College Bowl (also known as General Electric (G.E.) College Bowl) was a radio television and student quiz show. College Bowl first aired on US radio stations in 1953. It then moved to US television broadcast networks, airing 1959 to 1963 on CBS and from 1963 to 1970 on NBC. In 1977, the game resurfaced as an activity on college campuses through an affiliation with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) that lasted for 31 years. In 2008, the College Bowl Company announced its suspension of the College Bowl program, citing increased costs and financial infeasibility of continuing to work with ACUI.
History
College Bowl originated as a USO activity created by Canadian Don Reid for soldiers serving in World War II. The game was then developed into a radio show by Reid and John Moses. Grant Tinker, later President of NBC and MTM Enterprises, got his start as an assistant on the show.
Two four-member teams representing various colleges and universities competed; one member of each team was its captain. The game began with a "toss-up" question for ten points; the first player to buzz in got the right to answer, but if (s)he was wrong, the other team could try to answer (if a player buzzed in before the host finished reading the question and was wrong, the team was penalized five points). Answering a "toss-up" correctly earned the team the right to answer a multi-part "bonus" question worth up to thirty points; the team members could collaborate, but only the captain was allowed to actually give the answer. The game continued in this manner, and was played in halves. During halftime, the players were allowed to show a short promotional film of their school; or they might talk about career plans or the like.
The first College Quiz Bowl match was played on NBC radio on October 10, 1953, when Northwestern University defeated Columbia University, 135-60. Twenty-six episodes ran in that first season, with winning teams receiving $500 grants for their school. Good Housekeeping magazine became the sponsor for the 1954-55 season, and a short third season in the autumn of 1955 finished the run. The most dominant team was the University of Minnesota, which had teams appear in 23 of the 68 broadcast matches. The 1953-55 series had a powerful appeal because it used remote broadcasts; each team was located at their own college where they were cheered on by their wildly enthusiastic classmates. The effect was akin to listening to a football game, but this type of excitement evaporated in later versions, in which both teams competed in the same room.
Television
Though a pilot was shot in the spring of 1955, the game did not move to television until 1959. As G.E. College Bowl with General Electric as the primary sponsor, the show ran on CBS from 1959 to 1963, and moved back to NBC from 1963 to 1970. Allen Ludden was the original host, but left to do Password full-time in 1962. Robert Earle was moderator for the rest of the run. The norm developed in the Ludden-Earle era of undefeated teams retiring after winning five games. Each winning team earned $1,500 in scholarship grants from General Electric with runner-up teams receiving $500. A team's fifth victory awarded $3,000 from General Electric plus $1,500 from Gimbel's department stores for a grand total of $10,500. On April 16, 1967, Seventeen magazine matched GE's payouts so that each victory won $3,000 and runners-up earned $1,000. The payouts from Gimbel department stores remained the same so that five-time champions retired with a grand total of $19,500.
Colgate University was the first team to win five consecutive contests and become "retired undefeated champions," defeating New York University in Colgate's first appearance in April 1960 when NYU was going for its fifth win. Rutgers was the second college to win five contests and be retired. Colgate later defeated Rutgers in a special one-time playoff contest to become the only six-time winner in a "five-win-limit" competition. An upset occurred in 1961, when the small liberal arts colleges of Hobart and William Smith in Geneva, New York, defeated Baylor University to become the third college to retire undefeated. In another example, Lafayette College retired undefeated in fall 1962 after beating the University of California, Berkeley for its fifth victory, a David and Goliath event.
The show licensed and spun off three other academic competitions in the U.S.:
- Alumni Fun, which appeared on all three major TV networks in the 1960s and featured former college students
- Bible Bowl, which has evolved into at least three separate national competitions and used the Bible as a source
- High School Bowl, which was broadcast in some local TV markets and featured high school students
International versions
University Challenge
A British version of the televised College Bowl competition was launched as University Challenge in 1962. The program, presented by Bamber Gascoigne, produced by Granada Television and broadcast across the ITV network, was very popular and ran until it was taken off the air in 1987. In 1994 the show was resurrected by the BBC with Jeremy Paxman as the new quizmaster. It remains very popular in Britain. The show, and the catch phrase used by Gascoigne (and later Paxman) before each toss-up question, "Your starter for 10," was the inspiration for the novel Starter for 10, and the subsequent film. A New Zealand version of University Challenge ran from 1976 to 1989, and was revived in 2014.
Challenging Times
An Irish version of the competition called Challenging Times ran between 1991 and 2002. It was sponsored by The Irish Times newspaper, and presented by Kevin Myers, then a columnist with that newspaper. Over the course of the show, University College Cork had the most wins, with three, while National University of Ireland, Galway qualified for the most finals, winning twice and placing second twice.
Later history
The game returned to radio from 1979 to 1982, hosted by Art Fleming (the host of the original Jeopardy!), with the 1978 and 1979 national tournament semi-finals and finals appearing on syndicated television. The two champions from those years competed against teams from the UK for the "College Bowl World Championship," which were also televised; in 1978, Stanford University played a team of UK all-stars under College Bowl rules, and in 1979, Davidson College played Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University under University Challenge rules. (The UK teams won in both years.) There have been two television appearances since then; the 1984 tournament semi-finals and finals aired on NBC, hosted by Pat Sajak (of Wheel of Fortune fame), and the entire 1987 tournament on Disney Channel, hosted by Dick Cavett. The University of Minnesota won both iterations.
In 1970, modern quiz bowl invitational tournaments began with the Southeastern Invitational Tournament, and the circuit expanded through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These tournaments increasingly made various modifications to the College Bowl format, and came to be known as quiz bowl. Earlier invitational tournaments, such as the Syra-quiz at Syracuse University, had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1976, the program became affiliated with the Association of College Unions International (ACUI) [1], which continued to promote the competition as a non-broadcast event after the demise of the radio and television experiments. That affiliation ended in 2008, and the College Bowl program is no longer active. The College Bowl Company continues to administer the Honda Campus All-Star Challenge at historically black colleges and universities.
In the 1990s with the rise of the Academic Competition Federation and National Academic Quiz Tournaments, both with their own national championships, a number of schools (such as the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, both former national champions, and recent runner up Georgia Tech) "de-affiliated" from College Bowl. Factors which contributed to this process included, among other issues, eligibility rules for College Bowl (which limited the number of graduate students who could compete and required a minimum courseload), higher participation costs for College Bowl relative to these other formats, and concerns regarding the quality and difficulty of the questions used in College Bowl competitions.
In popular culture
- In 2009, brief scenes from the early 1960s episodes of College Bowl with Allen Ludden appeared in the film Gifted Hands.
- A brief scene of GE College Bowl with Allen Ludden appeared in the 1982 film Diner.
Criticism
In the 1987 and 1988 regional tournaments, College Bowl was accused of recycling questions from previous tournaments, thereby possibly compromising the integrity of results. Questions for tournaments need to be new for all teams involved, or certain teams could have a competitive advantage from having heard some questions previously. The 1987 National Tournament on the Disney Channel saw additional controversy, as a number of protested matches proved to strain the television format. Especially in the early 1990s, The College Bowl Company attempted to collect licensing fees based on copyright and trade dress claims from invitational tournaments that employed formats that it claimed were similar to College Bowl, and threatened not to allow schools that failed to pay these fees to compete in College Bowl events. As it was, the company's intellectual property claims were never tested in court and these events along with the growing Internet community of quiz bowl players led to a great increase in teams, tournaments, and formats.
Top four finishers of CBI National Championship Tournament (1978-2008)
No tournament was held in 1983 or 1985, though regional tournaments were held in each year.
†Tied for third (lost in semifinals, no playoff for third place).
††In 1994, Brigham Young University finished second in the round-robin, qualifying for the final series. However, as the final best-two-out-of-three series was held on Sunday, the team declined to participate, and the University of Virginia took their place instead. Brigham Young was awarded third place.
References
- Nasr, Carol (1969) The College Bowl Quiz Book. Doubleday, New York.
External links
- College Bowl Company official web site
- College Bowl history through 1977
- IBM Case Study on automating College Bowl incorporated
- Hobart and William Smith versus Baylor
- G.E. College Bowl on Internet Movie Database
- Portland State University College Bowl Collectionâ€"Materials about the undefeated 1964-1965 Portland State College Bowl Team