After the recent discussion of pinball in this thread, I just stumbled a something related on Alex Trebek's Wikpedia page, that in 1975, he guest-starred on
The Magnificent Marble Machine. I don't think I had ever heard of this show before, but there is one episode on YouTube, with Florence Henderson and Roddy McDowall as the celebrity guests, and it actually didn't look half bad, easily surpassing my expectations for how entertaining I thought I would find a short-lived (one season) game show from before I was born. Obviously the video quality was quite poor due to being nearly 40 years old, but it wasn't bad enough to make it unwatchable.
Any relative old-timers or pinball fans here remember this show?
Here is Part 1 of the episode I watched on YouTube.
The centerpiece of the show was a giant pinball machine — measuring 20 feet high and 12 feet long — that sat in the middle of the set. The winning contestant, along with their celebrity partner, would work the flippers in an effort to keep the ball alive for as long as possible, up to 60 seconds, in order to rack up cash and prizes. Hitting a designated score would trigger an additional play with the Gold Money Ball, where the player could earn even more cash.
I can see why the show didn't last long, as watching someone else play pinball, even for 60 second bursts, is not exactly the pinnacle of compelling television. My main question was why would they have used "Marble Machine" in the title, rather than something more obviously pinball-related? Could pinball have been a copyrighted term that they would have had to pay for? I know that various companies made pinball machines, as mentioned in the discussion in this thread, but did they actually use the word pinball itself to market them?