I’ll Buy That! was a game show hosted by Mike Wallace back in the days when Mike Wallace sometimes hosted game shows.  The show debuted June 13, 1953 and lasted a few months into 1954.  Home viewers would send in items they wished to sell and a celebrity panel headed by Vanessa Brown and Hans Conreid would attempt to guess what each item was.  Every time they made a wrong guess, the “selling price” would go up.

How was it?  A fine question.  There don’t seem to be many (any?) episodes around.   But its cancellation and the failure of a few other attempts got Wallace out of the game show hosting and into news work.  So that’s something.

Masquerade Party was one of those shows that went from network to network and from host to host.  It started on NBC in 1952, went to CBS in ’53 and ’54, went to ABC, then back to NBC then back to CBS.  Along the way, its hosts included Bud Collyer, Douglas Edwards, Peter Donald, Eddie Bracken, Robert Q. Lewis and finally Bert Parks.  The four member panel was in a constant state of flux.

But the premise didn’t change.  The host would introduce a “Masquerader” — some celebrity who’d come out in heavy-enough make-up that you couldn’t tell who it was. The outfit and a little routine the Masquerader would perform would be a hint. For instance, when George “Superman” Reeves was a Masquerader, they had him dressed up as a giant pack of Kent Cigarettes, which just happened to be a sponsor. The panelists would ask questions and try to guess who the celeb was…and at the end, there’d be an unmasking which was often messy. That was it. Usually, there’d be three games a show which led to one of the show’s main weaknesses. Sometimes, to find three Masqueraders to fill a half-hour, the definition of a celebrity had to be pretty low and it sometimes descended into folks the panel had never heard of. That of course made it tough for them to figure out the answer.

Very few episodes of this show are known to exist. Before his passing, ventriloquist Paul Winchell scoured the country looking for a kinescope of a time he was on with his idol, Edgar Bergen. The two of them were joint Masqueraders playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde — one playing one, the other playing the other. Some of the costumes and clues were quite clever, especially during a period when Allan Sherman, who’d been fired as producer of I’ve Got A Secret, was brought in to run things. In his autobiography, Sherman says that when the job was offered to him, his initial reaction was to turn it down because he thought the show was lousy. But he needed the job so he took it but didn’t put his name on the program…until it rose up to pass I’ve Got A Secret in the ratings.

In 1974, the show had a brief revival hosted by Richard Dawson but it was cancelled after one season.

Your Surprise Package was a short-lived game show on CBS that’s most notable as the last such program produced by Allan Sherman. Sherman had co-created and produced I’ve Got A Secret, then gone on to other shows with varying degrees of success. When he signed on to this one, he didn’t imagine it would lead to so many changes in his life, starting with the necessity that he relocate from New York to Los Angeles. There was a shortage of available studios in Manhattan then, plus CBS liked the idea of George Fenneman — best-known as Groucho’s sidekick from You Bet Your Life — as host. Fenneman wouldn’t commute from L.A. so the Shermans had to move.

It was not a great show. Contestants had to answer questions to win mystery boxes containing prizes of varying worth. Bern Bennett was the announcer. Carol Merrill, who would later gain fame as the prize model on the original Let’s Make a Deal was the prize model. The show went on the air in March of 1961 and didn’t do well in the ratings. As you can see in the two tickets above, they lowered the minimum age to attend — often a sign that a show is having trouble filling its bleachers. By the date of the second of the two tickets above, Sherman was making the rounds, trying to line up the job he’d do after Your Surprise Package was axed. He needed money. Earlier in November, much of the wealthy Southern California community of Bel Air burned…and while Sherman didn’t lose his new home there, there was considerable damage not from the fire (for that he had insurance) but from a subsequent flood when heavy rains hit L.A. and the hillsides around Bel Air were barren of vegetation and thus sending the water straight down into the community.

Sherman was out of work a short time before he was hired as the producer of a new syndicated talk show that Steve Allen was doing for the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company. Within weeks and before the show even went on the air, Sherman was fired due to clashes with management. In August 6, 1962 — not all that long after the above ticket — he recorded a record called My Son, the Folk Singer and within months, it was the fastest-selling comedy album ever. It made him very famous, very successful and very unlikely to ever produce another game show.