Wheel Of Fortune 1975

Wheel of Fortune has been on the air since 1975, making it one of the longest-running game shows on television, but even long-time fans might be surprised at just how the show is taped (via How Stuff Works).

According to Radio.com, the team manages to shoot an entire month's worth of shows in just four days (specifically every other Thursday and Friday) by taping six shows each day. In fact, one episode takes just thirty minutes to film, thanks to the digitization of the puzzle board. Before 1997, when the board was analog, it took almost an hour to tape, just because the board needed to be manually reset so often.

Wheel Of Fortune (January 6, 1975) NBC Premiere (All Avalible Footage) 3 weeks ago Comedyfan74 Upload, livestream, and create your own videos, all in HD. Play games, enter to win cash and prizes, apply to be a contestant and get to know Pat and Vanna. Official Wheel of Fortune website. Wheel of Fortune. Pat Sajak Vanna White (1975-) Contestants guess hidden phrases by guessing letters one at a time. Contestants win money or prizes, as determined.

Yet, somehow, despite the rushed filming schedule, the show has time to replay certain rounds if they don't like the first take (via Buzzfeed). According to one former contestant, 'They basically film a whole week's worth of shows in a day, and sometimes repeat rounds if it didn't go 'right' the first time.' In fact, contestants are rigorously coached on how to act, how to call out letters, and even how to spin the wheel (via The Week). If this shocks you, there are a few more things you should probably know as Wheel of Fortune returns for its 38th season (via Today).

More secrets about Wheel of Fortune

While Wheel of Fortune uses some tricks to its advantage, like making the 6-foot diameter wheel look bigger with the angle of the camera, most everything else about the wheel is actually real, not rigged (via Awesome Jelly). Some fans used to believe there was a foot pedal under host Pat Sajak's desk allowing him to control the speed of the spin or where it landed, since they noticed the wheel never stopped on 'bankrupt' or 'lose a spin' during the final spin. The truth is, it does occasionally land on those spots, but it's edited out for the sake of time. The wheel itself is not rigged.

Of course, this isn't the only way that the show is streamlined to save time. For example, to avoid contestants repeating previous incorrect guesses, there's a screen facing them showing those letters, but that's not the only secret screen. The host has one facing him that shows how many of a correctly-guessed letter there are in the puzzle (via ABC News). Before the screens took over, it was the job of a 'finger boy' (i.e. member of production staff) to signal that number to Sajak with their fingers. With so many sneaky time-savers, it's no wonder they're able to shoot so many shows in so few days.

This large-scale graphic print series represents the casino wheel designs from the popular American television gameshow Wheel of Fortune which first aired in 1975. The work consists of progressively more complicated graphic designs from every 10 years of the shows syndication. These are digitally created by the artist via vector graphics programs and printed in archival inks on wall-sized cotton rag photographic papers. Wheel of Fortune (1975-) serves as a memorial record of the inflationary character of the U.S. and Global economies over the course of the show’s syndication and the years of the artist’s lifetime.

*The new 2020 Wheel of Fortune Limited Print Edition is now available in our online Editions Gallery

1975 Daytime Wheel, Round 1. Vector-based Graphics, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

1985 Daytime Wheel, Round 2. Vector-based Graphics, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

1995 Daytime Wheel, Round 2. Vector-based Graphics, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

2005 Daytime Wheel, Round 2. Vector-based Graphics, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

2015 Daytime Wheel, Round 1. Vector-based Graphics, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

2020 Daytime Wheel, Round 1. Vector-based Graphics, Archival Pigment on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

Daytime Wheels 2005 & 2015. / Courtesy of Brugge Triennial, Belgium.
Archival Pigment Prints on Cotton Rag Paper, 111 x 111 cm, Edition of 5 / AP 1

On Craig Havens’ Wheel of Fortune: Representing Capitalist Realism
By ​David Evans

The idea of a communist transcendence of capitalism traversed most of the 20th Century, but more or less died in 1989 with the opening of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent implosion of the Soviet Empire. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ominously boasted of the spectre of communism haunting Europe. And in 1990 East German poet and playwright Heiner Müller responded to current events with a book of poems called A Spectre is Leaving Europe. The spectre of communism hasn’t entirely left East Berlin and certainly fascinates the artist. Implicit in the series, is the demise of communism and the assumption that capitalist hegemony, to use a term associated with Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, now has few serious challengers.

Craig Havens was a teenager living in the United States when the Cold War ended. Currently he is working in Berlin where he has recently produced his Wheel of Fortune work. This large-scale print series recreates the past four decades of casino wheel designs from the popular American television gameshow Wheel of Fortune. In Havens’ work capitalism presents itself as a natural order and Fortuna re-appears in the form of continuous booms and busts. And on the individual level, the well-established notion of going from rags-to-riches through hard work and initiative has been displaced by the idea of making your fortune with the help of Fortuna. In this respect, Havens’ Wheel of Fortune series offers a resonant emblem of the present.

Wheel Of Fortune 1975 1983

Cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s visionary book Capitalist Realism has the added sub-title Is There No Alternative? His writing has affinities with the art of Havens which encourages reflection on a difficult Fisher-type question: is there no alternative to the Wheel of Fortune? Both Havens and Fisher are profoundly aware that much of what passes for leftwing commonsense is irrelevant. They want fresh ideas in a grim situation where it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Wheel Of Fortune 1975 Season 1 Episode 1

Excerpt from the essay 'On Craig Havens’ Wheel of Fortune: Representing Capitalist Realism' by David Evans. Researcher, Writer and Curator of photographic and print-based art. Publications include Appropriation (2009), Critical Dictionary (2011) and The Art of Walking (2013).