By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
With host Pat Sajak’s departure from Wheel of Fortune after more than 40 years as host, one can’t help but reflect on the impact that Wheel of Fortune has left on popular culture. The average American knows how the game is played, whether they watch it or not. Our language itself has been influenced by the show. The consistency and simplicity of the game has led to many familiar phrases…
“I’d like to buy a vowel.”
“I’d like to solve the puzzle.”
“For $154, I’d like the ceramic dalmatian.”
Wait…what?
If you’re a loooooooong-time Wheel Watcher (or if you’re a younger watcher who’s discovering the earlier years of the show on the Wheel of Fortune channel on Pluto TV), maybe you remember the quirky charm of an era where contestants solved the puzzle and then promptly spent all their money at a lavishly decorated onstage boutique.
Talk show host Merv Griffin had shown a knack for developing games. His venerable Jeopardy! was starting its 10th year in 1973, but NBC’s head of daytime, Lin Bolen, felt that the show looked old and made it known that she wanted to be rid of it. Griffin shrewdly negotiated a stipulation in his contract for Jeopardy! stating that he could create the show that replaced it, if and when it was cancelled. Griffin came up with Wheel of Fortune, attributing it to two childhood memories—he and his sister would play Hangman with pencil and paper to pass the time in the backseat on long car trips; and he was enamored by a large spinning wheel he had seen in a carnival game. He developed a game where contestants solved Hangman puzzles, with a spinning wheel determining the value of the letters they called.
Bolen liked the idea well enough, but she had an idea of her own for a game show and wanted to infuse it into Griffin’s pitch. Bolen wanted to see a game show where contestants went shopping. When Griffin described the game to her, Bolen surprised him by saying that there should be prizes all over the stage, and contestants should use the money that they won to buy prizes. Griffin, recounting the story, implied that he was rather cool to the idea, but he wanted to get the show on the air, so he agreed to it, and in fact, Bolen’s idea for shopping became so intrinsic to the game that the original pilot was titled Shopper’s Bazaar.
Wheel of Fortune premiered on NBC in January of 1975, and for the next 14+ years, the contestant who solved the puzzle would take their prizes to one of a rotating series of boutiques—the Living Room, the Cozy Kitchen, the Kid’s Bedroom, the Outdoor Center, etc., with an array of thematically-appropriate prizes available. Contestants were allowed to buy whatever they could afford and had the option to stop shopping and save their money for the next round, in hopes of building it up so they could buy something even more expensive. That was called “putting the money on account.” Because of the risk involved (the money that went unspent could be lost on a Bankrupt, and if the contestant didn’t solve a puzzle for the rest of the show, the money simply went away), contestants typically opted to spend all of the money that they could, and when the few dollars they had left couldn’t buy anything onstage, the show would put it on a catalog gift certificate.
Many of the prizes were standard game show fare; cars, trips, furniture, appliances…but shopping got interesting once the contestant got down to about $300 or so that they still had to spend. Scattered around the stage were a variety of low-end prizes available for contestants to use up their funds—an end table shaped like an elephant; an onyx waste basket; a gold-plated towel rack; a Gucci calculator; a toy robot; a gigantic Toblerone bar; a hand-painted milk can; a silver picture frame; bookends depicting Atlas holding up the world; a 1930s-style telephone; a brass duck…
Of all the oddball prizes that contestants snapped up during those years, the one that unexpectedly became a star of Wheel of Fortune was a ceramic dalmatian. The apocryphal story (the author of this article could not verify this) is that Sheldon Linke, a prize coordinator in charge of rounding up goodies for NBC’s game shows, had seen a ceramic dalmatian and was so enamored with it that he placed a massive bulk order; so many that the show simply had to keep offering it to use up the stock. People came to love the ceramic dalmatian, and it became something of an unofficial mascot for the show. The studio audience would applaud when a contestant opted to buy it. Sometimes, a contestant armed with, say, $3,500 worth of spending money, would make it a point to buy the ceramic dalmatian first and then move onto the furniture and vacations.
By 1987, shopping began to fade away from Wheel of Fortune. A special “Big Month of Cash,” in which contestants simply got the cash for solving the puzzles in lieu of shopping, proved to be wildly popular. People watch game shows to play along, and with Wheel of Fortune, that means solving the puzzle at home. The time saved by omitting shopping allowed the show to cram one or two extra puzzles into each episode.
Besides that, even the people who made the show weren’t particularly fond of shopping—Sajak bluntly referred to the shopping segments as “the longest two minutes on television.” Contestants who had to spend thousands of dollars on the spot weren’t prepared to do so and would silently stare at the prizes for long periods of time. Sometimes, a contestant simply wasn’t interested in the prizes available to them for that round, and the shopping came across more like a chore than a treat. The show’s announcer had a short script to read for each prize purchased, which often led to tedious segments in which viewers just had to sit and listen to five or more prizes being described. No game was happening. And besides, the idea for shopping had been foisted on them by an executive who had long since left the network and no longer wielded any power over the show.
After 1989, shopping was entirely gone, but the ceramic dalmatian has enjoyed a cheeky legacy; it would still appear whenever the show did retrospective specials. In 2007, employees of the show were given miniature ceramic dalmatians for Christmas. And even today, in 2024, 35 years after the last time a contestant went shopping, a ceramic dalmatian preserved in a glass case sits at the studio entrance for Wheel of Fortune.