FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1969

[AaronHandy3]

Let's Make A Deal, the Monty Hall-Stefan Hatos-produced gameshow which is "The Marketplace Of America," premiered at 9:00 p.m. (EST) on ABC Primetime, continuing that time honored tradition 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!

This was not long after 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 primetime spinoff of LMAD on ABC was in fact the second, following a previous nighttime run on its former network, NBC in a Sunday night spot (May 21 - September 3, 1967), where it served as a summer replacement; the primetime run on The Alphabet Network was a regular series.

Let's Make A Deal finished its ABC nighttime run on August 30, 1971, but it wouldn’t be long before it begat a third primetime run in syndication on September 18, 1971; it helped coin the phrase "Primetime Access" and lay the groundwork for several other network daytime game shows to spin off nighttime syndie spinoffs (weekly or daily) and ran for 6 years. Its final season saw it 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. The ABC Daytime run of LMAD continued until July 9, 1976; one of the shows to debut the following Monday was Family Feud!