DECEMBER 30, 1963

[AaronHandy3]

Let's Make A Deal, a Monty Hall-Stefan Hatos-produced game show which has been termed "The Marketplace Of America," had its debut @ 2:00 p.m. (EST) on NBC Daytime. One of the most popular television game shows of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Let's Make A Deal is the show where contestants buy, sell, or trade anything and everything from Aardvarks to Zithers. Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and even Beverly Hills housewives dressed as kumquats and turnips hoping to trade a hard boiled egg for a Cadillac. What would be behind the Curtain… A Car or a Zonk (a worthless, ridiculous prize)? Sometimes when a Trader had decided to “take The Curtain,” emcee Monty Hall offered to buy it back again… $1,000… $2,000… $3,000 not to take The Curtain!

Traders never knew how high he would go. Prizes were disguised so that Traders were never sure whether a garbage can, for instance, contained a mink coat or just garbage, or which of three envelopes contained $1,000. The decision-making was exciting and suspenseful. Would it be a Car or a Camel? A First-Class Trip to Hawaii or a Live Cow dressed in sunglasses and feather boa? Would model Carol Merrill point out the features of a new Refrigerator or would announcer Jay Stewart be dressed as an old granny in a Giant Rocking Chair?

Part of the time, contestants played various games relating to the price of small items, pricing items of greater and greater value or matching the prices to the items, for example. Contestants began playing those games on Let's Make A Deal in the 1960’s.

Near the end of the show, Monty asked those who had already played if they wanted to keep what they had, or trade it for a chance at The Big Deal Of The Day. The first two Traders who decided to risk their cash and/or merchandise for a chance at a grand prize got to choose between Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3. There were no Zonks in The Big Deal, but it was possible to trade down. After the Big Deal until time ran out, Monty just couldn't stop making Quick Deals! One of the most famous... “I’ll give you $50 for a Hard Boiled Egg.”

Run-throughs for Let's Make A Deal began in November of 1962. The Pilot Episode was taped for NBC on May 25, 1963 and was for presentation purposes and never broadcast (until GSN unveiled it in 2002). The series went into production in late 1963.

At the beginning of the series, contestants were dressed simply in street clothes, but that would change quickly, according to Hall: "About a month into the show, a woman came to the show and brought a sign that said ‘Roses are red/Violets are blue/I came here/To deal with you,’" Hall told author Jefferson Graham. "And I picked her. Well, for the next couple of weeks we had signs flourishing like crazy [the show was probably live early in the run], and then somebody started wearing a crazy hat to attract my attention. Then it went crazy. They all started wearing all sorts of things." Thus, the concept of wearing costumes on LMAD was born.

LMAD completed a magnificent 5-year run on NBC December 27, 1968, and defected to ABC Daytime the following Monday, exactly 5 years to the date of its premiere on NBC and in the same timeslot, too! The Peacock Network would soon regret its decision to drop LMAD; the game was a huge cash cow for NBC, and its cancellation resulted in a loss of revenues and ratings for the network.

Let's Make A Deal has the distinction of siring three primetime spinoffs: one on NBC (May 21 - September 3, 1967), one on ABC (February 7, 1969 - August 30, 1971), and one in syndication (September 18, 1971 - May 28, 1977), which helped coin the phrase "Primetime Access" and lay the groundwork for several other network daytime game shows to spin off their own nighttime syndie editions (weekly or daily). The ABC Daytime run of LMAD ground to a halt on Friday, July 9, 1976 (after The Alphabet Network made a fatal mistake in moving it to 12 noon); interestingly, one of the shows to debut the following Monday was Family Feud! The nighttime syndie version lasted a season longer, having switched from ABC Television Center to the gambling capital of the world, Las Vegas (at The Riviera Hotel), with the addition of a Super Deal, which gave The Big Deal winner a chance to trade up even more. A total of 4,700 shows (according to Monty) were produced for Let's Make A Deal.

But, like the old saying goes, a great game show never dies (or stays dead for long): Let's Make A Deal saw many resurrections: in Canada in 1980, in syndication in 1984 (as The All-New Let's Make A Deal Show), and on its old network, NBC, in 1990 (emceed by Bob Hilton at first, then a very grey [blond?!] Monty Hall afterward). Classic episodes of LMAD have seen repeats on The Family Channel in the 1980s, and in 2001, Game Show Network retained the rights to air 1,300 surviving classic episodes (undoubtedly from the 1971-77 syndie version), beginning with 35 of the best LMAD episodes in a Let's Make A Deal-a-thon, a five-day launch media event from Monday, August 27 through Friday, August 31, from 8:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m. ET., and with shows in a regularly scheduled air time of 8:30 p.m. ET, Monday through Saturday, beginning Saturday, September 1. And in June 2006, Let's Make A Deal became a featured attraction on a third network, CBS, as part of Game Show Marathon, with Ricki Lake emceeing and celebrities (like Leslie Nielsen) as contestants.


(Sources of info: The Let's Make A Deal Homepage)