Do you want to test your street smarts? Well, you’re too late. You could only do that for five years starting in 2000. If you were one of the lucky few that got to be harassed by the powerful Frank Nicotero, you should be proud. You got to strut your stuff in front of…well, likely just hundreds of people and prove your worth by winning money for two strangers in a studio far away. I always watched this show late on the old UPN, but it’s likely you’ve seen it on one of numerous channels since then. “Street Smarts” started during the big boom period for game shows and it lasted a lot longer than most of the others. I think it did because it was an actual relatively fresh idea and it was a late night show. Not a lot of expectations when you’re on at 1 a.m. contending with poker reruns on ESPN2.
“Street Smarts” pitted two contestants to a duel of being able to guess how stupid people are. The premise of this show is easy. The title makes sense when you hear this. Host Frank goes out and picks three people off the street, and asks them random questions. The people in the studio are then asked the same questions, and have to judge how the street people answered. Fun right? Yes it is.
The street “savants” as they were known normally ranged from smart to full on Vin Diesel. Most of the shows comedy came from their bad answers and Nicotero’s witty anecdotes about the aforementioned stupid answers. Speaking of Frank Nicotero, this guy needs to do more stuff. Quit getting washed up actors to host shows and let this failed stand-up take another crack at it. Look at this face!
After the savants gave answers, this leads us to the guessing. The studio contestants had to battle through four rounds. The first one is very straight forward. You had to pick the person that got the answer right. Sometimes it was all three savants, sometimes one. It was a toss-up. The second round was picking the person with the wrong answer. It was the chance to really call someone an idiot or accidently let slip how racist you might be. Look up videos of the game show host episode; you’ll know what I mean.
The third round is the fun. Contestants got to “pick a pony” and ride them. You perverts out there need not apply, it wasn’t what you think. Players chose a savant and guessed how they answered the question. Yeah, we’re not setting the world on fire here, I know. Describing a game show isn’t all that fun. The final round gets a little “Jeopardy” and makes the people pick a savant in secret and their answer. Got it?
He looks smarter than Frank. I'd put money on him.
This was a fun little game show that brought my dad and I much laughter. We always try to find a way to feel smarter, and this normally brought us as high as Trebek’s little quiz show brings us down. I found out that the highest money total you could get on the show was $4,600. That’s a lot of money riding the backs of stupid Americans. Hopefully the savants were out of work actors, because some of them were really stupid. It couldn’t have been real. At least, for the love of Frank Nicotero, I hope they were. That poor man’s brain must be gone if not.
Now Frank hosts this classic board game on the Hub network. He no longer has to pretend to be hip but still gets to tell bad jokes. Awesome.