Almost Anything Goes

We loved this show. Our favorite event was Car Hop Hop, where the contestants had to walk the plank across a pool while carrying a tray of burgers and shakes (hand up please) without falling off while others were swinging tetherballs on ropes to knock them in the pool.

We were in grad school then and thought this was hilarious!! Especially for a Friday night when we needed humor in our lives!

This show made Regis Philbin a star!

I grew up in Boulder City, NV and in 1975 I worked as a cable puller for the "Almost Anything Goes" production. It was a wonderful experience for a high school kid in a small town! I had a great time and still have fond memories of those few days in show business.

I thought the show itself was a lot of fun to watch, and having gotten some experience behind the scenes I gained a lot of respect for just how much work goes into putting something like that together. I hoped that there would be other episodes and that they might even make a return trip to Boulder City but that never happened.

Compared to the "reality" game shows so popular today this one was pretty light hearted. That's not to say that the competition wasn't just as fierce, the contestants played hard; but it was all about having some fun and entertaining the audience, rather than about exploiting personal drama.

Sometimes you want to watch something that educates and enlightens and other times you just want to be entertained for a few minutes. For those times, this show is a good choice. There are no demands placed on the viewer and the only expectation is that you'll be grinning when it's all over.

I was 7 years old in 1975 and i do remember this show really well.

i was excited to see this show, but didn't it run on Tuesday nights on ABC in 1975?? For some reason i felt like it was on during a school night.

This show along with a couple other shows that were on ABC in the year 1975 were favorites of mine too, such as "Starsky & Hutch" , "Baretta" , "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Night Stalker".

There was a couple other shows i remember that were short lived , such as "Hotl Baltimore" & "Kodiak" , both also on ABC.

Gee , it seems like ABC had all the big shows at that time.

But i wont forget my classics in 1975 such as "Sanford & Son" , "All In the Family" & "The Jeffersons".

I'm glad to see that someone besides me remembers this hilarious show! I used to watch it when it ran on Saturday nights back in 1976 (I was 19 at the time) and I wouldn't have missed it for the world! Too bad this show went off the air before the invention of the VCR. After all of the vulgarity and filth that is so prevalent in television today, Almost Anything Goes would be like a breath of fresh air for audiences of all ages; clean enough for children to enjoy and competitive and funny enough to entertain adult audiences. It would be great if a channel like ABC Family picked up this ball again and ran with it.

Each game had a funny name. One of my favorites was "Hop-Along Kong." Each contestant had to dress in a full gorilla suit, crash through a giant gate, stomp into the sand all of the action figure "natives" in the village, swing on a vine across an above-ground swimming pool (representing the ocean between Skull Island and America, and if they fell into the pool, had to climb out of the water and try it again until they made it across on the vine), jump from the stage in a model of the Radio City Music Hall, grab the Fay Wray doll, climb the model of the Empire State Building and set the Fay Wray doll down on the top level, then knock down all of the fighter planes revolving on a mobile attached to the top of the building model. Each contestant had to try to beat the previous contestant's time.

I hope someone somewhere will get the idea to revive this show. Good clean fun is always welcome on my television screen!

Irene F. Mazur Chicago, Illinois

Almost Anything Goes was based on a British game show called "It's a Knockout" which ran in the 1960s. But it also owed a lot to the 1950s series "Beat The Clock" (a stunt game that was a perennial favorite on television during the "Golden Age" and revived several times through the 2010s). Essentially they took the concept of "Clock" and supersized it! Teams would compete in crazily designed stunts (typically which had to be completed in a fast time) in order to score points and win the competition.

The show was designed like an actual sports league, with divisions based on geographic location, a series of playoffs and a championship. But it aspired to be more than the "Clock" game ever was.

"AAG" was three distinct things: First it was a celebration of "Small Town America," as each competing team in this series hailed from a dot on the map: Places like Boulder City, Nevada, Chambersburg. Pennsylvania and Havre de Grace, Maryland, as three examples.

Next it was a kind of a tribute (or parody) of actual sporting events, with episodes done in a stadium setting, fans in the stands, cheerleaders hyping the crowds, and a full complement of sportscasters and color commentators, chief among them, the great Charlie Jones who handled most of the play-by-play and featured Regis Philbin who often set the scene or did brief sideline interviews with the competitors, all of which was done in a seriously stoic style.

And finally it was Schadenfreude for audiences, as they watched these team members getting pelted with pies, seltzer bottles, and other slapstick inspired schtick, attempting to cross an above ground pool on a slippery pole, or negotiating a ridiculous obstacle course or relay race as they tried to win for their home towns and get a fleeting moment of fame.

The show ran for two seasons, and lived up to its title, with all sorts of silly and sloppy competition, and it spawned two spinoffs: a "junior" version where kids were the competitors and "All-Star Anything Goes," where kid actors from television series faced off in a scaled down series of stunts.