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  • 2007-02-03 (xsd:date)
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  • Who Doesn't Want to Be a Millionaire? (en)
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  • One typical humorous use that has followed the advent of digital editing software is the alteration or fabrication of screenshots from TV game shows to make it appear that contestants have missed ridiculously easy questions, provided absurdly inappropriate responses, or scrawled untelevisibly obscene answers. The e-mailed item reproduced above represents an example of the first such category, detailing the saga of a contestant on the popular Who Wants to Be a Millionaire game show purportedly stumped by a question asking her to choose the largest object from a set including a peanut, an elephant, the moon, and a tennis ball: Having used up all three of her lifelines — first eliminating peanut and tennis ball as possible correct answers, then asking a friend and polling the audience to choose between the remaining choices of an elephant and the moon — one Kathy Evans of Idaho supposedly decided to ignore all common sense and advice and opt for elephant as the correct answer. Of course, the evidence provided with the story in the form of a screenshot was a bit of digital trickery. It was an altered version of a frame showing Fiona Wheeler, a contestant on the UK version of the show, attempting to answer a slightly more difficult question: (Ms. Wheeler actually did quite well on the program, earning £32,000 for her efforts.) Such fabricated humor might be considered superfluous, as real-life video examples abound of Millionaire contestants who were bounced off the show after missing their first (i.e., easiest) questions, including a college student who could not identify what type of unexpected surges a surge protector guards against (electric current) and an attorney who failed to select the common phrase closest in meaning to I can't take it anymore (That's the last straw). In this vein, a popular Millionaire clip is one from the French version of the program, featuring a contestant who could not determine whether the moon, the sun, Mars, or Venus is the object that orbits the Earth — answering the Sun even after polling the audience! In fact, a majority of the audience members also selected the Sun as the correct answer, although a common assumption is that many of them deliberately chose the wrong answer as a way of poking fun at the seemingly hapless contestant for being unable to answer the question on his own. (en)
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