"Classic" Press Your Luck

Note: The guide is updated to 9/26/86 (still with some spaces missing).  If the episode's background is navy blue, then that means it is in my collection.

Current number of episodes in my PYL Tape Collection: 459 + PILOT (on 45 tapes)

Go to Jason Hernandez's site for another awesome episode guide!  His guide got mine started!

(Jason Hernandez's PYL site gets credit for this picture)

The Big Board: lots of cash, prizes, and whammies.

• Before the likes of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, there was a popular game show that people now in their 20's and 30's remember vividly.

• From September 19, 1983 until September 26, 1986, the game show Press Your Luck aired on CBS.  Even after its cancellation, the USA network continued to run reruns of the show until 1995.  Today, PYL is on GSN, being shown to the people that knew the game so well and to those that have never heard of it.

• I still remember watching the reruns of PYL on USA.  Very entertaining stuff, for those that like game shows, that is.

• PYL was a spin-off of the game show Second Chance, hosted by Jim Peck.  Basically, PYL had two rounds.  Players answered questions to get spins.  Those spins gave the players a chance to rack up loads of cash and prizes.  However, there were little critters called "whammies" that took away all the goodies whenever a player hit it.  Four whammies put the player out of the game.  The player with the most money after the two rounds won the game and got to keep the cash and prizes earned.

What the players do NOT want: I introduce you to the Whammy.  There are about 80 different whammy animations and about 10 different designs (one of which is shown here), but they all do the same thing - take away all your cash and prizes when you stop on it.

The whammy picture came from here.

Some links: