In living color

A news item from our little oldies diginet. Buzzr will go all-color starting the week of July 1.

This means that the black-and-white episodes of What's My Line, I've Got a Secret and To Tell the Truth will vanish from their current graveyard slots in the wee hours. It's not like anybody was awake to see them, anyway. And there are many eps of the shows on YouTube, despite Fremantle's occasional (and misguided) efforts to crack down on the superb WML channel at the site.

Still, it's a bit of a milestone. Buzzr obviously appeals to a tiny sub-niche of oldies freaks in the already small niche of game shows. You might say that the B&W shows went after a sub-sub-niche, a sliver of the audience even within the oldies crowd. And to be honest, I never liked how Buzzr padded the black-and-white shows to a forty-minute length with extra commercial time. So I'm not too broken up about the news.

The shows could always return, of course, just as Dawson Family Feud will reappear in the wee hours starting the week of July 1. But I get the feeling that Buzzr is pretty much committed to all color shows from now on. (Not to mention that they're committed to Match Game at every possible - or impossible - hour.) We'll see.

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