Hardy Perennial

"If summer comes," cracked CBS's Garry Moore, "can Pantomime Quiz be far behind?" He was speaking of Mike Stokey's ten-year-old TV show, the undisputed dean of summer replacements, which early this month, as dependable as lightning bugs, made its annual return to network TV. As in last summer, Pantomime Quiz is replacing Ed Murrow's Person to Person (Fri. 10:30 p.m., CBS), and its frenetic actors will gambol and gyrate through the dog days until Murrow's return on Sept. 13. "In the winter," says Mike Stokey, "I hibernate."

Pantomime Quiz is based on the old parlor game of charades, and particularly on its more sophisticated descendant, The Game, which became popular in the 1930s. While attending Los Angeles City College in 1939, Stokey and other students played The Game on experimental TV (call letters: W6XAO) from a tiny studio over a car dealer's garage. "There were probably more people in the studio than there were viewers," Stokey recalls, "but even then I felt it was undeniable TV material." After a stint as an NBC announcer and 3 1/2 years' war service in the Air Force (a pilot instructor in B-17s and B-29s), Stokey returned to broadcasting, amazed that no one had yet put The Game on TV.

He turned the trick in 1947 over Los Angeles station KTLA, and Pantomime Quiz has been on and off TV ever since. There have been few changes in format. M.C. Stokey hands out actable "stumpers" (e.g., "Hand your teeth to me, grandma, I'm putting the bite on a friend") to competing four-man teams, each made up of two name actors and two pretty actresses. The player who gets the stumper acts it out with passion and abandon while his three teammates have only two minutes to supply the words. Stokey has speeded up the game with the invention of 32 timesaving hand signals (for the six "basic" signals, see panel), and years of competition have given to some of his players--Jackie Coogan, Hans Conried, Dorothy Hart, Carol Haney, the late Judy Tyler--an almost telepathic quickness. Sponsors (currently: LIFE, Amoco and Hamm's Beer) like the show because it is economical ($10,000 a week) and usually bags a respectable rating. Actors like the show, despite a meager $250 stipend, because it requires no preparation, is fun to play, and gives them a welcome chance to ham it up. Vincent Price credits it with changing his career: he could get nothing but "heavy" roles until producers saw him clowning his way through successive performances on Pantomime Quiz.

The comic-book titles, songs and sayings are culled from some 30,000 stumpers mailed in each week by viewers who hope to win a TV set by baffling one of the teams. Five readers on the West Coast reduce this flood to a trickle of the 100 best, an assistant producer in Manhattan thins it to 50, and Stokey selects the best eight of these. A great many of the stumpers sent in have already been used or seem too easy. The most frequently submitted gag line is "Head for the roundhouse, Nellie, the brakeman can't corner you there." Stokey has no explanation for its appearing in the mail at least 75 times a week, year in and year out.

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