Blankety Blanks

Two celebrity/contestant teams tried to solve puzzles and fill in "Blankety Blanks" on puns (for example, "When Richard Nixon spilled the coffee on Gerald Ford's lap, he said Pardon Me!"). To start, a category along with keywords and a puzzle was revealed. The puzzle had numbers (1-6) that hid six clues (all parts of sentences) to that puzzle. Host Cullen then pulled out from a card from a rotating wheel of 100 situated next to him and placed it into an electronic reader, which chose at random one of the four players and a dollar amount from $100 to $1000 in $10 increments.

The chosen player (either the contestant or the celebrity) in control picked a number in order to reveal a clue that would help him or her identify the mystery subject; unlike some celebrity-civilian games of the period, the partner could not assist the contestant or celebrity playing at the moment. A correct answer won the team the designated money amount, but an incorrect answer (or no answer at all) meant the game continued as Cullen pulled another card, allowing another player (possibly the same one from the previous turn) to take a chance.

Play continues until the puzzle is solved, at which point the team who solved the puzzle got a chance to turn the points into money by solving the Blankety Blank in a pun; in this part of the game, the celebrity and the contestant were allowed to work together. Each correct Blankety Blank solve gave the opposing contestant a strike, with three eliminating them from further play.

In a Blankety Blank guess was incorrect, no strikes were given and the amount that was played for is held until that team solves another puzzle.

Contestants stayed on the show until they got three strikes.

Format changes

In the pilot, letters were used instead of numbers in the main-game. Unlike the numbers used in the series, the letters shown were used in the revealed sentence fragment (for example, "Z" may conceal "That crazy lady").

Later in the show's run, the dollar values ranged from $100-$750 and any money won from solved puzzles went into the team's bank, with the first team to reach $2,000 winning the game. The bank would then double upon solving the Blankety Blank

Broadcast
ABC 1975

Host
Bill Cullen

Music
Bob Cobert

The 1974 pilot theme would later be used on Get Rich Quick

The Main would also be reused on Double Talk