ABC/Eric McCandless(LOS ANGELES) — No whammies – stop! New episodes of Press Your Luck hosted by Elizabeth Banks are back tonight on ABC.
The game show features contestants collecting spins by answering trivia questions. They can later use the spins to win cash and prizes, which Banks tells ABC Audio is her favorite part of the job “hands down.”
“I get to give away life changing money, and it’s not my money,” she admits. “It’s a fabulous feeling.”
Banks is one of at least seven women hosting TV game shows — a job that, up until recently, was dominated by men. She says she’s glad the industry’s changing.
“I’m thrilled by the numbers and, it’s just one of these weird traditions that just needed to be broken. You know, there’s no real rhyme or reason for it. It’s kind of just how the world worked,” she says.
“I think we are all realizing that how the world works didn’t always work for everybody. Like ladies didn’t get to host game shows. And there used to be this thing like, well, ‘we didn’t know maybe if you wanted to host it.’ It’s like we did. We always want to do all of it. We want to do it,” she adds.
Even so, Banks reveals that hosting a game show wasn’t something she necessarily dreamed of doing as a little girl, but she sure loved watching them.
“I honestly had never thought about hosting a game show when I was a kid,” she shares. “I thought about being on game shows when was a kid, for sure.”
“We used to make fake like Plinko boards from The Price is Right. And be at the grocery store and we love Supermarket Sweep when I was little too,” she recalls. “And we loved Press Your Luck. Loved the Whammy.”
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