Jeopardy! fans go wild as Ken Jennings shows off rare memorabilia from game show's original host Art

February 2021 · 4 minute read

JEOPARDY! fans have scored a rare look at what clues originally looked like thanks to Ken Jennings.

The 48-year-old revealed on Twitter that he was gifted a piece of the game board from back when Art Fleming hosted the show.

Ken, 48, posted to his Twitter on Saturday: "Wanted to show off this cool gift from my friend."

"An early-’70s cardboard clue from the Art Fleming Jeopardy!. The correct response? We may never know," he joked.

The clue was in yellow font and read: "'Peanuts' char. who now styles self 'Joe Cool' A 'BMOC' - 'Big Mutt on Campus.'"

It didn't take fans long to deduce the clue was just a classically complex way of asking for "Snoopy."

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But what was so neat was that the all-too-familiar Korinna typeface (which Jeopardy! now uses) in white, with a dark blue backdrop, was nowhere to be found.

In fact, fans just didn't know that the now-digital clues displayed on the screen were once printed out on giant cardboard.

Followers geeked out over how different the clues looked back in the day as one commented: "Oh my god."

"What a fabulous gift!" another fan wrote.

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"The comma directly underneath the closed quotation marks pleases me to no end," joked another.

The show has famously (or infamously) irked some hardcore grammar sticklers since it now puts punctuation outside of the quotation marks.

"This is so cool! I wonder how many of these survived" gushed a fourth.

"I just want to know the process they used to make these. Were they silkscreens? Some kind of tempra paint stamp print?"

"They must have had a really interesting production line to create hundreds of these for every taping," wondered a fifth.

3RD JENN-ERATION

Art hosted Jeopardy! when it began in 1964 until 1979 during the daytime on NBC - he passed away in 1997.

Alex Trebek hosted from 1984 until 2020 when he tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer at age 80 - his run kicked off what's considered the show's modern iteration.

Ken, who is still the game show's winningest contestant of all time (74 victories in 2004), was named host in 2022.

Johnny Gilbert, 94, - the voice of "This is Jeopardy!" - started alongside the late Alex and is the longest-serving staff member - he's still the announcer for Ken and co-host Mayim Bialik, 47.

'IT'S LOST'

However, longtime Jeopardy! viewers who would like to relive - or even just learn about - its original era may be hard-pressed aside from gems like this.

On the podcast Inside Jeopardy!, producer and former "Clue Crew" member Sarah Foss admitted that the game show lost all - yes, all - episodes from that 20-year era somewhere along the way.

"We don't even have the first episode of the show," Sarah said back in September 2022.

The only episode they have is "the original pilot," which "never aired."

"It's just one of those things, tape used to be so big and so heavy and over time we didn't have space or storage to store them, all these older programs. It’s lost."

"If only we could have known, so many special episodes I'd love to go back and watch," the producer lamented.

ART FLEMING'S PERSPECTIVE

In the original version, contestants were allowed to keep whatever cash they had accumulated throughout the game, no matter if they finished first, second or third.

In the early ‘90s, consolation prizes for the second-and third-place finishers were changed to include various merchandise provided by the sponsors.

In 2002, the second-and third-place contestants were decided to be awarded $2,000 and $1,000, respectively.

That's what they still get today which may not thrill the late Art if he were here.

Art vented about this change even in the '90s in an interview with NBC.

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"You could be in second place $1 away from the lead and you'd get a year's supply of dog food."

All that said, Art was no Ken or Alex trivia-wise and he admitted so himself: "If I didn’t have that sheet in front of me, you wouldn’t find me within a mile of that studio."

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