Get the Picture
Two teams in orange and yellow jumpsuits answered trivia to uncover a picture one square at a time on a sixteen-screen video wall, while Mike O'Malley, a year before GUTS, kept it moving. Nickelodeon's Great Frame Game ran for one year in 1991 and then reran for years.
Get the Picture was a Nickelodeon game show built around a 4×4 video wall, sixteen displays that together hid a picture. Two teams of two, one in orange jumpsuits and one in yellow, answered general-knowledge questions to earn the right to reveal a square, then had five seconds to guess what the whole picture was. The first round was Connect the Dots, in which each square filled in a piece of a dot outline; the second was played on a real image. Guessing early was the whole game, and a wrong guess cost money.
Between the questions came Power Surges, the show's mini-games. The first round's were quiz games, but in the first season the second round's Power Surge was physical: a Toss Across played with oversized computer chips, a ring toss onto a giant motherboard, or a shuffleboard played with enormous floppy disks, all to uncover pieces of a picture puzzle. The winners went to Mega Memory, a nine-square board of pictures the team saw for ten seconds and then had to find from clues, with a grand prize for matching all nine. The second season switched to points, gave the teams blue plunger buzzers and moved every Power Surge to knowledge games at center stage.
It was taped at Nickelodeon Studios at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando, 40 episodes in the spring of 1991 and 75 more that summer, and aired from March 18 to December 6, 1991, under the tagline "The Great Frame Game." The host was Mike O'Malley, a 24-year-old from New Hampshire for whom the show was his first break; a year later he was hosting Nickelodeon GUTS, and he later starred on Yes, Dear from 2000 to 2006 and earned an Emmy nomination as Burt Hummel on Glee. Reruns stayed on Nickelodeon until March 1993 and then on Nick GAS from that channel's launch in 1999 until it closed at the end of 2007.
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