Another casualty of the shutdown of the web site Howdies display was the web posting of the weekly trailer-style snippet compilation that they called the "topical" (or formerly the "sizzle") usually narrated by a male voiceover artist or a female one (who sounded a lot like, or perhaps was, Kelly Miyahara) ("On this week's
Jeopardy!..."). I don't know if they still make them to show on TV or not. For the most part it is a justifiable homicide--they were schlocky, formulaic, hyperbolic. They invariably featured a lot of corny coordinated gesturing by the contestants behind their podiums apparently as filler. Their producer seemed inordinately fond of giving them a
spooky monster-movie or
Twilight Zone theme, and making Alex look like a
creepy kook, even when it was nowhere near Halloween. Yet one thing I liked about them was they often included snippets excerpted from the show. The week my first show aired, the sizzle had outtakes from my contestant interview that were trimmed from the interview shown on TV. Another week, the sizzle showed Alex
boxing with the inflatable remote-control shark that was flying around on set after having been used in one of the clues, a cute excerpted aftermath. Little things like that. Well, those moments are gone too, now, I guess.
