Snap Judgment (game show)

Did You Know?

• The first theme music, "Window Shopping" by Bob Cobert, had previously been used on The Price Is Right.
• The second theme, composed by Score Productions, debuted on September 4, 1967.
• No episodes of Snap Judgment are known to exist due to network wiping practices.

Game play

The original version of the show was a word-association game. Two teams, each made up of one contestant and one celebrity, competed. The contestants had already written down their associations before the episode started. The host, McMahon, gave the celebrity a clue word, and that celebrity had three attempts to guess the contestant’s association. A correct guess was worth $10. If the celebrity failed, the opposing team could try to steal that $10 with a single guess. If both teams missed, the contestant revealed the first letter of the association, and each celebrity got one more guess. The first team to hit $100 won the game and moved on to a bonus round called "The Big 5." In that round, the contestant left the stage for a soundproof room. The celebrity had to come up with five associations for a clue word from the host, then pick one as the "bonus word"—the one the contestant was most likely to say. The contestant returned and had 20 seconds to name all five associations, each worth $50. At first, the contestant only had to say the bonus word to double the team’s winnings, but this was quickly changed to require guessing it correctly. For the second game of the same episode, the two celebrities swapped teams. The score and earnings counters had three digits; if a contestant’s total went over $1000, the counter just showed $999. On December 23, 1968, the format shifted to something very close to Password, which had been cancelled by CBS over a year earlier. Now, players guessed a word from one-word clues. Points worked on a descending scale: 10 points for a first-clue guess, nine for the second, and so on. After the fifth word, point values doubled. The first team to 25 points won $100 and played a redesigned "Big 5," similar to Password’s Lightning Round, but with 30 seconds to guess five words at $100 each. There were no returning champions; each show brought in two new contestants.