decried as a knockoff of NBC's popular Hollywood Squares. ABC gave the show 13 weeks, while the syndicated version lasted on season.
Eight years after that syndicated run ended, former Jack Barry assistant Richard S. Kline acquired the rights, and brought the series back, this time as a standard quiz on the order of the rest of the Barry-Dan Enright line of the 70's & 80's. This version went through two hosts, and also lasted a season.
Now, we're going all the way back to the first TV iteration, which began all the way back in 1948, and was passed around the networks before finishing on NBC in 1957, all of this after launching on radio on Mutual in 1945.
Bert Parks, best known, of course, for later hosting the Miss America Pageant for a number of years on NBC, was the definitive MC on both radio and TV, aided in the former by uber busy Bud Collyer. As was the case on TV, Bank shifted radio networks, too. ABC & NBC each ran the show concurrently on radio & TV, and if Mutual had a TV network, they'd probably have done the same.
The format for this Bank is similar to other quizzes of the period. Here, then, is a 1956 offering toward the end of the ABC run, as Dodge also sponsored The Lawrence Welk Show and Make Room For Daddy at the same time.
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