Random Roar: You Don’t Know Jack Deserved Better

 

The original version of You Don’t Know Jack was released in 1995, making this year the franchise’s 25th anniversary.  For a while, developers Jellyvision Games and Berkeley Systems made yearly releases and even released versions focused entirely on television, sports and movie trivia.  The franchise was huge and then after the year 2000, it suddenly disappeared.  There was one more game in 2003 which was poorly received and then nothing new was released (other than daily questions on the official website that are no longer available) until 2011.

So what happened?  How could a franchise that started strong and was popular for a half a decade just suddenly disappear like that?  I don’t know for sure, but I blame Pee-wee Herman.

At the height of the popularity of You Don’t Know Jack, ABC green lit a version for television, and it aired in the summer of 2001.  It starred Paul Reubens, whom most will know as Pee-wee Herman (just like most people know Rowan Atkinson as his character Mr. Bean), playing an over-the-top host named Troy Stevens.  I don’t know why they bothered announcing him as Troy Stevens when he was credited in the opening as his real name first and then as the role he was playing.  Whatever.  Anyway, not only did the show not feature the original theme song, the only elements that seemed to carry over were Cookie the announcer and a couple of the question formats: the Dis or Dat and the Jack Attack, more on these in a bit.

Troy Stevens was a bit too mean-spirited a host for my liking, since as far as I can tell, most of the hosts of the PC and video game versions weren’t.  At the start of a show, he’d always say “We have three contestants!  Let’s cheat them… I mean, let’s meet them, now” and that’s just for example.  At the end of the second episode, a little girl asked for her picture taken with the dog from the episode and Troy put his finger over the lens when he took the picture.  In fact, the show was filled with those kinds of antics.  There was a regular feature on the show called the $2,000,000 Question where the dollar value lowered when he started reading the question and the contestants could ring in as soon as he was finished reading it.  However, a bit of slapstick humour usually happened that resulted in the question being delayed long enough that by the time he finished reading it, there was only a little more than $100 up for grabs.  In one episode, the question was lit on fire, for example, and he tossed into a garbage can and doused it with a fire extinguisher.  Troy then played up the effects of smoke inhalation to delay the further reading of the question long enough to deplete nearly all of the two million dollars.

During the final round before the Jack Attack, there was a math question where contestants needed to figure out an equation and calculate the answer at the end.  For example, let’s say I were to ask the number of main series Dragon Quest games (11), add the total number of party members in Final Fantasy V (5, including Krile), then divide by the number of months in the year with an R in them (8) and then multiply it by the number of good You Don’t Know Jack game shows (0), you get a correct answer of zero.  Okay, just kidding about that last one.  Let’s say you multiply it instead by the number of seasons Alex Trebek hosted Jeopardy! (37) and the correct answer is actually 74.  During all of this, there was a very mean-spirited distraction occurring.  In the fourth episode, a trio of children were playing purposefully bad violin in the contestants’ ears, so it’s no wonder all three answered that episode’s relatively easy calculation wrong.

Thing is, I get it.  This was the first time the show was being broadcast on television and thus the first time they were able to have a live actor performing the questions.  They probably didn’t have anyone telling them not to do half of what they ended up doing on the show.  They used male models to show off lingerie for a question, brought in an opera singer for a question about what note she was singing, and so on.  The game show took so long with their antics that they barely got through half of the material that the computer game did in the same amount of time.

That’s why I think that they screwed up a good format by trying to change it when they adapted it to television.  I don’t know if it was screwed by the network or if they legitimately thought it was a good idea to change it up so much, but they didn’t have to.  They already had a winning formula in the computer game, and given how long it usually takes to play a game – approximately 21 minutes, I’ve found on average with two players and I imagine it’s not much more with three; this is exactly the same amount of time the game show ran if you take out the commercials – they wouldn’t have to change much.  The contestant meet and greet that’s customary of all game shows could still take place without negatively impacting the game’s running time.  They might need to pick up the pace just a little bit and divide it into four segments like most half hour game shows tend to, but they could’ve taken the format from the first three versions of the game and used it for the game show without changing anything else.

In the computer game, after determining the number of players and who presses which button, the game begins and is formatted like a game show, with an iconic theme song, an announcer and a host.  The contestant in control chooses a category from three presented on screen (later versions remove that functionality, with one version making it random based on when you hit your buzzer, but most versions now just plow ahead to the next question without a category choice), and then the question is read out.  Occasionally, a special format question will appear, like the infamous Dis or Dat.  Dis or Dat involves a list of seven items and you need to answer whether they belong in one category or the other, and in some cases they might pertain to both categories.  This is also the format the daily questions on the official website used.

For an example, I could list off seven items and you tell me if they’re a Punch or a Judy.  Or both.  Hawaiian (Punch), Garland (Judy), Dench (Judy), donkey (punch), rabbit (thanks to Judy Hopps, you could argue the answer for this is “both”), and so on.  This is one of the two most enduring special formats for questions, the other being the Jack Attack.

For the Jack Attack, occasionally named the Head Rush, I could describe it, but I think it’s best seen in action.  (Bonus points for the video making a shout out to the Fanny Chmelar incident from the British game show The Chase.)

Over the years, other special question formats were occasionally used, like the Celebrity Collect Call (they got actual celebrities like Tim Allen to give a question) or the Gibberish Question (a gibberish phrase was given and you had to figure out what actual phrase it rhymed with).  I suppose the game show tried this with their $2,000,000 Question and Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t, but they just weren’t the same.

After six episodes, the game show was quietly dropped and was never seen again.  Also, I don’t know whether it was a coincidence or not, but after the game show flopped, the computer game’s yearly releases stopped and the franchise has never been the same.  I can’t say for sure, but I fully believe that the game show killed the franchise dead and Jellyvision (now Jackbox Games) has been trying to revive it ever since, first as its own occasionally released game and then as part of their Jackbox franchise.

Very little fuss has been made about this being the 25th anniversary of the franchise and I don’t even know if Jackbox Games knows about it.  All I know is the series has been slumming it since 2001 and I put all blame for this on that bad idea of a game show.