Mindreaders
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- For other uses, see Mindreader.
Mindreaders was a game show produced by Goodson-Todman Productions which aired on NBC from August 13, 1979 - January 11, 1980. The host was Dick Martin and the announcer was Johnny Olson.
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[edit] The Main Game
A team of four men plays against a team of four women. Each team consists of three civilian contestants and a celebrity captain. Host Dick Martin reads a question to the three civilian contestants on one team. Each player locks in an answer. One by one the celebrity captain predicts how each of his/her teammates answered. A correct prediction keeps that team in control and play moves to the next player in line. If the celebrity is incorrect, the celebrity captain of the opposing team gets to predict his/her teammates' responses to the next question. Each correct answer is worth $50 and the first team to reach $300 wins the game and goes on to play the end game.
[edit] The End Game
In the end game, the winning team faces 10 randomly selected members of the studio audience who comprise a jury. Each civilian member of the winning team must predict how the jury answered three questions (one player per question). After each question is read, the jury locks in their answers, and the player guesses how many of them answered yes or no. Guessing the number right on the nose wins $500 for the team. Missing the number by one or two higher or lower pays $200. After the three questions, the winning team plays a round called “Celebrity Turnabout”, so called because the tables have turned. Now the civilian players predict how the celebrity captain will answer one last question. Each player makes a guess with the majority rule in effect. The celebrity captain reveals his/her answer, and if the majority of the team is correct, the civilians win 10 times the amount earned in the first half of the bonus game for a maximum total of $15,000.
[edit] Notes
- Although NBC originally agreed to a 26-week run, the network canceled Mindreaders after 22 weeks.
- Teams competed against each other for 3 consecutive games, after which they both retired.
- The sound signifying that the jury locked in their answers was later used as the solo player buzz-in sound on the Bill Cullen version of Blockbusters.
- The show's theme music is a slightly re-arranged version of a commercial cue from the short-lived 1979 game show, Celebrity Charades.
- A pilot produced for CBS in 1975, also called "Mindreaders", was hosted by Jack Clark and featured a different format: contestants predicted the majority response to a hypothetical question asked of the entire audience (a similar format was used as the main game of the 1981-82 series, Pitfall). Details on the second pilot attempt, produced 4 years later, can be found via the supplied link below.
- Despite the fact that two episodes from the original NBC broadcasts are on the tape trading circuit, this game show has never been rerun on GSN. Whether the complete series is intact or has been destroyed is not known.
- Part of the end game was later used in the final year of the Goodson Productions 1986-89 revival of Card Sharks, which Mindreaders producer Mimi O'Brien also worked on.
