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Each week on The Newlywed Game four couples, all married less than one year, competed with each other to win their own special "dream gift," usually appliances or furniture. The emcee asked the wives questions about their husbands, and the husbands questions about their wives, each while the other mate was out of earshot. The couple that correctly guessed the greatest number of each other's answers was the winner. Questions were usually designed to produce embarrassing situations and disagreements between husbands and wives, much to the delight of the audience. For example, "What animal would you compare your mother-in-law to?" or "Would your wife say she sleeps with her toes pointing toward the wall, the ceiling, or the floor?"
There was also a daytime version of the program on ABC from July 1966 to December 1974, and a syndicated version from 1977 until 1980. Bob Eubanks hosted them all. He was still with the show when it surfaced again as The New Newlywed Game in the fall of 1985. Despite the name change nothing much had changed, other than the freedom to be somewhat more explicit in the sexual innuendos, a function of the changing mores of American television.
In the fall of 1988, when yet another revival of The Newlywed Game surfaced, the emphasis had shifted to comedy, and longtime host Eubanks was replaced by Latin comic Paul Rodriguez. The Rodriguez version ran for a single season.
The Newlywed Game was resurrected again in fall 1996 with Gary Kroeger as emcee. The following fall the producers went back to the series' roots, replacing Kroeger with the original host, Bob Eubanks. It went off the air at the end of the 1999-2000 season.
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