Sunday, July 21, 2013

Soap Stars in Other Places: Now You See It from 1989


Now You See It is another short-lived game show that aired on CBS for a few months in 1989, which was hosted by Chuck Henry. For one week they had soap stars and one episode is posted on YouTube.com in two parts.

The soap opera week (dubbed Battle of the Daytime Soaps) had stars from four LA-based soap operas: The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital and The Young and the Restless. Typically such weeks would only have CBS performers as the network didn't want to promote the other stations, so this was a bit of a surprise. This entry spoils the game and thanks goes to Donelys3 for posting. Here is a link to part one and part two.

Even though this episode is over 20 years old, there are some familiar faces. The B&B team was Joanna Johnson (Caroline, who now plays Karen) and the late Jeff Conaway (Mick, though best known for his role on Taxi). The Days team was Peggy McKay (who still plays Caroline) and James Hampton (Saul, who has been in a lot of other projects IMDB him). The GH team was Jackie Zeman (Bobbie) and Corey Young (Walt). I don't recall the character of Walt, but he was Dr. Benson, though no relation to Carly. The YR team was Melody Thomas Scott (Nikki) and Nina Arvesen (Cassandra).

Unfortunately this wasn't the Friday episode, so I don't have totals and names of the charities to share. The actors did speak about things they were involved with at the time like Jackie had just done the workout video.

The basic concept was there was a screen full of words mixed in with nonsense letters, the contestants had to find the words that matched the given category. The team that won the first round played the team who won the second. So on this episode B&B beat GH, and Y&R beat Days. Then one player from each of the winning teams played against each other: so Joanna from B&B and Melody from Y&R played head to head. Melody ended up winning against Joanna and got to play for the big money. She and Nina worked together to win $5000 for charity.

This was an interesting game show to watch as since it had two very short runs, I wasn't familiar with it. Unlike a lot of celebrity appearances on game shows, the actors had to play seriously and no one really came off badly, which I also liked.

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