TVGameshows.net : Your Weekly Game Show Magazine
Thirty years ago, Wink Martindale was hoping to piggyback the success of his five-year run on Gambit with a remake of the 1950s Jack Barry-Dan Enright favorite Tic Tac Dough.
Though targeted as a syndicated evening half-hour, CBS bought the game and even ended Bill Cullen's Pass the Buck two weeks before the end of its contract to insert Tic Tac at 10 a.m. Every possible element was in the show's favor: an established name, Martindale as host, the Barry-Enright moniker and veteran game show hand Ronnie Greenberg as producer. With all of those ingredients, Tic Tac Dough laid an egg as a network show.
As Martindale said in a 2006 interview with TVgameshows.net, "So many of these local stations had bought the syndicated version for the fall. When we went on in the morning the previous summer on CBS and bombed, a lot of station managers wanted to know what kind of lemon they had bought."
Fortunately, for Martindale and the package, the evening version became one of syndication's top success stories of the late '70s and early '80s, thanks in no small part to the exploits of a Navy pilot, Thom McKee. Cheered on by his wife Jenny, McKee went on a record-setting run, covering two seasons, to win $312,700 in cash and prizes (including eight cars and $200,000 in cash).
Today, after a long hiatus, reruns of Tic Tac Dough begin airing from 11:30 a.m. to 12 noon after Wheel of Fortune repeats at 11 Monday through Friday. The series will pick up with the second season, which will eventually feature McKee.
Martindale was the 2007 Ralph Edwards Award recipient from Game Show Congress and McKee was the 2006 Game Show Congress Contestant Legend.
Tic Tac Dough is part of a mild overhaul of GSN's daytime and evening lineups beginning this week. Jeopardy! reruns will move to 2 p.m. (ET/PT) with Password Plus (currently in the Tom Kennedy episodes) moving down a half-hour to 2:30.
The John O'Hurley To Tell the Truth episodes and Bob Goen's That's the Question will be paired back-to-back from 3 to 4.
Daily repeats of the previous night's How Much Is Enough? with Corbin Bernsen as host move in at 4. Chain Reaction follows at 4:30.
In late night, Trivia Trap with Bob Eubanks and Now You See It with Jack Narz become Monday-through-Friday staples from 1 to 2 a.m.