History Trivia / WheelOfFortune

** The UsefulNotes/ClosedCaptioning is done before the final editing, sometimes resulting in the captions showing lines that ended up being edited out, such as one October 2020 contestant proclaiming, "I don't even need a car, but I'll take it." after winning one.

* On March 6, 1986, ''Series/WheelOfFortune'' became the first GameShow to have UsefulNotes/ClosedCaptioning.

*** February 14, 2014: The red team lands on $3,500 and they clearly call M (of which the puzzle had two), but Pat echoes "N, and there are three of them". Even the UsefulNotes/ClosedCaptioning displayed the call as M.

** While nearly all of the episodes that were available on Netflix carried over to Pluto TV and GSN, four did not: #S-6725 (January 19, 2018), #S-7136 and 7137 (February 17-18, 2020), and #S-7143 (February 26, 2020).

** July 13, 2019 (rerun of January 5, 2018): After most of New York City got hit with a power outage, flagship affiliate WABC-TV interrupted Wheel mid-Round 1 (just as a contestant was calling a letter on $2,500), then returned during the commercial break before Round 2. The blackout appeared to affect WABC's operations, as the footage became glitched in the middle of Round 2, with the lower third of the picture being moved to the top of the screen, and was not corrected until the end of the main game. More breaking news of the blackout later pre-empted most subsequent programming (most of ''[[Series/SharkTank Shark Tank]]'' and the entirety of ''Series/PressYourLuck'' and ''Series/CardSharks'', all of which were repeats).

** Jim Thornton can be heard voicing a commercial in ''WesternAnimation/MonstersInc''

** Charlie O'Donnell died on November 1, 2010 with the season in mid-production. Although he taped episodes before his death, the show instead chose to [[SameLanguageDub dub his voice over with substitute announcers]]. This did not affect the UsefulNotes/NintendoWii video game as it was released one day after his death.

** In late 1982, The Great Game Company (which would later become [=GameTek=]) announced plans to adapt seven game shows into video games for the Atari 2600, ''Wheel'' among them. They were being developed just as UsefulNotes/TheGreatVideoGameCrashOf1983 started and the plans were put to an abrupt end. No prototypes of any of these games are known to exist.

** The closing chat from February 25, 2022 (#S-7545) was about Vanna's cat Stella. At the time of the episode's taping, Stella had just celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Vanna said that Stella "could live for a lot longer", to which Pat takes as "more material" for the RunningGag of him getting her name wrong. On an episode later in the season, Vanna announced that Stella had passed away. Likely to avoid insensitivity, #S-7545 was barred from its scheduled Saturday repeat in June 2023.
** The February 16, 2023 episode (#S-7734, Sweethearts Week) was skipped in Singapore due to featuring a gay couple; Singaporean broadcast laws prohibit any depiction or mention of same-sex relationships on free television. Some affiliates also pre-empted its January 27, 2024 repeat airing with infomercials, although this may have just been a coincidence, as this is common with the show's Saturday repeats.

** In Pluto TV's rotation, Pat's first episode is grouped with Season 10, and Vanna's with Season 11, due to the syndicated series' equivalents of their daytime production numbers (#1768 and #2016, respectively) falling during those seasons.

** As for streaming services, Netflix had featured a rotation of a total of 74 episodes (25 at a time, with one episode being featured in two batches) that only ranged from Seasons 34-37. The announcement of the launch of a 24/7 ''Wheel'' channel on Pluto TV was initially celebrated by fans. Then when streaming actually started, ''still'' nothing older than Season 34 was initially offered, and Pluto initially stated that this would not change. The Vulture journalist who originally reported the announcements, himself a fan of retro ''Wheel'', stated that he could not get an answer as to why ''Wheel'' did not go any earlier. Catering to demand, Pluto TV added 100 episodes ranging from Seasons 20-30 (2002-2012) in March 2023, and to everyone's surprise, 150 more episodes going as far back as Season 1, including Pat and Vanna's first shows from the ''daytime series'', were added later in the year. Many of these episodes had never been seen since their original broadcasts or syndication reruns, which are never more than one season old.

** WROC-TV is very eager to pre-empt ''Wheel'' for just about any kind of local special. Unlike WIVB and WETM, WROC does not have a sister station to move the show to, meaning ''Wheel'' frequently airs in overnight slots. Multiple notable episodes, including at least one $100,000 win, were pre-empted by specials dedicated to things as menial as '''Susan B. Anthony's birthday''' (and not even on the actual day). When a Buffalo Bills special is an hour long, WROC will sometimes opt out of the second half to allow ''Jeopardy!'' to air, but they have never done this for ''Wheel''. In May 2023, a sweeps month, they pre-empted ''Wheel'' for an ''entire week'' to air local specials on that year's PGA Championship which took place on a local course, despite the event itself only lasting two weekdays.

** Any time the Kansas City Chiefs make it to the Super Bowl (which they have done four times in the 2020s alone), local FOX affiliate WDAF-TV temporarily moves ''Wheel'' to a late-night slot for ''over a week'' consecutively in favor of specials hyping the big game, starting two Fridays prior. In 2024, this conflicted with the NFL Superfan Tournament (which even had a contestant representing the Chiefs), resulting in all five episodes airing at 1:00 AM.

** One of the biggest obstacles for syndicated ''Wheel'' is ''Monday Night Football'' whenever it airs nationally on ABC. In terms of U.S. coverage, ABC is the largest network carrier of the show, including in all but one of the Nielsen markets with an owned-and-operated (O&O) station. When ''MNF'' aired on a weekly basis until 2005, the West Coast would air the show on a one-day delay (with a "new" episode on Saturday instead of a repeat) while the East Coast was unaffected. Starting in 2020 (Season 38 of ''Wheel''), ABC began airing some games nationally again, the first of which usually falls on the same day as the season premiere of ''Wheel''. Since ABC now airs college football on Saturdays, West Coast affiliates are now forced to schedule impacted Monday episodes shortly after the games, which can result in these episodes not airing in their entirety, if at all, depending on the length of the game. Starting in 2023 (Season 41), ABC began airing pregame coverage before some (not all) national games at 7:30 PM Eastern, ''Wheel's'' time slot on the O&O's and in most markets in general. This pre-empted the first two Monday episodes of Pat Sajak's final season, including the premiere, in '''three of the Top 4 Nielsen markets''' (fortunately, all six contestants on those episodes were from markets where ''Wheel'' airs on non-ABC affiliates), along with one Secret Santa episode. WRIC-TV in Richmond, which normally airs ''Wheel'' at 7:00 PM, announced that on all of these days, ''Jeopardy!'' would move up from 7:30 and ''Wheel'' would not air ''at all.'' The third Monday episode was pre-empted on ''all'' ABC affiliates due to a game that started at 7:00 PM instead of 8:00. Due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, ABC soon decided to air ''MNF'' nationally ''every week of the 2023 season'', impacting several more episodes on the West Coast. Pat posted an apology for the pre-emptions, but claimed the show was "powerless" in doing anything about it.

*** In accordance with Singapore broadcasting laws, any mention or depiction of same-sex relationships or LGBTQ+ culture in general is edited out. This has resulted in contestant interviews and Bonus Round win celebrations being butchered, and in some cases, the complete removal of a winning contestant introducing their same-sex significant other at the start of the Bonus Round. Episode #PT-213 was rated [=PG13=] for "mature themes" due to featuring transgender celebrity Creator/LaverneCox.

*** For Season 4, ABC's original plan was to put ''Wheel'' back in its original time slot of Thursdays at 8:00, followed by fellow laid-back game shows ''Series/PressYourLuck'' and ''[[Series/{{Pyramid}} The $100,000 Pyramid]]'' (a lineup previously used for a special night of holiday-themed game show episodes, and with all three having considerable fandom overlap). ''Jeopardy!'' was to be on Tuesdays paired with ''[[Series/TheBachelor Bachelor in Paradise]]''. However, ABC later decided to move all ''Bachelor'' series to Thursdays and move both ''Jeopardy!'' and ''Wheel'' to Wednesdays at 8:00 and 9:00, respectively (with ''Pyramid'' following them both at 10:00, and ''Press'' moving to Tuesdays at 10:00 with a delayed premiere), leaving ''Wheel'' once again "buried" by ''Jeopardy!'', which, by this point, has seen and will continue to see several more primetime specials on the network. ''Wheel's'' order was also reduced from 13 episodes to 10 for this season while ''Jeopardy!'''s was not. On October 11, 2023, ABC quickly produced a special edition of ''Series/TwentyTwenty'' on the Israel-Hamas war to air at 10:00. Rather than skip ''Pyramid'', the network decided to move that show to 9:00 and skip ''Wheel'', even though that week's episode had already aired the day prior in Canada, resulting in CTV needing to pull the show from its schedule the following week to allow ABC to catch up. The originally-planned ''Wheel/Press/Pyramid'' lineup did get one night on December 28, 2023, though all three were repeats. Once again, following the new year, ABC put the final handful of ''Wheel'' episodes in limbo after several sporadic reruns (half of which were from Season 3) scheduled at random.

** Two episodes from Season 40 were removed from their respective weeks during summer reruns:
*** The September 16, 2022 episode (#S-7625) generated controversy over the Round 1 puzzle EENIE MEENIE MINY MOE CATCH A TIGER BY THE TOE, a rhyme with a once-popular variant that used a racial slur.
*** September 21, 2022 (#S-7628) has also been pulled because the media got into a similar frenzy over the "inappropriate" Round 1 puzzle WARM WET & WILD (intended to tie into the week's theme, California Coast). This episode had the first appearance of contestant Tanino Privitera, who returned for Fan Favorites week.

** On streaming services, Round 3 is erroneously ommited from the February 4, 2020 episode (#S-7127). It was likely accidentally cut while editing out the commercial break placeholders, resulting in the episode running only about 15 minutes without ads. When aired on Pluto TV, the ad breaks are longer to compensate.

** On November 12, 2016, for the only time in show history, a new episode (#S-6480) aired on a Saturday due to widespread Election Day pre-emptions sliding back the rest of that week's episodes. On Saturday, ABC, CBS, and NBC all had college football games scheduled until 7:00 PM Eastern, with the new ''Wheel'' episode scheduled at its typical 7:00 or 7:30. NBC's game was the only one that ended on time, allowing ''Wheel'' to air in its entirety on most of its affiliates. Most East Coast CBS airings were joined in progress by Round 3, and many ABC airings didn't air at all because of their game running past 7:30 (many stations such as WABC-TV in New York ran local news after the game until 8:00 PM instead of a partial ''Wheel''), and ones that ''did'' air were joined in progress around Round 2. FOX airings were pre-empted outright since their game ''began'' at 7:00, though some affiliates moved it to air before the game. Several other affiliates do not air ''Wheel'' on weekends at all during the college football season, or they air it on different stations, or in other time slots (mostly graveyard slots) to accommodate local news after the games (e.g., WOIO in Cleveland aired the episode at 11:35 PM). It also didn't help that most program guides still listed the airing as the previous season rerun that would normally air on a Saturday, so many fans and archivists were unable to record the episode, or were unaware of it being new. It never reran, but one of the contestants managed to see it in its entirety on his station (KTVT) and [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C99CDTKQr3g uploaded it to YouTube]]. However, it is missing the $1,000 Toss-Up and part of the contestant interviews, due to KTVT's infamous habit of starting the show before its official time slot. The Toss-Up can be seen at the tail end of WOIO's 11:00 newscast and KWWL's 6:00 newscast from that day on archive.org. The episode later appeared on Pluto TV in August 2022.
** Most of the episodes available on Netflix and Pluto TV are packaged by their full theme week, though some weeks only have one or two episodes available. In the most egregious example, Season 37's College Week Spring Break week excludes its Tuesday episode (#S-7157) despite not only having the week's only Bonus Round win, but also featuring ''Wheel'' superfan Christian Dixie, who even returned for Fan Favorites week. The episode was not excluded from television reruns, however.

** The several weeks of reruns between Seasons 37 and 38 excluded some individual episodes from the rest of their weeks, including an episode from November 2018 that mentioned airing on Election Day, and a May 2016 episode that was pulled at the last minute to avoid having to add a SPIN ID following a $10,000 Mystery Wedge win. One of the excluded episodes (#S-6842 from Season 36) later appeared on Netflix with the rest of its week.

** While nearly all of the episodes that were available on Netflix carried over to Pluto TV, four did not: #S-6725 (January 19, 2018), #S-7136 and 7137 (February 17-18, 2020), and #S-7143 (February 26, 2020).

** Another broadcast rule exclusive to ''Wheel'' is that it is only current daily syndicated program that does not offer a second daily airing at all (whether a different run like every other game show, or an encore of the same episode like talk shows and entertainment news shows). If you miss an episode on your local station and it is not made up, your only legal chance of seeing it again is if it shows up as a repeat the following summer, on a Saturday next season (if ''that'' doesn't get pre-empted by college football), or, even less likely, on streaming, and unlike ''Jeopardy!'', ''Wheel'' never posts full episodes on their [=YouTube=] channel, not even temporarily. Since there are only 65 weekday repeats and 52 weekend repeats a year, compared to a season's 195 episodes, several episodes only get to air one time. In TheNew20s, ''Jeopardy!'s'' second airing (known as ''Daytime Jeopardy!'' or ''Jeopardy! II'') is seeing more clearance as a replacement for ending LongRunners such as ''The Ellen [=DeGeneres=] Show'' and ''Series/DrPhil'', but affiliates are forced to find another program that isn't ''Wheel'' to pair it with; some have chosen another puzzle game show, ''Series/PeoplePuzzler''. Many fans view ''Daytime Jeopardy!'' as pointless since it is currently only a few weeks behind the main run, and for unknown reasons, CBS Media Ventures still refuses to offer an equivalent for ''Wheel''.

** Any time the Kansas City Chiefs make it to the Super Bowl (which they have done four times in the 2020s alone), local FOX affiliate WDAF-TV temporarily moves ''Wheel'' to a late-night slot for ''over a week'' consecutively in favor of specials hyping the big game, starting two Fridays prior.

*** For Season 3, the show remained on the Sunday lineup, still mostly during NFL season, and its success, along with ''Jeopardy!'''s AdoredByTheNetwork status at ABC, resulted in ''Celebrity Jeopardy!'' joining it as a standalone series. Keeping with the O&O's order of ''Jeopardy!'' before ''Wheel'', ''Celebrity Jeopardy!'' replaced ''Wheel'' in the 8:00 slot, sliding the latter to 9:00 and replacing ''Series/SupermarketSweep'' (which, like ''Wheel'', was originally Sundays at 8:00, but then slid to 9:00; it got cancelled soon after). Despite this, reruns of both series (and ''Jeopardy! Masters'' once the ''Celebrity'' episodes ran out) aired on Tuesdays during Spring and Summer 2023 with ''Wheel'' at 8:00 this time. By the second half of the season, ''Celebrity Jeopardy!'' moved to Thursdays, with ''Wheel'' briefly returning to the 8:00 slot, but the rest of the season, a mix of new episodes and reruns, aired inconsistently on various days at either 8:00 or 9:00, and the season finale did not air until May 2023, four months after the previous new episode (and only to cross-promote yet another ''Jeopardy!'' primetime event). Furthermore, while reruns were planned to air every Tuesday for the entire summer up until Season 4's premiere, the reruns ceased a month earlier than planned, with the rest of them being replaced with ''Celebrity Series/FamilyFeud'' reruns, despite the primetime ''Jeopardy!'' reruns continuing.
*** For Season 4, ABC's original plan was to put ''Wheel'' back in its original time slot of Thursdays at 8:00, followed by fellow laid-back game shows ''Series/PressYourLuck'' and ''[[Series/{{Pyramid}} The $100,000 Pyramid]]'' (a lineup previously used for a special night of holiday-themed game show episodes, and with all three having considerable fandom overlap). ''Jeopardy!'' was to be on Tuesdays paired with ''[[Series/TheBachelor Bachelor in Paradise]]''. However, ABC later decided to move all ''Bachelor'' series to Thursdays and move both ''Jeopardy!'' and ''Wheel'' to Wednesdays at 8:00 and 9:00, respectively (with ''Pyramid'' following them both at 10:00, and ''Press'' moving to Tuesdays at 10:00 with a delayed premiere), leaving ''Wheel'' once again "buried" by ''Jeopardy!'', which, by this point, has seen and will continue to see several more primetime specials on the network. ''Wheel's'' order was also reduced from 13 episodes to 10 for this season while ''Jeopardy!'''s was not. On October 11, 2023, ABC quickly produced a special edition of ''Series/TwentyTwenty'' on the Israel-Hamas war to air at 10:00. Rather than skip ''Pyramid'', the network decided to move that show to 9:00 and skip ''Wheel'', even though that week's episode had already aired the day prior in Canada, resulting in CTV needing to pull the show from its schedule the following week to allow ABC to catch up. The originally-planned ''Wheel/Press/Pyramid'' lineup did get one night on December 28, 2023, though all three were repeats. Once again, following the new year, ABC put the final handful of ''Wheel'' episodes in limbo while ''Jeopardy!'' consistently continued airing new episodes ''and'' saw marathons of repeats aired multiple times.

** There were plans for a tournament during Season 39. They were quietly abandoned after executive producer Mike Richards was fired. One was eventually held in Season 40's during WWE Week, which used the long-retired Friday Finals format.

** Any time the Kansas City Chiefs make it to the Super Bowl (which they have done three times in the 2020s alone), local FOX affiliate WDAF-TV temporarily moves ''Wheel'' to a late-night slot for ''over a week'' consecutively in favor of specials hyping the big game, starting two Fridays prior.

** From Season 19 through Season 34, ''Wheel'' did the occasional Southern-themed week. All of them fell victim to this while the week of March 20, 2017 (episodes #S-6751 through 6755), designated as Southern Charm week, was being reran. ''Wheel'' failed to notice an image on its video wall depicting African Americans in slave-era clothing that appeared behind Pat and Vanna during the closing segments. This was only pointed out in the middle of a rerun of the week in June 2017, likely due to the original airings of the last two episodes being pre-empted on CBS affiliates by March Madness. Because the controversy only erupted on Thursday evening, there was only enough time to pull the Friday episode, and it was done in a rather unconventional manner. Since weekday episodes are distributed to affiliates one weekday in advance, meaning they already had it, ''Wheel'' instructed its affiliates not to air #S-6755 and instead air the week's Saturday rerun (episode #S-6363 from March 2, 2016), already sent to them earlier in the week, on Friday ''and'' Saturday. The last-minute pull allegedly did not apply to Canada. No episodes from this week, or any other Southern-themed weeks have since appeared in reruns or on streaming, nor has the theme been done since. In all, the banned weeks include:

** The closing chat from February 25, 2022 (#S-7545) was about Vanna's cat Stella. At the time of the episode's taping, Stella had just celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Vanna said that Stella "could live for a lot longer", to which Pat takes as "more material" for the RunningGag of him getting her name wrong. On an episode later in the season, Vanna announced that Stella had passed away. Likely to avoid insensitivity, #S-7545 was barred from its scheduled weekend rerun.
** The February 16, 2023 episode (#S-7734, Sweethearts Week) was skipped in Singapore due to featuring a gay couple; Singaporean broadcast laws prohibit any depiction or mention of same-sex relationships on free television. The original airing of this episode was also suspiciously cut off shortly after the couple's interview on Huntsville, Alabama affiliate WAFF for coverage of a storm that was outside of the viewing area.

*** June 29-July 3, 2020: Originally scheduled as reruns of "Great Northwest" week (featuring Fan Favorite contestant Blair Davis), it was changed to reruns of "Great American Cities: South Florida" week instead, due to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests_in_Seattle ongoing anti-police protests happening in Seattle at the time]]. This also impacted the Summer 2020 reruns of all the Great American Cities weeks from Seasons 33-37; the one for Seattle was scheduled last, by which point the protests had ended. "Great Northwest" week later saw some episodes rerun in the 2020-21 weekend run, and the full week is available on Pluto TV.

** Starting in Season 35, winning the $10,000 Mystery Wedge resulted in a SPIN ID being drawn. On syndicated reruns, these are edited out usually seamlessly by cutting to alternate angles as Pat throws to commercial. Starting in Season 37, the drawings are now left intact on summer reruns (but are still edited out of weekend reruns if applicable). A couple of episodes from Seasons 33 and 34 that reran in Summer 2020 actually ''added'' a drawing, and a 2020 episode that omitted the drawing during its original airing (blaming COVID-19) restored it during a later rerun. On Pluto TV, the drawings are cut out and masked with a white flash.

** In Seasons 38 and 39, most Tuesday episodes featured several plugs for T-Mobile, including their logo added to the Toss-Up wipes. Although these remain intact during summer reruns, Saturday reruns of these seasons generally avoid including Tuesday episodes at all. There were two exceptions to the latter; in both cases, the episode was edited to remove all T-Mobile plugs by changing the Toss-Up wipes to the regular ones, removing the logo on the left side of the category strip, and removing the verbal mention of the brand from Pat when introducing the "T-Mobile Triple Toss-Up" (one rerun edited out the name, while the other used a different take, but still retained the name in the closed captioning). A few Tuesday episodes that did not have T-Mobile plugs to begin with also managed to appear in the rerun rotation.

** The ABC O&O's, all of which carry ''Wheel'' at 7:30/6:30 Central (with the exception of KTRK-TV in Houston, which does not carry ''Wheel'' due to opting for an hour-long 6:00 newscast), are fond of pre-empting ''Wheel'' (but never ''Jeopardy!'') with O&O-exclusive specials or events, the most of notorious of which is the CMA Awards' red carpet arrivals, which they began airing in 2019. When ''Wheel'' swapped out two travel-themed weeks for reruns at the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic (see DistancedFromCurrentEvents), all of the ABC O&O's pre-empted ''Wheel'' with the Mountain Time Zone feed of ''ABC World News Tonight'', despite airing only one hour after the East Coast feed in most cases. Although only reruns were affected, fans generally did not agree with this decision, as many considered the show a comforting distraction during the hard times. Two of the seven stations opted to restore ''Wheel'' for the second week. The Saturday reruns were not affected by this.

** When NBC has a sporting event that pre-empts ''Wheel's'' time slot, Rhinelander, Wisconson affiliate WJFW-TV will often still air ''Wheel'' and their 6:00 newscast, and bump that hour of network sports coverage to their subchannel. Notably, WJFW was the only "Big Four" network affiliate east of the Mountain Time Zone to air the Black Friday 2023 episode at its normal time, on its normal station, and in its entirety. In addition, when many NBC affiliates refused to air the ''Series/ThirtyRock'' reunion special due to potentially driving away linear television viewers by promoting Peacock, WJFW pre-empted it with additional airings of ''Jeopardy!'' and ''Wheel''. It was the only NBC affiliate to fill its slot with either game show (it is not known whether they re-aired the same day's episodes or if they aired another day's episodes); most others filled it with local specials, infomercials, or sitcom reruns.