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Television

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That wasn't sa-FAIR-i.

Should Wheel of Fortune contestants be disqualified over mispronounced words? This has been a topic of debate since the game show first aired back in 1975, more or less. It becomes an especially tricky conversation when factoring in a player’s accent, which many folks say shouldn’t cause them to lose their winnings if indeed their guess was correct on a puzzle solve.

This conundrum recently reared its ugly head for the show’s February 3rd episode, during which Arzice Salonga, a single mom from Medina, Ohio, (keep this in mind for later) buzzed in to solve the opening $1,000 Tossup puzzle—a two-word “Event” which read: “A F _ I _ _ N / _ A _ A _ _” on the board.

Salonga correctly guessed “African Safari,” however, pronounced it “Sa-FAIR-ee,” which was deemed incorrect. Fellow contestant Brian Nelson then swooped in with the correct pronunciation and nabbed the $1,000 prize.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

“Yes, safari is the way you have to say that,” host Ryan Seacrest said to a shocked Salonga. “I just checked with our judges to make sure.”

Online, fans quickly came to Salonga’s defense. Especially on Reddit, where one person said “That was cheap. I didn’t think they were so fussy on pronunciation.”

Another added, “She was robbed IMO.”


Still another wrote, ““100 percent bull**** on that puzzle. She got screwed. I know pronunciations matter but, like…there’s been way worse.”

And here’s where the accent issue came up. A few surmised that the mispronunciation was actually more of a dialect thing, and shouldn’t be counted against her.

“I think it was such a mistake by the show. It sounds to me like she has a slight accent of some sort, which shouldn’t be a determining factor. If she had spelled it, it would have been right,” wrote one person.

“I thought her pronunciation was just a regional dialect,” echoed another.

Ohio does, in fact, have three distinct regional accents. The Midland one in particular, which is the most common regional accent, pronounces words like "merry", "Mary", and "marry" the same way. Meaning that it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for someone from this area to pronounce a word like “safari” as “sa-fair-ee.”

Still, a few felt the show was in the right for the disqualification. One person said, “I’m gonna go against the grain. Wheel is a show about words. You should pronounce the words correctly to win.”

Of course, there have been other times when Wheel of Fortune’s stringent rules have cost contestants their prize money, including one infamous episode where a contestant lost his chance at the $1 million prize due to mispronouncing “Mythological Hero Achilles.” But this strict mandate seems to only really come into question when the pronunciation is due to an accent, as when one contestant's Southern accent caused her to say “Seven swans a-swimmin'!" rather than “Seven swans a-swimming.” Or another contestant named Neetu whose accent made it sound like he said “In A Moment's Notice” rather than “At A Moment's Notice.”

Unlike a puzzle on the show, maybe there’s not one right answer to solve this dilemma, and we should make room for some nuance. At the same time, what’s a game without rules? Thankfully most of us don’t need to worry about it. But if you do plan on trying to win big, maybe do a quick review of proper pronunciations before spinning that wheel, just to be safe.

Pop Culture

Watch Lucille Ball repeatedly tell a host to take his hands off female audience members

People laughed every time she told him 'hands off,' but she was stone cold serious.

Lucille Ball was a powerhouse both on screen and off.

According to her daughter, Lucille Ball never considered herself a feminist, but there's no question she blazed many a trail for women. A working mother in real life, she depicted issues facing housewives with her brilliant television comedy and became the first female studio head in Hollywood. She broke glass ceilings but wasn't particularly outspoken about women's rights. In fact, in a 1980 interview with "People," she said, “They can use my name for equal rights, but I don’t get out there and raise hell because I’ve been so liberated, I have nothing to squawk about.”

Ball empowered women by example—and by speaking her mind. Carol Burnett shared a story on PBS about how Ball was unhappy with a script for her new show, but women at that time didn't raise concerns about such things. Men could express criticism and demand changes, but women simply didn't. Ball did—and firmly—despite being non-confrontational by nature. Later she told Burnett, "Kid, that's when they put the 's' at the end of my name."

A video has been circulating on social media showing Ball's no-nonsense way of speaking up when she felt the need to, and people are gushing over it.

In 1978, Ball participated in a Q & A session with UCLA theater arts students on the television program "America Alive!" The viral clip shows Ball repeatedly telling one of the hosts, David Sheehan, to take his hands off of female audience members when they were asking a question.

Watch:

@femalequotient

We love Lucy ❤️

People laughed every time, but Ball didn't so much as crack a smile during her clear, simple, repeated "hands off" admonitions. For 1978 especially, her advocacy for the women in the audience was extraordinary. Sheehan wasn't touching these women in a lewd or sexual manner, but he was touching them in a way that he wouldn't have touched a man who was asking a question. Most people wouldn't have thought much of it at the time, but Lucille Ball immediately noted it and didn't let it stand.

"I love that she didn't even laugh when the room was," shared one commenter. "She was not joking."

"'Take your hands off her, David,' should be a sound AND a t-shirt," wrote another.

"He kept trying. She kept telling him. Love her," shared another.

"Lucille Ball always reminds me of my grandma," offered another. "She hated to be seen as delicate, and she hated men that would touch her even more. She would say, stone-faced, 'Get your paws off.'"

Even if Sheehan was casually touching those women out of habit and not ill intent, it's laudable that Ball made a point of making him aware of it. Unfortunately, women are still having to deal with men touching them without being invited to, but seeing Lucille Ball's serious face while calling it out is a good reminder that women have been fighting this battle for a long time. Good for her for using her microphone and the respect afforded her to speak up for the young women in her audience.


This article originally appeared last year.

Sofia Vergara was wowed by AIRFOOTWORKS' feats.

"America's Got Talent" auditions have given us all manner of dance performances, from expressive individuals to impressive group numbers that got the judges praising and the audience roaring. But in19 audition seasons, judges and viewers have never seen anything quite like AIRFOOTWORKS' gravity-defying, core-busting dance routine.

As the music began, no one knew what the apparatus made of poles and bars surrounding the dancers was for. But it soon became apparent that they would use it to lift themselves off the ground. What started with a simple pull-up, however, turned into an incredible synchronized dance to Justin Bieber's "Where Are U Now" in which the dancers synchronized their movements without their feet even touching the ground.

Watch:

AIRFOOTWORKS Delivers MIND-BLOWING Dance To Justin Bieber's "Where Are U Now" | Auditions | AGT 2024www.youtube.com

The dancers, who hail from Japan, were mentored by Kenichi Eniba, who won AGT Season 8 in 2013. Their performance earned them a standing ovation from all four judges and the audience.

"Everything about the performance was perfect," said judge Sofia Vergara.

"It was so creative and so different—and so difficult, by the way," said judge Simon Cowell. "So you have a great mentor. However, even if you've got a great mentor, you've still got to be able to do what your mentor helps you to do. And you did it immaculately."

People in the comments were equally blown away.

"How do people find out they have talents like this??? 😭✋🏼🔥"

"My toxic trait is thinking I can do this without any difficulty 😅."

"Insane core strength."

"OBSESSED with this audition."

"What kind of core strength is this... flawless,🔥💯🔥"

Many people were disappointed that none of the judges hit the Golden Buzzer.

"Why no Golden Buzzer?!?!?! If I've seen any act more deserving of it, I can't recall. These guys were AWESOME!!!!!!!"

"Did they run out of golden buzzers? This is worthy."

"THEY DESERVED THE GOLDEN BUZZER!"

"This performance absolutely deserved a golden buzzer. It was just spectacular."

"Can only assume all the judges were so enthralled and mesmerised by this performance they forgot there was a golden buzzer."

For more talent auditions, you can follow America's Got Talent on YouTube and TikTok.

@agt

everything about @AIRFOOTWORKS performance was perfect! watch #AGT tuesdays on @NBC and streaming on @Peacock.

This article originally appeared last year.

Pop Culture

Dan Harmon accused Hallmark of recycling one movie into two. The truth blew his mind.

Harmon called the "Sister Swap" explanation "cinematically unprecedented."

Dan Harmon in 2013.

Hallmark movies tend to be predictable holiday fare, so it’s safe to say that Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon wasn’t off when he cried foul after learning about the Sister Swap films.

Harmon saw there were two Sister SwapHallmark movies that came out in 2021 and couldn’t tell which one to watch first. “Well HERE’S THE THING,” Harmon wrote on Instagram, “both Sister Swaps are released in 2021. They are not sequels. Both Sister Swaps are the same story, about sisters—played by real-life sisters, who have to swap…cities.”

In a world where Hallmark churns out 40 holiday films a year, it’s reasonable to think that the company was trying to pull a fast one and save some money by making two identical films and releasing them separately.

The Sister Swap films star real-life sisters Kimberly Williams-Paisley and Ashley Williams, whose characters are siblings as well. The first film, Sister Swap: A Hometown Holiday, is about a widow who attempts to reopen her late uncle's old dilapidated small-town movie theater for one last Christmas screening. Sister Swap: Christmas in the City, which debuted seven days after, is about sisters who swap cities to pursue new projects in the 12 days leading up to Christmas. Harmon was thrown by the fact that the films shared several scenes with identical dialog.

“We keep going back and forth between the movies,” Harmon said, trying to make sense of them. “The same conversations are happening in each one but there’s no ‘Rashomon’ or ‘Peep Show’ angle, the dialogue in each version is identical but the scenes are cut differently because I assume they just had different editors.”

Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon is known for its unique structure where the same story is seen from multiple perspectives.

Harmon shared another post where he lined up a scene from both nearly identical films.

Finally, Harmon’s confusion was assuaged when the people who made the film showed up in the comments. The films’ co-screenwriter, Zac Hug, explained what Hallmark was trying to do with the movies.

“Quick note on this, the task in writing was to make sure the audience didn’t have to see them both but were rewarded if they did. Hallmark also got on board with my sister and me writing them together,” Hug wrote.

Williams-Paisley confirmed that the decision to combine the two films was to do something unprecedented with a Hallmark production. "We wanted to do something outside the box for the genre but also stay in the genre and my sister came up with this brilliant idea of two films that take place in the same time frame and sometimes overlap," Williams-Paisley commented.

Executive producer Neal Dodson further clarified things for Harmon. "We had one editor and edited them in tandem," he wrote. "They share 9 scenes, with different edits to those scenes that favor whichever sister's movie it is."

Harmon clearly understands the medium of film—he created the hit series Community and Rick and Morty—yet he missed the fact that Sister Swap was a total revolution in the art of making Hallmark films.

After hearing about the movies from the artists themselves, he changed his mind and said the films were "cinematically unprecedented."

The films are truly a departure from the usual movie format, not just for Hallmark, but TV movies in general. But, before we get too excited, the productions also probably saved a few nickels by shooting two films at the same time.


This article originally appeared three years ago.