Bumper Stumpers
| Bumper Stumpers | |
|---|---|
Bumper Stumpers title card
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| Genre | Game show |
| Created by | Wink Martindale |
| Developed by | Mark Maxwell-Smith |
| Directed by | William G. Elliott |
| Presented by | Al Dubois |
| Narrated by | Ken Ryan |
| Composer(s) | Ed Lojeski |
| Country of origin | Canada |
| No. of seasons | 3 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) |
Dan Enright Wink Martindale |
| Producer(s) | Doug Gahm |
| Location(s) |
Global Television Studios Toronto, Ontario |
| Running time | 22–24 minutes |
| Production company(s) |
Global Television Network Barry & Enright Productions Wink Martindale Enterprises USA Network |
| Distributor | Sony Pictures Television |
| Release | |
| Original network |
Global Television Network USA Network |
| Original release | June 29, 1987 – December 28, 1990 |
Bumper Stumpers is a Canadian game show in which two teams of two players attempted to decipher vanity license plates in an attempt to win money. The show was a joint production of Canada's Global Television Network and the United States' USA Network, the two networks that aired the series in first run, in association with Barry & Enright Productions and Wink Martindale Enterprises. This was one of three original series that USA and Global co-produced in the 1980s, with a 1985 revival of Jackpot and 1986's The New Chain Reaction preceding it.
Bumper Stumpers premiered on June 29, 1987 and aired concurrently on Global and USA until December 28, 1990. It was created by Wink Martindale, the second creation of his to make air (Headline Chasers, which Martindale launched in syndication in 1985 in the United States with himself as host, was the first) and developed by Mark Maxwell-Smith. Al Dubois, who at the time was a weather forecaster for Global, hosted the show with Ken Ryan serving as the announcer. The show was taped in Toronto.
Reruns of the series were seen on Global in Canada from 1990 to 1995 and on Game Show Network in America in 1994-95 and 2000. Bumper Stumpers has aired on the Canadian network GameTV since October 1, 2012.
Bumper Stumpers featured two teams, one usually a returning champion pair. The teams' goal was to correctly solve the Super Stumper, a puzzle designed to resemble a vanity license plate that consisted of seven spaces. At the beginning of each game, host Dubois would tell the teams whom or what the plate belonged to, and the first space was revealed.
In order to begin filling in the spaces in the Super Stumper, the teams played a series of jump-in questions. Bumper Stumpers used a game board consisting of seven monitors, and each jump-in question used the top row of two monitors. The teams would be shown two plates, one of which belonged to someone or something, and had to guess which of the two was the correct plate. For instance, a plate belonging to swashbucklers would read "PYR88" with the solution being "pirates" while one belonging to Bill Cosby would read "IIPI" with the solution being the title of his television series I Spy; consecutive letters or numbers in a plate were usually treated as plurals, so the two numbers at the end of the first plate would read as "eights" and not "eighty-eight" while the first two letters in the second would not be pronounced "eye-eye". In another example, a plate belonging to a saboteur would read "VTHKOLM" but be pronounced "fifth column", with the V serving its purpose as the Roman numeral five, while a plate with "H2O" in it would belong to something having to do with water due to it being the chemical symbol.
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Wikipedia