40 years ago, Australian producer Reg Grundy adapted Scrabble for television, specifically for NBC. That same year, young Raven-Symone was cast in The Cosby Show as the youngest daughter of Dr. Cliff Huxtable (Cosby). Scrabble lasted five years. Cosby ran nearly twice as long.
You don't see The Cosby Show in a lot of places anymore because of the scandal surrounding Cosby. Raven-Symone, meanwhile, has become a regular presence on television in her adult years. That's So Raven and its sequel, Raven's Home. A stint on The View. Now, she's hosting Scrabble.
Hasbro, following the lead of other game show revivals, is packing two half hour games in a one hour format (think ABC's revivals of Match Game and The S100,000 Pyramid), sold the new Scrabble to the CW as part of a two hour Thursday block with the similarly reformatted Trivial Pursuit, which we'll look at another day.
The game is basically the same as before, and it marks Hasbro's first inroad into broadcast television, as their previous series were produced for cable, including a previous iteration of Scrabble.
A Raven-Symone fan channel uploaded this excerpt.
Rating: A.
I feel this version of "Scrabble" is actually quite different from what came before. I will give you that the first round is fundamentally similar to Woolery's tenure in that players identify scrambled words based on clues related to the word; here, though, it's one-word clues and definitely not as pun-filled as Woolery's got.
ReplyDeleteBeyond that, rounds two and three are completely different and somehow the most faithful adaptation of the original board game ever seen ("Scrabble Showdown's" Lightning round is a good comparison, but Raven's show goes above and beyond). In both, the objective is virtually the same: Compose high-scoring words using an arbitrary letter pool, hopefully taking advantage of bonus squares and high-value uncommon letters. The key difference being that in round two, both players use the same letter pool, so we get to see somewhat different approaches to the same problem; and in round three, our champ for the day must make their best plays from up to seven pools to hopefully score 200 points and win the "GSN King" $10,000 jackpot. This is the only TV version I've seen where being a great board game player is a practical must; I like seeing skillful use of two-letter words and strategic placement along the other player's words for ridiculously high-scoring combos. I don't think I could ever play at the level the really good players on this show do, but it's fun to see the sheer potential they unlock.
Hasbro & CW want to remind people the game is still around in stores, so, yeah, knowing the game is essential. Thanks for writing.
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