Posted on by bdamage1
Brian Damage
We here at Ring the Damn Bell love pro wrestling…heck, that is what this blog is all about. Sometimes though, we may venture into a topic that is not so much about the wrestling business. Now don’t fret, this piece still has a sorta pro wrestling theme to it….just not solely about it. What if I told you, that back in 1994, WWE Hall of Famer Gorilla Monsoon hosted a talk show/game show?
This show was on daytime television and had nothing to do with pro wrestling at all. It was a fusion of a game show meets a talk show. Daytime talk shows were all the rage in the 1990’s with Oprah, Phil Donahue, Sally Jessy Raphael, Montel Williams, Ricki Lake etc. With the glutton of daytime talkers, why not add Gorilla Monsoon to the mix? The show in question was called ‘Bingo Break’ and, as the title suggested, was a program that had the popular game of Bingo attached to it.
Since this was a “legitimate” show, Gorilla Monsoon went by his real name of Bob Marella. His co host was a former interviewer from the Black Entertainment Network (BET) named Caron Tate. There was a house band called the Dave Smith Five and then there was the talk show sidekick and ‘Bingo Master’ former WWF interviewer Sean Mooney. Together, they all formulated a show that combined interactive Bingo with music and guests like psychics and numerologists.
Sean Mooney was responsible for calling out the numbers when they played bingo. Viewers at home would play along by acquiring free Bingo Break cards at local supermarkets and pharmacies like Metro Food Market, Neighbor Care Pharmacies and Basics Foods. These places were also the advertisers for the show. Bingo Break was filmed in a studio in Baltimore, Maryland. Why Baltimore you ask? First off, the city had low production costs and secondly…Baltimore was apparently a real hot bed for Bingo.
The city had several bingo parlors and averaged around 300 to 800 players five days a week. Bingo Break started airing on Baltimore’s FOX station channel 45 at 10am five days a week. It had a 13 week trial run in the Baltimore market with the intention to eventually syndicate the program nationally after that. The show ran from January of 1994 until April of ’94.
In case you were wondering why Gorilla Monsoon…errr I mean Bob Marella and Sean Mooney were chosen for this talk/game show, look no further than the show’s creator. His name is Nelson Sweglar and if the name doesn’t sound familiar, his work should. Sweglar was the head of WWF’s television and pay per view production from the early 1980’s until the early 1990’s. He was Kevin Dunn before Kevin Dunn. Sweglar was responsible for helping bring WWF shows like Tuesday Night Titans (TNT) and Primetime Wrestling to life.
Nelson Sweglar was very good friends with Gorilla and offered him this opportunity to spread his wings and try something different other than pro wrestling. Monsoon was an avid gambler albeit a very successful one. He seemed perfect to host a show of this magnitude. Sweglar came up with the idea for Bingo Break and helped finance it by dropping $250,000 of his own money into the project. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending who you ask), Bingo Break did not hit the numbers it needed to be a winner. Ratings were not strong and many critics panned it. One critic in particular, dubbed Bingo Break as “the worst television show in history.”
After its initial trial run, Bingo Break faded away and never made it to national syndication as predicted it would. One major highlight of the show, however, came when Bobby ‘the Brain’ Heenan made a surprise appearance. At the time, Heenan was a member of WCW’s announce team. Despite that, when Heenan introduced himself to the hosts, he started by saying, “Hi, I’m Bobby Heenan of the World Wres…of WCW.” A Freudian slip I suppose. Never the less, it was the final time to my recollection, that the great Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan were together on camera.
As the years have gone by, Bingo Break has become a mere afterthought to many who watched it or worked on it. While we may never know how Monsoon felt about this venture into daytime television was…thanks to the marvelous invention called Youtube you can view an episode of this much forgotten show.