Game Shows
It is not surprising that the game show has been one of the most enduring mass media formats. Combining entertainment and competition, celebrities and ordinary people, populism and the promise of instant success, game shows have tapped into elemental parts of the collective American psyche. America's most acute "quiz mania" occurred during the decades from the 1930s until the mid-1950s as a new incarnation of the American dream in which ordinary people, through luck and pluck, could rise from rags to riches overnight.
One of the first quiz programs appeared fairly early in radio's history. To increase its readership, Time magazine aired current events quizzes over the radio with The Pop Question Game, which lasted from 1923 to 1926. Other early radio contests of the 1920s included The Brunswick Hour Musical Memory Contest, The Radio
Digest, Do You Know, and Ask Me Another. The Depression years also encouraged Americans' interest in game shows and quiz contests. Because listening to the radio was still free in an era of tight budgets and unemployment, people flocked to their sets for diversion. Local movie theaters picked up on the game craze by offering bingo games and bank nights to lure people in with the promise of affordable entertainment and the possibility of winning prize money.
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