Soap Stars in Other Places: Scattergories

Scattergories was another short-lived game show from 1993. The show along with a revival of Scrabble aired on NBC from January - June replacing the soap opera Santa Barbara.

The game play for Scattergories included celebrities, which is why I'm blogging about it. The show's host was Dick Clark. A few episodes of the show are available on YouTube.com. This playlist has all of the episodes available. Since Scattergories was on NBC, two of the episodes had Days of Our Lives cast members as part of their cast.

The gameplay was battle of the sexes style with teams of four men and four women competing to win money. They were given a topic and a letter, the team had to raise their hands and get words that matched (six per category). Challenges were allowed and a jury of former contestants decided if the words were legal. Instead of having the celebrities in studio they were on a video wall. Robert Kelker-Kelly (Bo back in 1993) and Melissa Reeves (Jennifer) were the cast members that appear on the episodes available. Brian Austin Green (who was on Beverly Hills 90210) at the time also is a celebrity along with actors from prime time ABC shows like Richard Karn from Home Improvement. Usually this only happens on syndicated shows, so it was surprising to see stars from shows that didn't air on NBC.

At the time, I didn't know what NBC aired instead of Santa Barbara. I have zero memory of Scrabble 1993, so a part of me wonders if my O&O station actually aired it at its scheduled time. This wasn't the worst game show, but would have been better if the stars were in studio. That said if they had a star in studio and they couldn't come up with a word, that would have been embarrassing, so I wonder if that was part of why they used the video wall with taped responses.