Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck ScandalOct 07 '03 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Micheal Larsen's reign of terror on the game show Press Your Luck is immortalized in this Game Show Network documentary.
Last night I viewed the documentary Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal on the Game Show Network. While the program itself is far from groundbreaking, or original in terms of the documentary format, it certainly does shed some insight into the world of television game shows, and of the sorts of people who play them. Press Your Luck was a mid-80’s game show on CBS, and the purpose of the game was to acquire enough spins (by answering questions correctly at the beginning of the round) to use against the big board. The big board consisted of a number of screens aligned into the shape of a square. The images on the screen constantly changed, while at the same time, lights constantly roamed the board, lighting up one screen at a time. The goal was for the player to stop the movement of the lights, thereby winning whatever was marked on the screen in which the lights stopped at. Usually, it consisted of either a cash prize or an item of merchandise. However, there was the frequent unlucky scenario of a player hitting a screen that contained a Whammy. A Whammy took away all of the winnings that a player had acquired in all of his previous spins. On an average day, the winning contestant might be extremely lucky if they took home ten thousand dollars, although it was not uncommon for the big winner to only take home a few thousand. After all, the chances of hitting a Whammy and losing lots of money were fairly high, and the board itself seemed so random and merciless that no contestant, however quick and skilled, would ever be able to beat it. But someone did. An unemployed man named Michael Larsen studied the game intensely from the comfort of his own home. He studied the board, how it worked, and discovered something. The random patterns were in fact not random. There was an actual sequence involved -- five sequences, actually -- and, armed with that knowledge, he went to Hollywood, and got on the show. He then proceeded to fleece CBS out of more than $100,000 dollars, making it the biggest ever payout in game show history up to that time. The documentary does a pretty good job of presenting this scandal, considering that Game Show Network is more about airing old game shows than about creating documentaries of any sort. GSN definitely did the right thing by making Peter Tomarken, the original host of Press Your Luck, the narrator of this piece, and it also manages to be illuminating in terms of what the players in the scandal say, and also by what it shows and implies. What transpires is not a story of a man who achieved greater things as a result of appearing on Press Your Luck. Instead, this is a cautionary tale of what happens when you become transfixed on wanting to live the American Dream. Larsen was an unemployed man who did nothing but watch television, hoping to find something that could make him money. He soon got interested in game shows, back when game shows were common on network daytime television, and one of the shows that caught his eye was Press Your Luck. His ex-common-law-partner paints a portrait of a man obsessed, who ignored his family just to get a shot of that dream, and the recreations of his home life suggest that he was quite crazed. He had not just one television, but many televisions, as well as video tape recorders, and his life revolved around discovering any angle, any opening, anything that would give him an opportunity to make lots of money. And even after winning all that money, after beating the odds, Larsen’s life went on a downward spiral that proves that you reap what you sow. After winning his money, he spent much of it on bad business deals and scams that got him into trouble with the law, while the rest of it was stolen in a robbery in which the thieves had little problem getting the money, as it was all lying around in one dollar bills around the house. Larsen died of throat cancer a few years later. The best thing about this documentary is the fact that they show the Larsen episodes in their entirety (including unaired footage). When Larsen took over the game, he repeatedly hit the right spaces on the board, which gave him not just money, but extra spins, and he went for thirty-one spins before passing up his remaining spins to another player. He ended up taking so many spins that his turn spilled over into the next episode, before the other two contestants could even play. There is something patently surreal in watching the original broadcast, as it begins much like a regular Press Your Luck show, with material that seems out of context to the isolated, unique scenario that is about to transpire. Soon, Larsen, this strange and sort of creepy fellow, takes over the game, and the show, and nobody, from the other two contestants, to the audience, to the host Peter Tomarken, can believe what they are seeing. One contestant has the most sour look on her face, realizing that she can never catch up to this guy, while Tomarken tries his damnedest not to break down and plead with the guy to stop, lest he hits a Whammy and loses tens of thousands of dollars in a potentially horrifying spectacle. Yet Larsen wasn’t the man of steel that you may think. The stress was getting to him, and it showed all too well. It got even worse when the sour female contestant decided to take a little revenge, when later on, after she took her turn, she passed her remaining spins back to Larsen, who had already gained 102,000 dollars. The spins that are passed to you must be played, which meant that Larsen had no choice but to play those three spins. It was only by a miracle that he didn’t lose it all, as the doc points out that he fouled up on his very last required spin -- he missed his favorite squares, the ones that never gave out Whammies, and ended up hitting the square that, on his very first spin at the very beginning of the game, had given him a Whammy. It could have been only a manner of fractions of a second in the difference between having him win the game with 110,000 dollars, and having a devastating experience by losing everything. I wished that the documentary had went further into Larsen’s life, and into the behind the scenes of the game show itself. Naturally, given GSN’s mandate, the two hour show spends 75 percent of the time on the game itself -- the original broadcast would be almost an hour, and occasionally Tomarken would break in to give us some reflective analysis. But it is obvious that we have a tragic story on our hands, of a guy who did not have a firm footing on reality, who had his head in the clouds with dreams of making it big. And we also have an interesting story of what happened behind the scenes. Some of the producers were wary of Larsen even before he appeared on the show, and, afterwards, CBS were looking at all the angles, trying to uncover a way of not paying the guy. In any case, CBS was so embarrassed that they suppressed the Larsen episodes after their original broadcast, never allowing it to be repeated on CBS , or any other channel that repeated Press Your Luck during the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was only with the GSN doc that these shows were ever shown at all again. If the doc spent even more time with these issues, the result would have been an even better program. Overall, though, Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal was a tantalizing glimpse into the attraction that money and game shows had on people, and of the tragedy that greed can pull certain people into. I’m of the mind, myself, that this story, if done right, would make an excellent, if dark, movie. Sure, most people might not care about a movie about a cheesy game show, but there are some lessons to be learned here, mark my words, and it’s surely an interesting story.  |
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