The shot heard round Concentration

Sometimes things just fall together. Happened to see a thread on what used to be Matt Ottinger's board about NBC's original Concentration. That got me looking around YouTube for old episodes.

And with baseball season about to start, I found a couple eps from 1963 with the pictured Ralph Branca. Of course, twelve years earlier, Branca had allowed that home run to Bobby Thomson.

The two episodes on YouTube come from a champions' playoff between Branca and Art Levine. These were two terrific players facing off against each other. Branca had won 17 straight games in his original appearance on the show. He was the Ken Jennings of the rebus bunch, you might say. Branca lost the playoff to Levine, though not on a walk-off homer.

The YouTube tapes brought back some pleasant memories from my misspent youth of those weird picture puzzles. Not to mention the show's goofy organ music and cheesy commercials. Since the last version of Concentration expired in 1991, fans have pined for another series. Given the plodding pace of the show and the hard, well, concentration required, I'm not hopeful.