A quiz show crossed with Allen Funt's seminal Candid Camera should've worked.
Unfortunately, Anything For Money, distributed by Paramount in 1984, lasted one season. 30 weeks total, due to early ratings success in a number of markets. Locally, the show aired at lunch time on the NBC affiliate, which hadn't launched a noon newscast at that point.
Impressionist Fred Travalena (ex-The Kopykats) was tapped to host. Veteran announcer Johnny Gilbert also was the announcer for Paramount's previous venture into game shows, Make Me Laugh, five years earlier. In that same fall of 1984, Gilbert also began his current run as Alex Trebek's announcer on Jeopardy!, now in its 35th season in its current iteration.
Travalena, no stranger to game shows himself as a panelist on Match Game, for example, was a charming, genial MC. However, it took nearly a decade before he landed another gig as a game show host (Baby Races), and Money deserved a better fate than it did.
This sample comes from a feed from WCBS in New York, complete with commercials.
Rating: B.
2 comments:
I remember seeing this a couple of times as a ten year old. I loved it. I'm so glad I went looking for info. about it. Nobody else seemed to have ever heard of the show! But, it exists! I didn't make it up. �� It was, too, a real show...that yes, deserved better than it got.
It all depended on where it aired.
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