The Happiness Hype

WHEN A network calls a game shows Fantasy, it seems reasonable to expect lucky participants to win either vacations in exotic places of frivolous, fantastic prizes like a dare with their favorite celebrity. But NBC's Fantasy more often deals with the real, mundane world, where economic realities alter the definition of a dream.

On a recent show, for example, a middle-aged woman outlined her situation to ever-concerned, yet ever-cheerful co-host Peter Marshall. She, her husband their six children planned to move from Cleveland, where the couple found no work, to California. Since arriving alone in the West, she had found work as a waitress ("a respectable job," Marshall assured her), but her husband unexpectedly found a job back in Cleveland. Neither she nor her husband, she explained, could afford to quit and risk unemployment. Separated from her family, without enough money to visit, the woman explained her "fantasy", she wanted a tape recorder so that she and her children could hear one another's voices instead of relying only upon letters.

Appearing five days a week, for an hour each day, Fantasy operates in two ways. Audience members can have their fantasies fulfilled at once or homes viewers can write in, hope for the best, and wait. Actress Meredith MacRae takes the Fantasy "truck" across the country and stops at the houses of fortunate correspondents. One woman described her wish to give her husband an orange tree, something he's always wanted. Another wife hoped to win a drum set for her fireman husband because he had to sell his old one. Admittedly, not owning a drum set of a fruit tree doesn't constitute economic destitution. But the viewers' letters and obvious joy (a camera crew of course record the happy fantasy realization, "it's a miracle," the tree recipient said) suggest their unhappy financial situations and consequent inability to continue hobbies. perhaps it stretches arm-chair psychology too far, but it does seem interesting that these two fantasies involved the escapist worlds of nature and music.

One might welcome Fantasy and think that, happily, at least one game show addresses itself to worthwhile concerns, awards needed prizes and doesn't give away yet another Broyhil dining room set Fantasy often includes cheerful, heartwarming segments, as when four World War II nurses were reunited after forty years.

But Fantasy blends the worthwhile with the ridiculous. During the same show that the Cleveland woman expressed her fantasy. Marshall realized three collegiate women's dream to parachute into a land of "hunks." Avoiding airborne difficulties, Marshall instead sent them off to Mexico with the hope that they'd find a couple of men. He gave them a post-card too.

Worse yet, though, Fantasy often seems similar to 1950s game show like Queen for a Day and The Big Pay Off, where contestants would describe heart-wrenching difficulties and audience response would determine the one "winner". Although Fantasy, unlike Queen, doesn't offer cripples and widows, it nevertheless panders to Is viewers' perhaps unconscious voyeurism aren't we lucky we own tape recorder, and didn't one of the WWII nurse seem unhappy to see the others? Perhaps an explanation exists for the forty year separation other than lack of travel funds.

More important, there's something offensive and embarrassing about the way Marshall fulfilled the Cleveland woman's fantasy. He led her to the Fantasy booth, a somewhat enlarged telephone booth hat blows air from its base and thus floats hundreds of dollars within he participant's reach. While the audience cheered, the Cleveland woman spent her fifteen seconds grabbing as much money as she would. Although she snared $900-not a small sum-one remembers her almost pathetic efforts, bending over when her time ended so as not to lose an extra bill or two that had landed on her back. Marshall escorted her out of the booth and then, just like on any other game show, took a break for a commercial that advertised oven cleaner or floor wax. But the Cleveland woman's story and her face suggested that all this wasn't just a game.