Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck

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Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck (also known as Whammy!) is an updated version of the American television game show Press Your Luck. It has aired on the Game Show Network since April 15, 2002; though the show is no longer in production, reruns can still be seen. Todd Newton hosted the show, with Gary Kroeger announcing.

Gameplay remained largely the same, and the Whammy took away the winnings of any contestant who lands on it. However, there were some differences between the two shows.

Whammy! added an extra round at the start of the game. In the first round, contestants started at the game board. Play passed repeatedly down the line of contestants, each taking one spin, for an unlimited number of rounds. This went on until each contestant had either landed on a Whammy, or chosen to stop by "freezing". Each contestant was given $1,000 to start the show (in early episodes they started at $0). Play started with four Whammies on the board and after each round through the contestants, four more are added.

The show then had the two rounds the original show had with a few tweaks. A series of five questions were asked, up from four originally, and the maximum number of spins a contestant could earn was 15 as opposed to 12 in the original. Round three was dubbed the "Big Board Round". In addition to the original Whammies, there were Double Whammies which simply added a physical element (such as confetti) to the animated Whammy character.

The largest cash amounts remained $1,500 in Round 1 and $5,000 + a spin in Round 2. The board still featured a BIG BUCKS square which advanced the player to the biggest cash square on the board.

Unlike the original series, champions did not get to return for another show. However, if one, two or all three contestants ended the show with $0 and less than four Whammies, they might participate again in a future show.

In line with technological changes, The Whammies were animated in 3-D, and the physical Whammy indicators that poped up in front of the contestants were also 3-D.

During the second round, the dollar amounts and prizes shown on the squares are rotated in a much different fashion. Rather than all the squares' contents at the same time, they changed six squares at a time, thereby making the second round a bit harder by providing the illusion that the board was moving faster than it actually was (each individual square changed at the same rate as in Round 1), something that the classic series never did (except in the case of a minor malfunction).

A new feature called the "Big Bank" was added for the show's second season in 2003. The "Big Bank" always begins with $3,000, and the money and prizes that contestants lose after a Whammy is hit are added into the bank. If a player hits the "Big Bank" square, the host asks a general-knowledge trivia question to the contestant, who collects the money in the bank if the question is answered correctly (referred to by Newton as "whammying the Whammy").

On some early episodes, a GEM Car was available as a prize. However, it was extremely difficult to win, as a contestant had to hit a special "GEM" space in Round 1, then hit a special "CAR" space in Round 2, then win the game, all without hitting a Whammy. Later in the show's run, the same two-space mechanic was used for other special prizes, such as other cars (where the two special spaces showed the front and back halves of a key). The addition of the "Big Bank" had the side effect of making special prizes slightly easier to win, since if a contestant collected one or both 'halves' of the prize and then Whammied, the special prize pieces collected would go into the Big Bank, and could be retrieved by a player who hit the "Big Bank" square and answered the question correctly.

[edit] Trivia

Original Press Your Luck host Peter Tomarken hosted 1 1/2 episodes of this version. One was an unaired pilot (2 pilots were shot, one with Tomarken and one with Newton), and the half-episode was when Tomarken came back as host for the question round of the special episode which pitted the brother of Michael Larson against Larson's original opponents from 1984 from what had been since dubbed the "Larson Incident" on the original Press Your Luck.
Fans of the show are known as the "Whammy Army"
While the game was in development, its codename was "Project NPYL" (also called "Project Nipple").
The April Fool's Day episode of the series featured Graham Elwood of Cram as host (Todd did make an appearance doing the Double Whammy bits).
Skyler Stone, the host of Con on Comedy Central, was a contestant on the first episode to air on April 15, 2002. Stone was also invited back for a special episode that originally aired on July 21, 2003.
Sandy Fox, now a voice actress, won a grand total of $11,337 on one episode. She competed on, but did not win, the finals show of the Tournament of Champions at the end of the second season.
The set pieces were recycled from the 2001 revival of the game show Card Sharks.
Unlike the original Press Your Luck, Whammy! generates random prizes and Whammies for each space on the Big Board using a run-of-the-mill personal computer, running at a speed of 200 MHz, as well as an infinite number of patterns for game play.
GSN ranked Whammy! #38 in its list of the 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time.