Among the treasures in The Strong Museum’s National Archives of Game Show History is the original flip-dot display used on Family Feud when it made its debut in 1976. So what’s the story behind the sign?
It all starts with Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the undisputed kings of TV game shows. Their success started in 1946 with programs including What’s My Line? and their influence continues on television today. One of their shows, Match Game, enjoyed a successful run from 1962 to 1969 and returned in 1973 incorporating a newly-added bonus game, the “Super Match.”
“Super Match” earned television’s greatest mark of success—a spinoff in the form of the 1976 game show Family Feud. After testing as a single-player game and as a game for celebrity and civilian pairs, the Family Feud format evolved to feature a competition between two five-player teams comprised of family members related by blood or marriage. Where the Match Game bonus round rewarded contestants for guessing any of a recent studio audience’s top three responses to a fill-in question, Family Feud gave players the opportunity to offer responses to questions in the hope of matching any of numerous answers given by participants in a random sample of Americans. The most-popular responses garnered the highest point values for the contestants.
The most engaging element of Family Feud created the greatest production challenge. The Fast Money round posed five questions such as “Name something you take with you to the beach.” With players able to give any answer, popular or not, logical or not, there needed to be a way to instantly display any and all of their possible responses to the multiple open-ended questions. Pre-printed art cards couldn’t work for displaying responses as they had on Match Game, as there were answers to multiple questions to keep track of, and the contestants’ answers would be thoroughly unpredictable. Hand-written or typewritten notations created in real time on-set were judged to be antiquated as well as impractical, as they were unreadable from halfway across the stage. Other similar methods for visually recording responses were discarded for their lack of impact for the home audience. After research into the state-of-the-art in display and exhibition, a Canadian company was identified for a magnetic flip-dot signage system patented in 1964, and Ferranti-Packard of Ontario sold the first such display to the Montreal Stock Exchange for $700,000 (equivalent to more than $6 million today.) The unit was extraordinarily expensive because of the intricacy of the flip-dot components that required manual construction—hundreds of electromagnets which, when energized, switched the field in either the positive or negative direction. And when the direction changes, the dot flipped.
A decade later, the mechanics for flip-dot displays were being perfected and Goodson-Todman was among the early customers when they ordered one of the largest such units built to date, at a cost far in excess of any display system ever utilized on a television show. Although significantly advanced from the units marketed ten years earlier, the Family Feud board still proved to be susceptible to extremes of humidity, so care was taken on-set to maintain a constant airflow around the unit. With that accommodation, the big board operated reliably through long consecutive days of production.
Modules of the display were each capable of displaying 10 alphanumeric characters utilizing 35 flip-discs for each character. The Family Feud board consisted of 24 modules in a 6 by 4 array, capable of displaying eight lines of text, each 30 characters long, for a total of 240 characters comprised of 8,400 flip discs. The technology proved to serve Family Feud’s production needs perfectly. The ability to easily program words on a QWERTY keyboard that could be revealed instantaneously, on demand, with a kinetic flourish just seconds later, in bright contrast capable of registering on television cameras with high impact, earned the massive unit a place of great prominence, center stage on every Family Feud episode between 1976 and 1995. The Ferranti-Packard display also attained iconic status over the course of decades through its subsequent use on foreign versions of the TV series in as many as 80 countries.
Now, decades later, this signature piece of technology has come to The Strong Museum through a generous donation from game show veteran Randy West. But we quickly recognized that the signature sign would have limited use if it couldn’t be brought back to operational status. What to do? Fortunately, as in so many parts of life, the solution was all in who you know. Fortunately, we were able to connect with Corey Cooper, the wizard behind game mechanics for multiple shows over the years, including Big Brother most recently. In December 2023, Corey made the trip from sunny Los Angeles to chilly Rochester and applied his insights and troubleshooting experience to the matter. As Corey explained on Facebook:
Spent a week getting this old Lady up and running again, after many years of neglect. Thanks to Randy West for donating it and Bob Boden for introducing both of us to the National Archives of Game Show History at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.
I originally created software on an Apple] [+ computer to run this lady’s older brother in ’82 or ’83, and then I did the software to run this one on an IBM AT computer in ’88 for the “Ray Combes version.” I worked from that software to figure out the protocol again, since we had the hardware manuals but not the software manual anymore (I had the hardware manuals, and was undoubtedly the one who lost the software manual).
I was pleasantly surprised that she came to life as soon as we hooked her up and gave her power. The Museum staff had it all set up for me when I arrived, and dealt with the tedium of all the missing and not-working dots, and she is now in their excellent hands!
With some physical care and technological ingenuity from Cooper and members of the museum’s Conservation and Exhibits team, the historic Family Feud digital signboard is now back in working condition and waiting safely in the wings to return to public visibility when The Strong opens its major exhibit on game show history in 2027. Survey says, the sign’s going to be a hit!