Greetings once again to our slowly growing fanbase.
By this point now, all of our new games – Body Language, Match Game and Card Sharks – have now been up on YouTube for a week. We’ve still got two more games to post, Press Your Luck and I-Con’s Hollywood Squares, so stay tuned for those. Hopefully, by now, you’ve had a chance to watch the premieres. And if you haven’t, WHY?! Well, you’re in luck, because you can watch them here as you finish reading this!
Anyway, I decided to share with you this 3-part retrospective detailing some of the things that you didn’t see during the playing of our games and what went into them. Simply put, every one of these games had a story to tell. I’ve already told you some of what went on just getting to the con, so I’ll do my best not to repeat things here unless it’s relevant to the conversation. With that, here’s the lowdown.
When we first decided to create Anime Game Show Super Show, we suggested a dozen different games. The five of us – Robert, Francis, Trevor, Andrea and myself – each ranked the top 3 games we wanted to play. When the votes were counted, Body Language came in 2nd.
Now you already know that we started this game and our show in general with virtually no time to set up. Fortunately, the celebrity guests were a little late themselves in arriving to the room, which bought us a little breathing room. With us already behind time, though, I could only give the briefest of briefings to them on the games we were playing, and to decide which two of them would be our first volunteers (or maybe victims, in their minds) to play in Body Language. Kristen Nelson & Bill Rogers stepped up, and once we got the contestants chosen and Trevor contacted on Skype, we were ready to go.
Out of any of the new games, Body Language suffered the most from a presentation standpoint. I couldn’t get the puzzle files set up to go on screen like I wanted, hence why you guys see them captioned in on YouTube. You can also see me scrambling to write the words on cards as we were going because we couldn’t show them on screen and get the charades to face camera and the audience at the same time. I think we might revisit some of these things for future episodes. In addition, this, along with Match Game, was the first time that we chose our contestants without the raffle like we usually do. Why? Our scramble to make it to the room forced us to leave some things in the car. That included the prize box… which happened to have the tickets inside.
However, in spite of all this, I think that all of the players did incredibly well. They proved that charades is far from dead, and if I had more time to give everyone the suggestion on how to act out famous names, they would have done even better. As for the puzzles, it took a little time at first, but everyone got the hang of them. Let me tell you, though, those puzzles are a lot harder to come up with than you think. Watch any episode of the real Body Language, and notice that every puzzle is just one long sentence where only those 7 words or phrases in the blanks have any meaning. It was a challenge, but we were up to it, and now that we’ve got it, we’re ready to give you guys more. And I hope we find more contestants, and celebrities like Kristen & Bill, who are game as well. They all started this off right.
We’ll talk about Match Game tomorrow. For now, enjoy our debut of Anime Body Language.
