Trivia / I've Got a Secret

• Banned Episode: Until the creation of Black and White Overnite, the cigarette-sponsored episodes were banned from airing on GSN. Two cigarette brands, Winston and Cavalier, are known to have sponsored the show. Said logos were on-set, and commercials for them aired as part of the episodes. While the cigarette-sponsored episodes do not air on Buzzr, they have posted a few to YouTube, with a Surgeon General's warning against smoking added onscreen whenever they show the plugs.
• Edited for Syndication: In December 2019, GSN deleted Kaye Ballard's entire segment from the February 1, 1965 episode because "it did not meet (their) broadcast standards", leading to an exceedingly short runtime and a pair of five-minute commercial breaks. The removed segment involved the panel identifying a song that Steve and Kaye sung in Italian, which turned out to be Baby, It's Cold Outside. Said episode had aired in full prior to 2019.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Oxygen and GSN versions are very hard to find due to their short lives.
• Milestone Celebration: Most anniversaries of the show's premiere got at least a mention, if not a Clip Show or look behind the scenes.
• Missing Episode:
  • Like What's My Line?, the earliest episodes of the 1952-1967 run, including the June 19, 1952 premiere, seem to be lost, and the 1966-67 color episodes only survive in black and white. The exact number of missing episodes is uknown, though it could be anywhere from 26 to in excess of 36.
  • Three episodes of the 1972 version...#30 with Jo Ann Pflug, #32 with Jan Murray, and #34 with Ruth Buzzi...are missing from the Fremantle archives. The other 36 episodes still exist, and each one has rerun at least once.
  • Two of the four 1976 episodes seem to be MIA, although CBS quit erasing in September 1972. The premiere circulates among private collectors, and the finale exists on audio tape.
• Never Work with Children or Animals:
  • September 12, 1956: A cow-milking demonstration went wrong when the cow they brought in made pies all over the stage instead.
  • The first contestants on October 5, 1964 were dogs Suzie (star of the Folies Bergère) and Suzie Jr. (her understudy), who proved to be a bit troublesome. Suzie got scared by the buzzer and kept barking for about a minute (the judge whistled instead for the rest of the round) and Suzie Jr. had to leave near the end to do some "business":
    Steve Allen: That's what I love about live television!
  • A fall 1972 episode with guest star Jo Anne Worley had a frog-jumping contest (Worley's secret was that a frog which would compete in the famous frog-jumping contest of Calaveras County, California was named after her). As it turns out, getting a frog to jump on cue is trickier that one would think.
• The Pete Best: The Man himself appeared on March 30, 1964. His secret: "I left my job two years ago — I was one of THE BEATLES!"
• Real-Life Relative: One episode with Jack Benny as guest also featured his daughter Joan on the panel, filling in for the vacationing Bill Cullen.
  • One episode featured Desi Arnaz as the guest and Lucille Ball as a guest panelist.
  • Jayne Meadows was often a panelist on both of Steve Allen's versions.
  • In one episode, Groucho Marx was on the panel. Harpo was the guest, and even Groucho couldn't figure out his brother's secret: It was actually Chico Marx dressed as Harpo.
  • One episode had Bill's wife Ann Cullen join the panel to replace Betsy Palmer one week when she was appearing in a play out of state.
  • A Christmas Episode featured Henry Morgan's mother (Henry was in California that week).
  • There were a few episodes where all the guests were relatives of famous people:
    • The February 26, 1958 episode featured the relatives of Rita Hayworth, Dean Martin, Joel McCrea, Joan Bennett, Loretta Young, Betty Furness and Yul Brynner.
    • The first round of the October 15, 1958 episode featured the children of the What's My Line? panelists. The remaining rounds had the contestants do a musical performance before or after their question round; those featured the relatives of Dana Andrews, William Bendix, Harold Lloyd and Sam Levinson.
    • The contestants of the December 28, 1960 episode all had famous fathers: Bud Collyer, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Walter Brennan and Mitch Miller.
    • The January 17, 1966 episode featured the relatives of Art Carney, Durwood Kirby, Frank Fontane and Steve Allen.
• Real Song Theme Tune: The 1952-1961 theme was "Plink, Plank, Plunk" by Leroy Anderson. It was succeeded in 1961-1962 by an upbeat arrangement of the "Theme from A Summer Place" before being replaced by an original tune from musical director Norman Paris for the rest of the original run. Steve Allen's theme song, "This Could Be the Start of Something", was used as the theme for the 1972-1973 syndicated revival.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • The original version was the first victim of the CBS's 1967 prime time game show purge with To Tell the Truth, a nighttime version of Password and What's My Line? getting the axe shortly afterward. CBS abruptly decided that game shows were no longer suitable for prime time slots; perhaps not coincidentally, notorious game show hater Fred Silverman was a CBS executive at the time.
  • The 1976 revival was so short-lived because CBS pretty much had no faith in it. They only aired four episodes of it as a summer replacement series (two of which were the pilots), slotted them against summer repeats of the very popular Happy Days on ABC and gave it almost no advertising. Those who managed to see it loved it (the younger viewers because there was nothing like it on TV at the time, the older ones because they had fond memories of the original show), but the predictably poor ratings killed it, and with it any hope for game shows in network primetime until Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 1999.
• What Could Have Been: Carsey-Werner announced plans to revive the show in 1992 alongside the Bill Cosby-hosted version of You Bet Your Life, but this fell through so early on that they never even named a possible host.
  • The May 13, 1959 and March 9, 1964 episodes were respectively supposed to have Doris Day and Connie Stevens as the Special Guests. But they both came down with an unexpected illness. In the case of the former, a little girl with an identical name took her place. In the case of the latter, Betsy Palmer did a segment with mannequins, in which one of them was on stage modeling current fashions.