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Richard Dawson, at far right, gets ready to ask a question in "The Family Feud". Source: https://www.remindmagazine.com/article/8341/contestants-take-herpes-tests-appear-on-richard-dawson-family-feud/ (May be subject to copyright) |
The words are still burned on my brain…
“Let’s play the feud”
“Survey says…”
There was no game show quite like it. Whether it was the format, the drama, or the weird host, “The Family Feud” had a lot to offer when you tuned in.
The other night, my spouse and I were sitting around waiting for trick or treaters to come to our door, and we had the latest incarnation of “The Family Feud” on in the background.
It was still neat to watch, but when I saw host Steve Harvey talking to each contestant, without trying to kiss even one of them, I realized how far we had come.
The format
The show was literally a family feud. There were two teams of four, made up of actual families. Members would take turns squaring off. A question would be asked, with numerous possible answers based on a survey of 100 people. The first person to buzz in got to answer. If their answer was number one, meaning it had the most responses, they had the option to play or pass. If there were higher answers, the other team could answer and, if they had an answer with more responses, they could play or pass.
The show was literally a family feud. There were two teams of four, made up of actual families. Members would take turns squaring off. A question would be asked, with numerous possible answers based on a survey of 100 people. The first person to buzz in got to answer. If their answer was number one, meaning it had the most responses, they had the option to play or pass. If there were higher answers, the other team could answer and, if they had an answer with more responses, they could play or pass.
Whatever team who chose to play would have to keep answering until they got all the answers. Each time they answered wrong, they got a strike. Three strikes, and they other team had a chance to steal. If they got an answer right, they would take the points. If they got a strike, the points went to the other team.
The first team to 300 points won, and got to go to the bonus round.
There, the team would supply two players. The first one, would answer something like six questions, again based on a survey of 100 people. Each answer had a certain number of points. The goal was to get to 200 points. The first person would answer all the questions, in like a 30-second time limit. If they did not hit 200 points, and rarely they did, the other person would then have 45 seconds to answer those questions, attempting to top the 200 point mark. They could not repeat answers either. If they did, this buzzer sounded, and they had to try again.
It was a lot of fun.
The host
Now, here is where the show gets really entertaining. The host was a former actor named Richard Dawson. He was best remembered, at least among my family and friends, as the British airman Newkirk in “Hogan’s Heroes”. It was a show about the exploits of a group of prisoners of war in a German POW camp. Wikipedia revealed Newkirk’s first name was Peter, something I never knew.
Now, here is where the show gets really entertaining. The host was a former actor named Richard Dawson. He was best remembered, at least among my family and friends, as the British airman Newkirk in “Hogan’s Heroes”. It was a show about the exploits of a group of prisoners of war in a German POW camp. Wikipedia revealed Newkirk’s first name was Peter, something I never knew.
The next time I saw Richard Dawson, he was on “Match Game” as a regular panelist. That is on the outer edge of my memory, back to the mid 1970s. “Match Game” was an interesting show. Gene Rayburn was the host. There were two contestants. He took turns asking each one a question that ended in a blank. There were six celebrity panelists who would each write down their answer. Each time the contestant’s answer matched a panelist’s, the contestant received a point. Of course it was the ‘70s, so some of the questions were pretty racy, something I only discovered watching the show years later when I was an adult.
That racy streak was something that would not end with “Match Game”.
“The Family Feud” debuted in 1976 and Richard Dawson was the host. My outstanding memory of him was that he tried to kiss every woman on the show.
It become a trademark and garnered him the name “The Kissing Bandit”. Comedians would make fun of him, but the fans of “The Family Feud” loved it.
When it went off the air, according to Wikipedia, Dawson said he kissed contestants for love and luck, something his mother did with him as a child.
Dawson even kind of spoofed himself. He appeared as a crazed game show host in the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “The Running Man”, although Dawson never kissed anyone as far as I remember.
Parting thoughts
“The Family Feud” occupies another special place in my childhood, because I watched it with my family on the farm; with relatives when I spent summers in Brooks; and with cousins in Lethbridge. We would all play along and, invariably, choose one family or another to cheer for.
“The Family Feud” occupies another special place in my childhood, because I watched it with my family on the farm; with relatives when I spent summers in Brooks; and with cousins in Lethbridge. We would all play along and, invariably, choose one family or another to cheer for.
One family in particular I recall cheering for was the “Thé Family”. I thought it was funny that if you looked at it, without hearing the pronunciation, it looked like “The The family”. They would win won game before losing and leaving the show.
The funny things a guy remembers.
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