100 Objects #16: Wheel of Fortune Dalmatian

99% Invisible

This episode of 99% Invisible explores the cultural phenomenon of the Wheel of Fortune ceramic Dalmatian, a seemingly useless prize that becam

Key takeaways

The ceramic Dalmatian was a consolation prize on Wheel of Fortune, symbolizing the absurdity and whimsy of game show culture in the 1980s.

Main topics

The history of American game shows
Cultural significance of television prizes

Notable quotes

"It was truly just the thing you got when you couldn't afford anything else."

Conclusion

The ceramic Dalmatian, though functionally useless, became a beloved cultural icon because it embodied

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This episode of 100 Objects is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Build interactive tools and apps by describing what you need. Custom calculators, data visualization dashboards, even prototypes. all without writing a single line of code. For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai. That's claude.ai. Speaker 1 (0:42) The year is 1988. After decades of political tensions, the Cold War is finally beginning to thaw out. But despite this, we start our story underground, in a windowless room. It was literally called the bomb shelter. This is Terry Eldridge. It was a basement space, just this wide open room. On this particular winter afternoon, Terry found himself hunkered down in the bomb shelter. But he wasn't taking cover. from an incoming missile or nuclear fallout. The bomb shelter was just a rec room in a dorm where Terry went to college. He and some classmates had gathered there because Terry had recently received a phone call from his dad, Roy. And he told Terry to make sure he was going to be near a TV in just a few days' time because something really good was going to be on. $6,000 just waiting to be won today on Wheel of Fortune. And now, here's your host. Speaker 1 (1:44) Me and a bunch of friends sat and watched my dad on Wheel of Fortune and it was really surreal. Speaker 1 (1:52) Did it surprise you to learn that he was going to be on TV? Was this out of character for him? Oh, absolutely. He was a retired cop. He had been a Denver cop for years. Roy Eldridge from Broomfield, Colorado. What do you do back there? I'm chief of physical security for a large government facility. Uh-huh. Sounds kind of secretive, Roy. Not really. Oh, all right. It turns out Terry's dad was good at the game. Roy was the biggest earner of the day and qualified to play the bonus round. for a pretty sweet prize. Roy, you're going to be playing for the Jeep Wrangler open-air model with room for four. Retail value, $12,765. He won this beautiful red Jeep Wrangler. 15 seconds to talk it out. Good luck. Maternity leave. I knew you could. And I'm thinking, you got this 19 or 20-year-old kid in college? Speaker 1 (2:46) You don't need a Jeep Wrangler, but I would love one. I was so excited thinking I am getting a Jeep. Terry wouldn't get the Jeep. But there was another thing. At the time, Wheel of Fortune had a segment called the Shopping Round. You got there by spinning the wheel, of course, solving the puzzle, and hopefully winning thousands of dollars. But you didn't get to take any of that cash home. Instead, contestants had to spend it all right there during the Shopping Round, where they forced you to buy random things that filled the stage. Jet skis, vacation packages, you got whatever you could afford. Speaker 1 (3:23) And every episode, the announcer would hype up those very prizes that you'd been forced to buy. My dad bought these horrible gold-plated sunglasses. The Cazale 951 Sport System sunglasses in an attractive presentation kit. That looked like something straight out of the Elvis wardrobe. Retail value, $300. And he also bought what at the time was a very pretty crystal. Speaker 1 (3:54) Towards the end of the round, once people got down to less than $200, there wasn't much left to buy. Except for, for about $150, there was always this ceramic dog. Top honors go to our favorite mascot, Wheel of Fortune's Ceramic Dalmatian, a medium-sized dog we've all learned to love. $154. Speaker 1 (4:20) A life-sized black and white polka dot dog made out of baked clay. It was kind of a consolation prize. Here's what you get with whatever money you have left that isn't enough to buy anything else on the set except for this dog. It was truly just the thing you got when you couldn't afford anything else. Terry doesn't even really remember seeing his dad buy one, but he did. And like so many people who went on Wheel of Fortune in the 1980s, A ceramic Dalmatian ended up back at Roy's house. After the excitement of watching his dad on Wheel of Fortune, Terry finished college, moved, bought a home, got married, and started a family of his own. His father kept the dog all that time. And then, one day, he pulled Terry aside. And he said, hey, take the dog home with you. So he has sat in our house, guarding the top of the stairs for the past 20 plus years. Speaker 1 (5:22) Thanks to his dad, Terry is the proud owner of perhaps the ultimate useless object. The Wheel of Fortune ceramic dalmatian has no discernible purpose whatsoever. Functionally, nothing would change in Terry's life if he got rid of it. But he insists he never, ever will. And it's not just beloved to Terry. For a brief moment, it became the mascot for one of America's most popular game shows, appearing on tens of millions of TV screens, night after night, all across the country. If you watched Wheel of Fortune in the 1980s, I bet you big money you remember the Ceramic Dalmatian. But why did this fake, useless dog capture the fleeting attention of our nation? Speaker 1 (6:10) From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is a history of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars, and today, why the Wheel of Fortune ceramic dalmatian is the perfect symbol of the game show, and what the fascinating history of game shows and game show prizes tells us about the changing definition of the American Dream. Speaker 1 (6:38) One of the things that fascinates me about game shows is the prizes. I've probably seen thousands of hours of game shows in my life. Growing up, I remember skipping school to watch Wheel of Fortune or The Price is Right, but I wasn't just into solving puzzles or guessing the price of a bottle of dish soap. Like millions of other Americans watching along with me, I wanted to see the stuff people won. Prizes are central to a game show. They are the reason viewers keep tuning in, imagining we could be the ones driving home in that brand new car. And those prizes have been there since the very start, before they were even called game shows. As far as we know, the quiz show is an American invention. It appears that the first one on the air was a show on the radio around 1924 called Brooklyn Daily Eagle Quiz on Current Events. Catchy. Speaker 1 (7:33) Rolls right off the tongue. This is Adam Nedef, author, historian, and researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle was a newspaper in New York, and they had these events called Current Events Bees. These events were kind of like a spelling bee for topical issues. Give a correct answer, you stayed in the contest, and the final person standing won both bragging rights and a small cash prize. Speaker 1 (8:01) And whenever Brooklyn Daily Eagle ran a current events bee, they would run a special edition of the paper where they printed all of the questions and all of the correct answers and always sold a lot of extra copies. So Brooklyn Daily Eagle had the idea that, hey, we can sell copies of the paper with these things. Let's start putting the current events bee on radio. So that was the idea originally. The first game show was invented to sell newspapers. Around the same time, another radio show emerged called Vox Pop. It started out with hosts asking random people on the street their opinions on things happening in the news. Speaker 1 (8:34) Did you read the paper today? Well, I got about halfway through it. You did? Well, that's fine. I'm going to see how well you did about it. And eventually they came upon the idea, let's do a segment of the show where we see what people actually know about these subjects. We'll ask them questions about what's going on in the news. I want you to give me three prominent items that were featured in the newspapers this week. And people didn't want to participate in this segment because they didn't want to risk looking foolish on the radio. So the hosts had this idea, well, let's take a wad of money with us. Speaker 1 (9:02) And we'll give people a dollar if they give the correct answer. A single dollar for a correct answer was all the incentive many needed. After all, this was the middle of the Great Depression. Quiz shows quickly became a potent form of distraction. Swaths of listeners who couldn't afford other entertainment could fantasize about winning a dollar for knowing a fact or two. These first quiz shows were also the perfect snapshot of a quintessentially American idea. Speaker 1 (9:34) If you applied yourself and you were smart, you could really achieve something, like winning a cash prize. These shows were always modest affairs. During World War II, the feds actually asked a lot of the shows to shut down for fear that an audience member would leak war secrets live on the air. But a few quiz shows stuck around, like one called Information Please, where the prizes included a $25 defense bond, practical and patriotic. Then the war ended. Quiz shows had never been about big giveaways anyways. The idea of, boy, wouldn't it be great to win on a quiz show? That would solve all my problems. No, that never happened until the end of World War II, when all of a sudden they turned on the money faucet. Speaker 1 (10:21) That money faucet would change quiz shows forever. And it started thanks to the post-war boom in manufacturing. Word needed to get out that goods were being produced again. And so that led to big giveaways on radio because giving away your furniture or your appliances from your factory was a good way to let Americans know, hey, we're up and running full speed again. We have so many things coming out of our factory that we can just give away a refrigerator on this radio show. you know, go out and buy a refrigerator this weekend at the department store. Speaker 1 (10:51) As a nation, the U.S. was becoming increasingly more wealthy. Not only could more people now afford consumer goods, they wanted them. Keeping up with the Joneses really became a big deal at the end of World War II. There was this dream that you were being sold of, it's not just about being able to provide for your family, it's about having nice stuff for your family. And quiz shows had evolved to a point where they suddenly fit into that American dream. At the same time that... Americans are trying to acquire stuff, that's when the quiz shows all of a sudden are giving stuff away in massive quantities. So these radio shows evolved in the same direction that the country at large was evolving. Speaker 1 (11:32) Quiz shows became a kind of mirror of American society. As consumer culture took off, quiz shows