Broadcast on January 3, 1975, the episode brings back memories of my misspent youth. By a grim coincidence the board posted the video just a few days before the death of Lin Bolen, the NBC exec who cancelled the show. This Deadline story about her death says, rather harshly, that Jeopardy got axed because of "its older demographics and stodgy host Art Fleming."
I dunno, Art seems charming and un-stodgy to me on the video. But I'm 66 and getting stodgier by the minute, so maybe I'm not the best judge. The JBoard.tv thread mentions Lin Bolen (not so favorably, as you might imagine).
The biggest gameplay difference from the current show is that players could ring in while Art was still reading the clues. None of this waiting for Alex to finish. The dollar values are also different, of course, thanks to unrelenting inflation. JBoard.tv speculates that the Final Jeopardy ditty is in a different key. I'm too musically obtuse to understand the issue.
Otherwise, the format is pretty much unchanged. Why mess with perfection?
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