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Chapter 1: What happened on May 19, 1984, during the Press Your Luck episode?
It's May 19th, 1984, and the audience in a Los Angeles television studio is going absolutely wild. The man sitting on stage in front of them is as euphoric as they are. In the background is a giant blinking game board that he has just conquered. The man claps his hands, shakes his head, and makes a sound that no one has ever heard before or since.
Not quite a scream, more like a high-pitched yodel. The outburst is a mix of excitement, exhaustion, and utter disbelief. It's basically his way of asking, what the hell did I just do? This is Michael Larson, and what he has just done seems impossible. Or at least, fishy. That day, he appears on Press Your Luck. It's a pre-taped daytime game show on CBS.
In every half-hour long episode, three contestants take turns playing a massive game board. Each square on the brightly colored grid holds cash, prizes, extra spins, or...
little red monster well you heard that correctly a little red monster the tiny animated boogeyman or boogie woman is a whammy what's a whammy well it's a a day ruiner if you buzz in and land on a whammy you instantly lose all of your winnings it's the show's signature gimmick About one in six spins results in a whammy.
Chapter 2: How did Michael Larson achieve an unprecedented winning streak?
This prevents contestants from piling up big sums of money. Usually. But on this fateful afternoon 42 years ago, Michael Larson goes on a hot streak that leaves those who witness it flabbergasted. The network brass, the host of Press Your Luck, Peter Tomarkin, the studio audience, and most of all, Michael himself. He racks up a whopping 45 consecutive spins without a whammy.
The shocking run helps him win $110,237 in cash and prizes. If you adjust for inflation, that's a little over 350 grand. At the time, it is the highest single payday in the history of game shows, and it's a spectacular TV moment. but there's still one mystery left to be solved.
How exactly a schlub with a thrift store dress shirt, slicked back gray hair, bushy beard, and a chipmunk smile manages to take Press Your Luck for 100 grand? Is he a cheater? Is he just supernaturally lucky? Or has he made his own luck? Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the whammy in Press Your Luck?
You can find us here every Wednesday, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts, or check us out on Instagram at theconspiracypod. Stay with us. As Michael Larson is making history, the constant beep-boop sounds of the game board become almost hypnotic.
While the audience is transfixed, the producers of Press Your Luck start to panic. It doesn't take a genius to realize that he has figured something out. It's just unclear what. The mood in the control room is pretty grim. Darlene Lieblick Tipton is a practices department executive at CBS. Here's how she says it went down.
After about the third spin, the question that is sort of mentally being asked of everybody is, how is he doing that? And then it was just, how is he doing that? And then it was just, oh my God, he's doing that. And it got quiet. The quick and dirty theory is that Michael must be running some kind of scam. No one could be that lucky.
Michael certainly wouldn't have been the first game show contestant caught up in a scandal. The game show scandal is practically an American tradition. In the 1950s, several network quiz shows get in hot water for pre-arranging outcomes. The most notorious of those incidents involves a Columbia University lecturer named Charles Van Doren.
He becomes a celebrity after winning $129,000 over the course of several months in 1956 and 1957 on the NBC game show 21. The feel-good story curdles when news breaks that the show's producers have rigged the game in favor of the telegenic Van Doren. Four decades later, Robert Redford makes a movie about the scandal called Quiz Show.
It turns out that Michael Larson is nothing like Charles Van Doren, but there is a conspiracy afoot. Well, sort of. By definition, conspiracies involve two or more people working together, but, you know, conspiring. Michael is a lone wolf. Though that's a slightly overdramatic way to describe an ice cream truck driver. That's right.
Michael drives a Mr. Softee truck in his hometown of Lebanon, Ohio.
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Chapter 4: What strategies did Michael Larson use to memorize the game patterns?
He also finds work as an air conditioning repairman. Neither job pays terribly well. The man has never been great with money, though making more cash and fast has been a lifelong obsession. To understand what makes a guy like Michael tick, we need to go all the way back to his childhood in Ohio. Even back then, he fixates on making a quick buck.
From a very young age, Michael believes that good old hard work is for suckers. In middle school, Michael sells candy bars to classmates at inflated prices. When he grows up, he starts to cook up money-making schemes that fall into, well, ethical gray areas. It becomes a habit. He never quits.
At one point, Michael starts a small business in a family member's name, then hires and fires himself so he can collect unemployment checks. He also takes advantage of a bank's $500 offer to open an account. Then, after waiting the minimum amount of time he needs to in order to collect the cash, he closes the account and opens another under a different name.
He's the kind of guy who works hard to find shortcuts in life, but hates doing hard work. Michael is one of four boys. His oldest brother James can see where Michael is headed. James later describes his brother as someone whose desire to make money fast will doom him to self-destruction. Even as Michael approaches middle age, he doesn't seem worried about the path he's chosen.
It's 1983 and Michael is now well into his 30s. He still doesn't have his life figured out. He's been divorced twice and is now in a common-law marriage to a woman named Teresa. That year, she notices her husband doing something strange. Michael collects a bunch of television sets and stacks them on top of each other in their living room. He watches the TVs for hours.
Hey, he has plenty of time on his hands. It's late fall in the Midwest. It's cold. Neighborhood kids aren't begging their parents for spare change to buy bomb pops. Michael fixates on game shows, recording episodes on VCRs with hopes of finding an edge. It's around this time that he discovers a series that he has never seen before.
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Chapter 5: How did CBS executives react to Michael Larson's performance?
It's called... Press your luck. The show is partially the brainchild of producer Bill Carruthers. Back in the 1970s, he co-creates a game show called Second Chance. The format will probably sound familiar. Three contestants answer questions for chances to play on a giant game board. On every spin, a randomized light moves around that board.
It's up to the player to buzz in and stop the light on a square containing a sum of money. At first glance, it seems easy to pile up lots of cash. Fast. But there are three spaces on the board that hold little red devils. Land on one of those and you lose all of your winnings. Michael Brockman, the head of daytime TV at ABC in the 70s, loves Second Chance. It premieres in 1977, but it flops.
The network cancels it after only a few months. Unlike most scrap shows, Second Chance gets a second chance at life. Brockman moves to CBS in the 80s and encourages Carruthers to resurrect that game show concept. This time, he retools it into something more aesthetically pleasing.
The prize board is bigger and brighter, and the motionless devils who take all the contestants' money are replaced by whammies, who show up to viewers at home in animated form, a Basically, the whammies are a more sinister version of the minions. And for those of you who weren't around in the 80s, this was ubiquitous. No whammies was almost like 6-7.
It's what you said all the time when you didn't want something to happen. You're at the vending machine hoping it doesn't get stuck. No whammies at the blackjack table. No whammies going through red light hoping you don't get a ticket from a cop. No whammies! Carruthers also wants to make the prize round even more entertaining.
In the new show, the light will move around the board slower than on Second Chance. That makes it easier for the audience to follow, and unlike on Second Chance, the squares on the board will no longer be fixed.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of Michael's game show success?
The spaces will have three different configurations that shuffle in real time. That means that on some spins, a square will hold a prize, and on some spins, the same square will hold a whammy. This makes the game more unpredictable. But most contestants and people watching at home don't care about any of that.
They just want to see someone buzz in and stop that moving panel of lights on a square with a big prize. While developing the new show, Carruthers is concerned about one thing. Randomization. He really doesn't want an enterprising contestant to be able to memorize the board's movements. The problem is, a computer program that makes each spin truly random is not in the budget. I hate.
It's the early 80s. As a compromise, Carruthers asks CBS for a light system that cycles around the board in 12 separate patterns. It's not totally random, but it's random enough. The network says yes to their request at first. But then it comes back with a computer program that can only provide five patterns.
After CBS officially picks up Press Your Luck, Carruthers tries to tell his bosses that five patterns just aren't enough. He tells them that some contestant will eventually memorize the board, not if, but when. Executives at CBS ignore the warnings.
Brockman, now the head of daytime programming at the network, claims that the consensus among the brass is that the low number of patterns on the board is not a risk. Later, he admits the obvious. They were wrong. Press Your Luck premieres in September 1983. That's shortly before Michael Larson starts binge watching it, long before binge watching becomes a thing.
To understand why he might be so determined to try to game this particular game show, I want to take you through a typical episode. Michael notes that every episode has two question rounds and two prize rounds, and every episode starts with a question round. The host, Peter Tomarkin, tosses four questions at three contestants. There are two ways to answer each question.
One, by buzzing in first and answering off the top of your head. You're even allowed to answer before Tomarkin finishes the question. And two, by picking one of the three answer options to mark and provides.
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Chapter 7: How did Michael Larson's life change after his game show appearance?
If you buzz in first and answer correctly, you're awarded three spins on the game board. If you answer correctly via the multiple choice option, you're awarded one spin. Michael also notices that these questions aren't exactly brain busters. They don't really test academic knowledge, but they're barely even trivia. They're based on the kind of topics that used to pop up on Family Feud.
Well, here's a real press your luck question. Crow's feet are those facial lines around the eyes that we get from squinting. According to American Health Magazine, what age does the average person get them? Is the correct answer 40, 30, or 50? The questions seem designed to get the contestants to the prize round as fast as possible. After all, that is the main event.
in the prize round the person who's earned the fewest spins gets the first shot at the big board which features 18 squares when it's a contestant's turn a panel of lights cycles through the grid seemingly at random but in reality the lights only move in those five patterns i mentioned Each contestant has a buzzer. There are two goals.
One is to smash that buzzer down and stop the lights on a square containing a prize. And the other is to avoid whammies. Like I said before, landing on a whammy zeroes you out. It's by design. Whammies are the producer's way of keeping winnings down. Doesn't always work, though. On Press Your Luck, several contestants go on to take home mid-five-figure sums.
And just a note on that fact, all of that cash isn't always collected in one episode. If you win, you can play on for five total episodes. Naturally, this is what Michael wants in on, a show where you can make fast money. Michael spends weeks trying to crack Press Your Luck. He studies game film like an NFL coach, slowing down the tape and pouring over it frame by frame.
He sits in front of the TVs in a trance, counting the light flashes on the prize board. This leads to an epiphany. According to his common-law wife, Teresa, he starts acting like a kid at Christmas. What Michael has realized is that on each spin, the lights on the prize board move around the squares on the grid in five predetermined patterns.
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Chapter 8: What lasting impact did the Press Your Luck scandal have on game shows?
This is the vulnerability Bill Carruthers had tried to warn his bosses about. If Michael memorizes the patterns, then he can conceivably buzz in and land on any space he wants. What Michael has also figured out is that there are a handful of squares on the prize board that never contain whammies. Two squares in particular only hold cash prizes and extra spins. This is the coup de grace.
If Michael can land on those two spaces over and over, he'll be able to pile up cash, keep spinning, and Avoid whammies. That is, if all goes to plan. Get-rich-quick schemes take a lot of work. And plenty of luck. So, Michael Larson has a plan. He buys a cheap plane ticket to Los Angeles. In those days, Press Your Luck holds open auditions.
One day, Michael walks in for a tryout and immediately plays up his humble background. He does exaggerate his life story a little, claiming he's just gotten off a bus from Ohio. the homespun charm offensive works. Bill Carruthers is the executive producer of the show. He's impressed by Michael, who he finds charismatic and funny.
And I mean, Michael is an ice cream man, an underdog, and America loves underdogs. But not everyone is buying Michael's act. Bob Edwards is the contestant coordinator at Press Your Luck. He also gets a kick out of Michael's story, but Edwards finds it too good to be fully true. Michael seems off to him. Edwards thinks that the guy must be hiding something. He just doesn't know what.
Edwards is suspicious enough that he tells Carruthers that they should not put Michael on the show. Carruthers overrules him. Carruthers says years later that he should have listened to Bob. And that's how Michael ends up on Press Your Luck. Before the taping, Michael meets his competitors. One is Ed Long, a Baptist minister. He's the returning champion who's coming off an $11,000 payday.
The other is Janie Litris-Dakin, a dental assistant. Looking back on that day, she describes Michael as a creepy person with a creepy smile. She also admits to underestimating him. On the Press Your Luck stage, Michael is in the middle with Ed to the audience's left and Janie to the audience's right. At the beginning of the episode, the host interviews each of the contestants.
Naturally, Peter Tomarkin asks Michael about being an ice cream truck driver. Michael says that he hopes to win enough money so he doesn't have to drive his ice cream truck that summer. When the game starts... Michael doesn't play like someone who's about to strike it rich. During the first multiple choice question round, he earns three spins on the big board, the fewest of the three contestants.
That means that he gets to go first in the prize round. Right before his turn, Michael positions his hands a few inches above the red buzzer. Then the board starts lighting up. Come on, big bucks, big bucks. Michael slams his hand down on the red buzzer. That's the sound of Michael landing on a whammy, an inauspicious start. But the failed spin serves an important purpose.
It helps Michael get his timing down, and that'll come in handy later. On his next spin, Michael wins $1,250, and on his next one, his last of the round, he lands on the same square and pockets another $1,250. Michael ends the first round with a modest $2,500, putting him in third place behind Ed and Janie.
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