CSotD: The Brilliant Minds of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman
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I'm not going to champion cartoons that you have to be 60 years old to get, except when they crack me up, as was the case with "The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee" this morning. Anyway, I'm pretty sure John Hambrock isn't old enough to have many memories of "Beat the Clock."
Although, if he is just barely old enough to have caught the very tail end of the show, he could answer the question that has bedeviled those of us who watched it whenever we were skipping school sick, which is, did anybody ever succeed in rolling the tennis ball up the ramp and having it stop on top of the block?
Given that the median age in this country is about 35, I should explain: "Beat the Clock" had a final contest each show for whatever the big prize was. (In those post-scandal days, it wasn't much. Probably a refrigerator or something.) They would have contestants try this until one of them accomplished it, and then, the next show, they'd have a new one.
Except that nobody could ever get the ball to roll up the ramp and stop on top of the block. And they never, as far as I know, just threw up their hands, declared it impossible and started a new big final contest. I have no idea if they had tested it before they rolled it out, but I know that, every time you'd watch the show, they'd come up to the end and they'd still have the block and ramp and tennis ball and the contestant would have 30 seconds and … it wouldn't happen.
And Bud Collyer isn't around to ask, which is hardly surprising, since he'd be 102 if he were.
(And, in looking his age up, I discovered that "Beat the Clock" ended in 1961 but was resurrected eight years later and ran until 1980, and then came back a couple of more times like Glenn Close rising out of the bathtub, which lets John off the hook for catering to us old folks. Nothing in Wikipedia about the tennis ball, but that article is pretty interesting, considering how dumb the show was.)
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