Snap Judgment


Aired
NBC Daytime, Monday April 3, 1967 – Friday, March 28, 1969
Run time
25 Minutes
Host
Ed McMahon
Announcers
Johnny Olson
Origination
NBC Studio 8H, New York City, New York

Snap Judgment was a word association game with a structure similar to Password.

Game format[]

Format #1[]

The original format featured a word-association game played by two teams consisting of a contestant and a celebrity. Contestants completed their associations before the start of the show and their celebrity teammates had three tries to guess the association based on the clue word provided by McMahon. A correct guess won $10, while no correct identification allowed the other team to get the $10 by guessing correctly with one try. If both teams failed to guess correctly, the contestant would reveal the first letter of the association and each celebrity had one shot at guessing the association. The first team to score $100 won the game and played a bonus round called "The Big 5".

With the contestant offstage in a soundproof room, the celebrity teammate was asked to come up with five associations to a clue word provided by the host, then designate one of those five as a bonus word, the one his or her teammate was most likely to say. The contestant would then return and have 20 seconds to come up with all five associations for $50 each.

Initially, the contestant merely had to say the bonus word in order to double the team's winnings. To provide a greater degree of difficulty, a new rule was added requiring the contestant to guess the bonus word to double the team's winnings. For the second game on the same show, the celebrities switched teams.

Format #2[]

On December 23, 1968 the game format & set was changed to one virtually identical to Password, which had been cancelled by CBS over a year earlier. In the new format, the objective was to guess a word from one-word clues with a point structure identical to that of Password (10 points were awarded for guessing the password on the first clue, nine points on the second clue, eight points on the third clue, etc.) After the fifth word, point values doubled.

The first team to reach 25 points won $100 and played a reformatted "Big 5", played similarly to Password's Lightning Round, only with 30 seconds to guess five words at $100 each.

There were no returning champions in either format. Each show featured two new contestants.

Personnel[]

Host: Ed McMahon
Sub-Host: Gene Rayburn (September 16-20, 1968)
Announcer: Johnny Olson
Executive Producer: Robert Noah
Producer: Ira Skutch
Director: Franklin Heller
Set Designer: Frank Skinner

Trivia[]

Theme music:

1st Main - "Window Shopping" by Bob Cobert (Recycled from The Price is Right) (April 3-September 1, 1967).
2nd Main - "Snap Judgment" by Score Productions (September 4, 1967-March 28, 1969).