Before "Come on down!" entered the American lexicon, Bill Cullen stood at the helm of the most celebrated game in television history. At nine years in daytime and primetime, it would be the biggest success of his amazing career.


Four contestants, one a returning champion, compete for the whole show. A prize is presented and described, and the contestants place their bids. The contestants make as many bids as they want as long as their bid is above the previous bid (sometimes there would be a minimum enforced on how much higher the next bid had to be). Contestants are also allowed to underbid, on the condition that they can't place any further bids on the prize.


Bidding continues until either (#1) all four contestants "freeze," or quit bidding --indicated by an asterisk next to their final bid--- or (#2) a buzzer sounds, indicating that the next round of bids is the last. After all the bidding is over, Bill reads the actual retail price, and whoever bid the highest amount without going over the actual retail price wins the prize, plus any attached bonuses. If everyone overbids, what happens next varied. Sometimes they'd do more rounds of bidding, sometimes just one bid, sometimes the prize lost would be attached to the next item up for bids as a bonus, and sometimes the prize would just be thrown out entirely.

According to a review from Variety dug up by Matt Ottinger, early episodes had a rule where contestants who overbid were disqualified from bidding on the next prize.

"The Price is Right is almost too cheap for critical evaluation. Bill Cullen is a noisy, shrill cashier whose prefabricated homespun character in this idiocy consists of never ending a word with a “G” [singin’, talkin’, etc.] and a total performance about as real as a three-dollar bill. It all worked out with a convenient dispersal of winnings [no participant went away empty-handed] and started right off fighting for the title of worst show on night-time television."--Jack O'Brien, 9/24/57

The reasons for the show's appeal are obvious. The fabulous but sometimes strange prizes were something to talk about. A regular night's offerings might include a trip to Paris, a $10,000 diamond necklace, a ferris wheel, an airplane, and a private island off the coast of Maine.




The bonuses that came with some prizes were also particularly unusual. A live elephant, a TV for every room in the house (pictured), 50 each of sheets, blankets, and towels (pictured), and a mile of hot dogs plus 30 gallons of mustard were some of the strange gifts that contestants received for their bidding skills.


Sometimes, it would end up being what the contestant didn't get that made the show amazing. A one-bid round was held where the contestants bid on a valuable-looking but suspiciously vaguely-described diamond necklace. The contestants bids were in the hundreds, but Bill revealed that they had all overbid because it was false jewelry and cost a paltry $30. The bonus bell sounded and Bill then revealed a piece of paper attached to the pricetag. It was a check for $1,000.

Now & then, bonus games were used, a precursor the the pricing games used on the Barker version. Listed below are four bonus games:

THE MIRROR GAME: A model holds a list of different prizes behind the contestant, and another model holds a mirror in front of the contestant, who thus can only see the prizes listed backwards. The contestant wins every prize s/he can identify in 15 seconds.


WHERE IN THE WORLD?: The contestant is shown the longitude-latitude direction for four different locations on Earth, as well as the recorded temperature for the day of broadcast. The contestant wins a trip to the location s/he selects. (Usually, one of the locations was a joke area like a butcher's freezer or a steam room.)


PICK THREE: This one was fun because in could be played in a few variations. The contestant is shown a list of ten numbered prizes and picks, by number, the one s/he wants. The catch was something was always done to make the prizes difficult to decipher. They might be written in a foreign language, the letters were scrambled, pig latin or some other slang laguage is used, etc. As with the previous game, two or three of the listed items were jokes.

PICK ONE PRIZE: Usually played with jewelry. The contestant was shown three identical prizes and won whichever one they picked. Naturally, one of the prizes was a cheap fake.

Those were just the recurring bonus games, but many appeared during the show's nine year run. Check out some of the others HERE!



Bill was at his peak of success here, and the extravagant prizes were not the sole reason TPIR was a success. Bill presented himself as the model emcee here, with his master sense of when to joke with the contestants, and while he was never totally serious at any point, he was always good at building suspense with the sometimes-sarcastic "Isn't this EXCITING?" type of build that fans like to point out about Bob Barker. He also remained humble about the show's success. Despite appearing on the cover of TV Guide seven times during the show's run, Bill never suffered from "Dawsonitis." He was still a regular guy.