We’re (I am a) modern and hip kids (kid) on Bother’s Bar, just like that Channel 4. So here’s a post about a show I bloody loved when growing up, Glücksrad aka Wheel of Fortune in German, possibly my favourite version of all time mainly because of the styling and crucially, Klaus-Peter Sattler’s music. The best bit about having satellite and cable as a 10 year old wasn’t the obvious stuff, it was the foreign channels and seeing the way our international friends made shows which basically forms one of the key backbones of the Bar. You don’t need to know the language, you can work things out with observation. A bit like life, really.
It’s all rather more homogenous these days which is a shame. But anyway.
The German show had a unique round (the Super-spiel) between the maingame and the winner’s bonus round. The three contestants worked as a team to solve a sort of crossword puzzle, they’d have 90 seconds to do it with each person being effective team captain for thirty seconds each. If they won, they split a progressive jackpot between them.
You will like it if you like words of exactly four and up to 13 letters in length.
But which version had the best clock music?
Is it this one? This was filmed in 1992 and is a charity edition with Angela Merkel. As it’s for charity it’s played by slightly different, cheaty rules but features extra comedy running around from Maren Gilzer:
Or is it this one, different studio but a reinterpreted version of the original tune (about 1:40) in?
Or is it in fact this one, an intriguing BACKWARDS version of the familiar tune? This game has a comedy ending.
It’s the second one.
Totally agree about the foreign gameshows Brig…a big favorite in our house was the Dutch version of the Price is Right…something like ‘Prizenslag’, with a top geezer called Hans Kazan…legend!
I remember Prizenslag!
Here’s some Prijzenslag from 1994:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47vJlRGB-fM
I was sure Hans Kazan’s hair was more ginger. I was also amused at the time (I was 10) at the hurdy-gurdy language used, which turned out to be Dutch.
Ha, amazing, Hans Kazan is basically the Dutch Paul Daniels.
Watching Miljoenenjacht on live stream in 2006 convinced me that Dutch was a dialect of German designed by committee to be impossible to sing in.
This may have been reinforced by the appalling quality of “singer” I heard on Talpa adverts and/or the Postcodelotterij inserts. Then I found a Marco Borsato CD in the bargain bin on campus…
Speaking of which, would you like a Greek Supermarket Sweep with an obnoxious red watermark in the middle the whole time?
I think they filmed this at an actual supermarket, like the original 60’s US version…the watermark is a pain though.
I didn’t even know they HAD Spar stores in Greece!
You’ll be surprised what stores you can find in European countries. Holland and some European countries still has C&A.
I remember on holiday in Cyprus in 2010 seeing really bright and modern Next and Early Learning Centre stores on the dusty roads. It didn’t look right at all, haha.
i read ‘obnoxious red watermelon’ when i read that first time. i think its getting late.
Agreed that the middle one has the best music, but anything with a dumping o’ moderately large balls has refeeming features, particularly when there’s lots of kids in the firing line who are remarkably unbothered about their plight.
Yep, deliberately chose that clip because of that (they always dumped the balls if they won regardless if there were children there or not).
What is it with 90’s German entertainment shows and kids?
Allow me to throw another log on the fire, and pull up a chair..
Back in the day, blinking into the gloom of a tv in a darkened hospital radio studio opposite the Black Country Museum, broadcasting to the sick and inferm (oh yes, I found my demographic very early on in my radio presenting life) we had an old stylee Astra dish, when you could get all the Das Erste regional German state tv broadcasters.
For some reason, they all used to do a sprawling 2 hour live OB on a Sunday morning (yes, I was far too good to be put on weeknights) and the Sunday before Christmas 1993, MDR thought it a great idea to do an OB from the grounds of a garden centre. Even better, a bus load of children from the local primary school were brought in to end the show with a rousing version of Silent Night.
However, some klutz at the production meeting, also thought it a great idea to have Santa go through the ranks of kids singing handing out presents as they sang. End result. A very slow and disjointed end to the show, as the assembled tribe from the kindergarden opened the pressies instead of singing the carol. I don’t think we even heard the start of the second verse. Quality idea.
Speaking of Glucksrad, I didn’t know they had a children’s version (notice the similarities).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMCuOrUZKd0&feature=related