Lingo / YMMV - TV Tropes

Accidental Innuendo: Several.
- Shandi: "The ladies have experience with pulling balls."
- Chuck, after the word was SPANK: "[The crew is] always spanking something over there—whoa."
- Shandi: "Okay, guys, let's have a look at your balls."
Adaptation Displacement: The 1987-88 version has become long since forgotten by anyone except hardcore game show fans. Didn't help that it 1) ran just 26 weeks during a single season, 2) was pulled from most stations after 13 weeks, 3) had major problems with paying out to its winners, and 4) overhauled its on-camera personnel for the last five weeks.
Awesome Music:
- The American theme used from season 3 onward.
- All the Dutch themes also qualify. The first (from 1989-2000) was an excerpt of Network Music Ensemble’s aptly-titled “Awesome”, and the second theme (from 2000-2010) was used in the US from 2002-2003. The third theme (from 2010-2014) is gloriously brassy and just screams "we're gonna have a good time."
Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
- The Dutch version of the show was very popular, having aired continuously from 1989 to 2014 (and only ending because of a ratings drop after a Channel Hop), and was brought back in 2019. After its early success, the producers of the Dutch version, IDTV (who is also known for Wie is de Mol?) wound up buying out the rights to the format from Ralph Andrews Productions, and began selling its version of the show to other countries.
- The French version Motus proved popular enough that it continuously aired from 1990 to 2019, only ending after the host's departure from TV.
Older Than They Think: When Wordle became a viral sensation at the start of 2022, many people pointed out that its premise was almost identical to Lingo, and Lingo got a bit of a Colbert Bump out of it — enough to prompt CBS to order a primetime revival.
Replacement Scrappy:
- Compared to Season 3's Stacey, Shandi wasn't exactly the most believable smart gal. She got better, though. And she has a BA in psychology and a masters in counseling, can play the violin and piano, is multi-lingual, has authored children's books, paints, and has done scholarly research on androgyny.
- Bill Engvall is seen as this by some.
Retroactive Recognition: An odd example. Rielle Hunter, who would later become infamous as Sen. John Edwards' mistress, was a contestant on the Woolery version. Once people realized that, the jokes began flying.
So Bad, It's Good: The first Woolery season, taped in the Netherlands on that version's set, had a tendency toward very dumb contestants and insanely-low production values (Chuck's bonus round spiel was mostly pre-recorded, the show very obviously used an applause machine, etc.).
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Oy.
- The 1980s version changed its No Lingo payout structure so that it was determined by the kind of Lingo that won the front game: a horizontal or vertical led to $16,000, a diagonal led to $32,000, and a Double Lingo (two lines completed simultaneously) led to $64,000. Still later, they bizarrely covered up the No Lingo score display with artwork of the show's logo.
- Many fans of the genre hated the fact that the GSN version didn't straddle games and kept changing its set, theme music, etc. The set changes were somewhat justified in that Season 1 was the only one filmed in the Netherlands, and the lack of straddling was justified in how heavily GSN reruns the series.
- The Engvall version has generated a mixed reaction from fans, and that's putting it VERY mildly. The primary issues were that the clues were designed to lead to raunchy guesses a la Steve Harvey's Family Feud (on top of being completely unnecessary), the fact the bonus round didn't use a Lingo board (essentially relegating the Lingo boards to tertiary status), and the fact the endgame offered far more than the Woolery era ever did for far less work (solve five words, get $100,000). The latter was also derided because it suggested the show was going out of its way to not get good contestants: teams would usually only solve maybe three words in the Engvall bonus round, whereas Woolery-era teams would clear five words pretty regularly. Whereas the Woolery endgame had winners with some frequency, the Engvall one had about two full wins.
- The 2021 UK revival has faced criticism from fans more familiar with the original format, for removing all of the bingo mechanics from the game altogether, resulting in a show that only consists of various forms of word guessing without the variety and punctuation added by them, as well as rendering the "Lingo" name an Artifact Title. An Italian revival based on this version did reinstate a version of the GSN era's original bonus round. Though some fans are fine with the bingo elements being removed. The 2023 US revival faced a similar reaction prior to its premiere, due to the high likelihood of its format being based on the aforementioned UK version (it, ultimately, uses a revised variant of the UK format).

YMMV / Lingo

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