A very short-lived CBS Game Show from late 1975, created by Bill Carruthers and hosted by Jim Lange, in which four female contestants sat at desks surrounding a spinning red arrow. Each contestant was spotted one prize to start the game, but the retail values were not given. In each round, a new prize was described and the host asked a question. The firs contestant to buzz in and answer correctly got to spin the arrow, hitting her buzzer to slow and stop it. The woman on whom it stopped could either accept that prize or pass it to an opponent (if the arrow stopped on a vacant area between two players, whoever stopped it was given the options).
The object was to accumulate the most without going over $5,000; Going over that amount locked the contestant out until she correctly answered a question, which allowed her to give a prize to an opponent in the hope of dropping below $5,000. Contestants could voluntarily lock themselves out if they were worried about going over the limit. After seven spins, whoever was closest to $5,000 without going over won the game and those prizes, then had a chance to win every prize featured on that episode.
Give-n-Take was unique for its dark theatre-in-the-round setting in an era where pastels were the norm for daytime game shows. It debuted on September 8 (the day The Price Is Right began an experimental week of hour-long shows) at 10:00 AM, replacing Lange's Spin-Off, and couldn't compete against NBC's Celebrity Sweepstakes; when Price permanently expanded on November 3, Take was shunted off to the low-clearance 4:00 PM slot (replacing Musical Chairs) and died on the 28th.
This show provides examples of:
- The Announcer: Johnny Jacobs, usually a Chuck Barris standby.
- Game Show Host: Jim Lange.
- Bonus Round: The winner picked one of the four seats and stopped the arrow once more; if it landed in her area, she won all the prizes that had been presented in the main game.
- Game Show Winnings Cap: $25,000, per CBS limit at the time.
- Luck-Based Mission: It was all a matter of where the arrow stopped, but whoever answered each question correctly would tilt the odds greatly in her favor for that turn.
- Non-Standard Game Over: If three of the four contestants got locked out at the same time, the fourth one automatically won the game.
- Show the Folks at Home: On the pilot episode only, the total for the contestant who won control of a prize was shown on-screen as she decided what to do with it. During the series proper, the totals were shown before the sixth turn as Johnny Jacobs read them off and listed the prizes each contestant had in her bank, in a voice-over heard only by the home viewers.
