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		Press Your Luck Article:
		The Pilot Episode
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Like any other show, Press Your Luck had to make a pilot episode to pitch to CBS. And, like any other show, the pilot was a bit different from the final product that the general public sees. This article will not cover all the peculiarities about the pilot episode, but will concentrate on the board. For reference, here are the three boards from this episode:

	$1500		$3000 + ONE SPIN	$750	$500	STATISTICS Cash: 14245 Avg: 419 PrEst: 2933 Dir: 2668 Total: 19846 [$C] 29, 1:1.86 [$+] 5, 1:10.8 [$T] 34, 1:1.59 [P] 7, 1:7.71 [D1] 362 [D6] 1000 [D11] 306 [D12] 1000
$2250	Intro Board While the "real" episodes had a normal, shuffling board, this board remained stationary while the border light did its pseudo-random thing. The amounts that you see here are all taken from Round 2. No prizes are shown on this board: the reason will be explained later.
$1000					$2000
$600					Move 1
$750 + ONE SPIN		$1200	$500	$1500	$750 + ONE SPIN

Besides the values themselves, there are four things that set the pilot board apart from how the board later operated.

1. The Whammies

As mentioned above, "multiple Whammy slides appeared in each square." On the actual show, if [1] contained a Jumping Whammy, it kept that slide through the entire round. Not so for the pilot: if a Jumping Whammy popped up in [1], it might make its next appearance as a Leaning Whammy, then soon after as a Running Whammy, etc. The general consensus for the aired episodes is that there were three* projectors pointed at each square, each holding a single slide that would be projected onto the Big Board from behind when appropriate. Having two values plus five additional Whammies breaks this idea.

* NOTE: some (including myself) believe that a fourth projector was used for the Question Rounds.

2. Repeating Values

While the aired episodes certainly had slides that occasionaly "stuck" from one rotation into the next, the pilot suffered a slightly different, but more common phenomenon: slides that faded into the same value, something that didn't happen on the aired episodes. When this happened, the "new" value wasn't always lined up exactly the same as the old, which seems to indicate that two projectors with (virtually) identical slides were used, not one projector fading out and back in. This is made very clear those times in which one Whammy fades directly into another Whammy. Once again, there is a problem with the original three-projector theory.

This effect didn't happen as often as it may seem, given the clips from the pilot that are available online. This also seemed to affect only certain squares, especially [1].

3. Prize Squares

Lastly, the squares that hold prizes act in a peculiar manner. They don't shuffle (psuedo-) randomly as the other squares do, but all follow a more-or-less strict pattern:

prize, value 1, value 2, prize, value 1, value 2, etc.

Once in a while certain squares will switch to showing value 2 before value 1, then the prize, and at one point in the show (while the camera was briefly off of the board) it may have shown value 1, value 2, value 1 again, then the prize. But one thing never changed -- either all seven prizes were shown on the board together, or none were. This would explain why no prizes were shown on the frozen board during the show's introduction.

4. Board Speed

Very clearly, the board ran much slower in the pilot: both the speed of the border light and the amount of time it took between board shuffles. (The transition itself was about the same speed as the aired episodes.) Part of the reason for the slower board was likely to help fix the outcome of each spin, but I give another possibility below.

Conclusion

So how did the pilot board operate? One unlikely option is that there were more than three projectors dedicated to running the board (maybe as many as ten), but it seems very inefficient and expensive.

It's believed that the projectors used on the aired episodes could hold multiple slides, which can be seen after a prize is hit: a new prize slide takes its place. Once in a great while, one can actually see the hit prize go black, then suddenly reappear with a new slide. Surely the pilot would have used these projectors, considering that prizes were also offered there.

One possibility is that not only were the prize projectors loaded with multiple slides, but so were all the non-prize projectors. After a non-prize projector faded out, it could load up the next slide for when that projector faded back in. To give the projectors enough time to load slides while being out, it may have been necessary to take a longer time between shuffles. To keep things simple for maintaining the prizes, they would have been set to rotate in sequence with all like slides in the same projector, rather than mixing all the slides amongst the three projectors. The prize projector would have been set to not change slides during a spin!

Of course, this is only speculation: most likely, we will never fully know how the board operated, even for the aired episodes. Another mystery is why such a complicated setup was even attempted in the first place, when compared to the aired episodes' considerably simpler system of one slide per projector. My best guess was strictly to keep the different Whammies "moving" about the board, giving them an illusion of surprise.

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