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Trivia / Three on a Match

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For the Game Show:

  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: Only 12 episodes are known to exist.
    • Seven circulate among collectors: March 15 and December 17, 1973 (both as master copies), plus February 6-8/11-12, 1974.
    • The other five (March 12/20/28 and April 5/13, 1973) are held by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
  • Screwed by the Network: Aside from its third-place ranking, then-NBC daytime programming chief Lin Bolen was trying to rid the network's schedule of games hosted by middle-aged men on technologically-obsolete sets, as part of an aggressive attempt to bolster ratings among women aged 18-34 (she had already done this in March 1973 with Concentration); this may explain why two months before the show ended, the format was changed significantly to remove the bidding and true/false elements from the front game and replaced with more "traditional" buzz-in questions. At the beginning of July 1974, Three on a Match was replaced by Winning Streak (with the same producer, host, and announcer) in a timeslot swap with Jeopardy! Neither game made it past January 3, 1975.
  • Similarly Named Works: With the 1932 pre-code movie Three on a Match.
  • What Could Have Been: A revival was attempted for syndication in Fall 1983 as part of a 90-minute block with revivals of Chain Reaction and Eye Guess (hosted by Jack Clark, Geoff Edwards, and Nipsey Russell respectively), but Syndicast decided against it after just 70 markets (no major ones) signed on. They tried it again for 1984-85, but still failed. For such a trio of beloved games, third time may have been the charm had Syndicast not given up...and in the end, only Chain Reaction managed to get a revival.

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