Oh, boy… what a conundrum…
You see, I loathe the “competitive reality show” phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it’s the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably — I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don’t know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous “the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip” music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin’s thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren’t betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It’s not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)
Needless to say, I don’t watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it — which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them — but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity… not to mention my prurient interests.
If you’ve never seen the show, part of Deal‘s schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they’re usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the “metal bikini.” Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we’ll find out…
(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late ’70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I’ve been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)
