Sunday, December 26, 2010

Right on the $800,000 Question, They Lost Anyway! OOOOPS!

Which product was sold in stores first: Post-it Notes or the Sony Walkman?

Gabe Okoye was sure he knew the answer.

Mr. Okoye, 25, and his girlfriend, Brittany Mayti, 23, were the contestants on the very first episode of “Million Dollar Money Drop,” a Fox game show that had its premiere on Monday. Mr. Okoye was confident about the Post-it Notes — so confident that he persuaded Ms. Mayti to go along. Together, they wagered $800,000 of the $880,000 they had banked, out of the $1 million the show’s producers had challenged them to keep at the beginning of the program.

They were wrong, Fox said. True to the show’s title, wads of hundred-dollar bills dropped off the table with a loud whoosh. The studio audience gasped, and Mr. Okoye hung his head in his hands, bent over as if he had been punched in the stomach.

“It’s O.K., baby,” Ms. Mayti told him, “we still have more money.” Minutes later, they lost the remaining $80,000 and went home not only empty-handed, but “devastated,” she said, about the loss of so much money.

Mr. Okoye thought to himself, “I have to make it up to her one million dollars’ worth.”

But he was right about the Post-it Notes.

In an embarrassing about-face, the show’s producers acknowledged on Thursday that they had “incomplete information” about the history of Post-it Notes, and they invited Mr. Okoye and Ms. Mayti back to try again. They did not, however, return the $800,000.

The couple said they harbored no grudge toward Fox, and had not decided whether to accept the invitation. “To go through that again — maybe to lose again — that’s a lot of stress,” Mr. Okoye said by telephone Thursday night.

Up until the Post-it Notes question, the couple had been on a roll. Only two questions still loomed. “There’s no way to recreate the type of situation we had, the adrenaline we had,” Ms. Mayti said.

“We’ll just never know,” he added.

Capitalizing on the holiday season, Fox scheduled “Million Dollar Money Drop” for four nights in a row this week. It is scheduled to return for a few nights in January.

“Money Drop,” based on a British series, is the inverse of most game shows, in that it gives players a million dollars at the beginning and challenges them to hold onto it by answering seven questions in a row correctly. It’s an intoxicating concept.

“Sometimes people can conceive the fact of having that much money,” Mr. Okoye said, “but once it’s right in front of you — you can touch it, you can smell it — it becomes much more real.”

In the history of game show blunders, Monday’s mistake ranks right up there with the episode of ABC’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” in 1999 that wrongly asserted that Lake Michigan was larger than Lake Huron. When the producers of “Millionaire” learned that the contestant’s answer was correct, they invited him back on the show.

As in the “Millionaire” case, the producers of “Million Dollar Money Drop” “decided to confront it head on — which of course brings them a lot of positive publicity,” said Tim Brooks, a television historian, in an e-mail message.

Mr. Brooks’s assessment: “Brilliant!”

But the publicity was almost entirely negative earlier in the week when viewers started to litigate Post-it Notes vs. Walkman online — and when Fox initially defended the wrong answer.

There was a spike in Google search traffic for the term “Post-it Note” immediately after the telecast on Monday night, and by Tuesday morning, message board threads had popped up about the topic and viewers had prodded television reporters to investigate.

Web searches confirmed that the Walkman had reached store shelves in 1979, but there was uncertainty about the introduction of Post-it Notes. The notes were invented by 1977, but were not sold nationally until 1980.

Mr. Okoye did some searching, too, but “I didn’t trust Wikipedia,” he said.

“I was just like, ‘Little old me can’t be right over a big company like Fox.’ It’s that type of doubt,” he said.

On Wednesday, as online attention peaked, Jeff Apploff, the game show’s executive producer, stood by the Walkman answer. In a statement, he said the show’s researchers had spoken “directly” with 3M, the maker of Post-it Notes, “and they confirmed that although they had given out free samples in test markets in 1977 and 1978, it wasn’t until 1980 that Post-its were sold in stores.”

On Thursday, he said the information from 3M was “incomplete.” In a new statement, Mr. Apploff said the show had learned that “the product was originally tested for sale in four cities under the name ‘Press ’N Peel’ in 1977, sold as ‘Post-its’ in 1979 when the rollout introduction began and sold nationwide in 1980.” He thanked viewers “who brought this to our attention.”

Mr. Apploff noted in the Thursday statement that the Post-it Notes question “was not the deciding question in their game.” That is why Fox is not paying the couple.

“Million Dollar Money Drop” has not yet been renewed for a second season, raising the question of how the couple would actually return to the show. “Regardless of a Season 2, we’ll set something up for them to play again,” a Fox spokeswoman said.

In the meantime, the couple, who said on the show that they had been dating for about a year and that they wanted to save money for a wedding, have been left to ponder what might have been. Since the taping in September, awkward conversations about the show have “sparked up like, here and there,” Mr. Okoye said. She laughed as he mimicked her side of the conversation: “Well, if it wasn’t for you, we would have. ...”

She interjected: “I didn’t say that!”

“She took it better than anyone else would have taken it,” he said.

Ms. Mayti replied, “It actually made our relationship stronger.”

Speaking of the wrong-turned-right answer, Mr. Okoye said, “Now it has me thinking, ‘What else is wrong out there?’ ”

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