TVSquad

Most people don't know this about me, but I'm a raging, rabid, insane fan of The Price Is Right. Like most people who are fans of this classic game show, I've been watching it most of my life, and can still play along as loudly as I did when I was a kid. Heck, I like the show so much, I wrote a long, rambling online article about it a couple of years ago. So, even though I work for a living, I try to catch the show whenever I can, even if I tape a week and watch it later.

Most of the show is pretty much the same as it was when I was a kid, except for the fact that Bob Barker has white hair and looks more and more like the Crypt Keeper every year. But there's something about the show that's been missing for a while now, something that people may not notice, until they see clips of older episodes (which are conveniently kept at wonderful sites like TPIR.tv):

Barker's Beauties are gone.

Oh, I don't mean that the show doesn't use models; of course, they do, three stunning women who model everything from jewlery to furniture to popcorn carts. But can anyone name any of these women, or pick them out of a lineup? Didn't think so. It turns out that the models, who Barker never seems to address or even mention by name, are being rotated in and out of the show, according to the CBS web site.

It wasn't always like this. In the olden days of TPiR, every fan knew the models' names by heart. Dian Parkinson was the vixen-ish blond that posed for Playboy, Jannice Pennington was the "nice" blond who had been on the show since the beginning, and Holly Halstrom was the spunky redhead. They all were allowed to display their own personalities on the show, and had a blast interacting with both Barker and the late announcers Johnny Olson and Rod Roddy. They even became fun panelists on other game shows, most notably Match Game.

It made for a nice family feeling on the show, for both the on-air talent and the audience. Unfortunately, age, corporate pruning, and sexual harassment suits (damn you and your wandering hands, Barker!) claimed the jobs of the three best-known Beauties -- you can read the deatails about that at Curt Alliaume's page on the show -- but there's no reason why they couldn't carry on the tradition with new models.

Indeed, one of the "newer" Beauties, Nikki Ziering, became reasonably well-known during her run on the show, but in the last few years, the models have been nameless and interchangable. Not sure if this was done to move the show along, given an increase in commercials per hour (that's what I'd rather see than beautiful models... more ads for Depends!), but all the Beauties do now is wave their hands and show off the merchandise. Because of this, a big dynamic that made the show the monster success it is has disappeared. And that's a shame.