Game Show Blog: Edition #2

Happy October, folks. As promised, today's edition of my game show blog talks about Wheel of Fortune. As a lot of you know, Wheel of Fortune recently began Season number 28 on the air in syndication, and Pat Sajak and Vanna White are still there. I don't think they'll be going away anytime soon. Anyway, for those of you who have missed the new episodes, the season began by airing two weeks of shows from Vegas. There's still four more weeks of Vegas shows that were taped as well, but those will air later in the season. This week was the first Culver City week of the season and the set looks exactly the same as last season. Of course, there have been some minor changes on the show this year. One of those is that $25,000 is no longer available as a bonus round prize. $30,000 is the new cash minimum for the bonus round. As well, if you win a car in the bonus round, you get an extra $5,000 in cash to go with it. That's a pretty sweet deal if you ask me. Another change is the introduction of two new puzzle categories. One of those is What's That Song?, in which the puzzle is lyrics to a popular song, and the contestant who solves the puzzle correctly can then win another $3,000 in cash for correctly identifying which song those lyrics are from. Now when I first heard about this category, I thought that would mean retiring the Song Lyrics category since that's essentially the same thing as What's That Song?, but without the bonus question attached to it; yet it's still there, which I find odd because I don't think you need to have two categories that serve essentially the same purpose. But I digress. The other new category is Same Letter, in which every word in the puzzle begins with the same letter of the alphabet. Easy enough to understand. And we also had some history on the show this week. On both the Wednesday and Thursday shows this week, the winning contestant ended up taking the Million Dollar Wedge with them to the bonus round. This is the first time since the MDW's inception in 2008 that this has happened. And as you will recall, 2008 also saw the first and only million dollar winner on the show to date. I hope we have another million dollar winner this season or next. Well, that will conclude this blog. Next time out, I will be taking a look at America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy. See you all then.