Wasting Time in the Summertime

When I was elementary school, most of my summer vacation was wasted watching terrible television game shows. The $74,000 Pyramid and the long-running Price Is Right were much more compelling back then than playing baseball with my friends outside in the 104 degree Texas afternoons.

In my esteemed estimation as a 3rd grader, the best afternoon game show ever was the highly unstable and bizarre "The Magnificent Marble Machine".

This show attempted to cash in on the mid-1970s pinball machine craze, which probably seemed like a great idea at the time. I mean, it would have been hard to make a game show out of other 70's phenomenons like skateboarding or disco (wait, they almost did that with Solid Gold and Dance Fever.) So a celebrity, usually some real struggler like Artie Johnson or the pre-red carpet Joan Rivers, would be matched with a contestant as a team against another celebrity/contestant team. They had to answer a bunch of trivia questions and the first team who got five questions right got a chance to play this massive pinball machine. One contestant played one flipper and the celeb was on the other. They won money and prizes depending on how long the ball stayed active. As a kid who put tons of quarters into pinball machines in 1976, I loved this stupid show. I mean, it was comforting to learn that Nipsey Russell was just as bad at pinball as me. And I was only in the 3rd grade.

I read somewhere that this show is considered to be one of the biggest game show flops ever. Back then NBC used to switch up the game show sets every day --- Matchgame would be filmed on Tuesday, Family Feud would be filmed on Wednesday and so on. The problem with the Marble Machine was that it couldn't be moved --- they tried once and it broke. So they just left it there on the set and filmed a whole season worth of shows in a couple of weeks. Needless to say, NBC didn't reup Marble Machine for a second season.