There for a while, every time I walked in Big Lots, I walked out with an arm load of DVDs. Recently the pickings have been slimmer. The last time I was in the Big Lots at Teays, all I found was the Jeopardy DVD. I’ve always liked Jeopardy and the DVD sounded interesting. It featured Alex Trebek’s first Jeopardy, the show where Ken Jennings lost after 74 successful appearances, and the Ultimate Tournament of Champions. There was also a documentary on the show broken up into little featurettes.
I watched the first episode of the relaunched Jeopardy and didn’t notice any huge differences with the show that still airs to this date. The set was a little different, Alex looked a little different, mostly it was cosmetic differences. The one difference and it may have been my perception, was that they used to give the contestants less time to buzz in with the “question”. The reason for this is that back then you could buzz in at any time. Now you have to wait until Alex finishes reading the question. The Ken Jennings episode was interesting to watch. Even knowing how it would come out (that he would finally lose), I was surprised at just exactly how it came out. The look of sheer amazement on the other contestant’s face when she realized that she had beaten him was priceless. The tournament was entertaining as well.
Of course the real reason to get this disc and watch it if you are a Jeopardy fan is to see the behind the scenes stuff. The featurettes start off with Merv Griffin explaining how he created the show. He explains that it was after the big quiz show scandals and no one was doing quiz shows. His wife at the time said to him, “well why don’t you give them the answers”. He explained that was what had created the problem in the first place, and she had to explain it to him. As soon as she did, he realized that they had struck gold and began work on creating the show that would become Jeopardy.
Further featurettes show how they come up with the questions or answers. The process by which the questions are chosen is explained as well as Alex’s process of learning the questions and how to pronounce them. Another section deals with all the parts of the set. It is explained how the buzzers work and how the contestants know when to buzz in and what the scores are when they need to decide on a wager for Double Jeopardy or Final Jeopardy.
There is also a section dealing with how contestants are chosen. There is an initial quiz and only the people who pass the quiz get to move on for further consideration. They want people who seem relaxed and personable. They judge a lot of this by holding a mock show. It was fascinating watching all the behind the scenes machinations.
I did notice one thing while watching the various episodes. My DVR has got me programmed like Pavlov’s dog. Even though the DVD presents the episodes commercial free, I kept jumping to fast forward through the commercials any time Alex mentioned that they needed to take a commercial break. Talk about being made to feel dumb by Jeopardy.
The DVD cost me $3 at Big Lots and it was well worth that. I don’t know that I’ll be popping it back in any time soon, but it was a lot of fun for a one time viewing. This is yet another disc that I am not sure how to rate. The documentary was fun, but it plays more like one of those behind the scenes specials that Food Network likes to play rather than a true documentary. The episodes are enjoyable and fun to play along with, but I don’t know how much replay value they have. Let’s just say that if you like Jeopardy and can find the disc cheap, you won’t be disappointed in spending $3 on it.
365 Days of DVDs 