Michael Larson - Broadcasts of The Larson Game

Broadcasts of The Larson Game

Due to its exceptional running time, Larson's appearance was split into two episodes, which aired on June 8 and 11, 1984. CBS then suppressed them for 19 years, as both the network and Carruthers at that time considered the incident to be one of their biggest embarrassments. When USA Network (and later, Game Show Network) bought the rights to rerun Press Your Luck, CBS and Carruthers insisted that the Larson episodes must not be aired. USA took this a step further, not airing any episodes of the first Home Player Sweepstakes the episodes landed in.

On March 16, 2003, GSN was allowed to air clips from the episodes as part of a two-hour documentary called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal. The documentary was produced by and aired on GSN (in association with Lionsgate and FremantleMedia), and was hosted and narrated by Press Your Luck host Peter Tomarken. The original telecast was dedicated to the memory of Bill Carruthers, producer/creator of Press Your Luck, who had died before the airing. He was also interviewed for the special, and it was his final television appearance.

The documentary featured interviews with the program's producers, Larson's family, and the two contestants who lost to Larson that day, both of whom were allowed to try their hand at duplicating Larson's trick on a recreation of the original Big Board. The board replica used only one of the patterns that Larson had memorized, and Tomarken pointed out exactly what it was. Janie Litras was able to stop the board at Square #4 only twice; Ed Long's play was edited for entertainment purposes and it isn't clear how long he lasted.

As part of the commemoration, Larson's opponents from 1984 were invited back to be contestants on Whammy! The All-New Press Your Luck playing against Larson's brother, James, with Tomarken returning to host the Question Round. Despite the fact that the board was now more random, and there was no way either Larson could have pulled off the same trick, Long and Litras (who had remarried and took the surname Litras-Dakan) still lost. In fact, when James Larson hit the Big Bank space on his first spin of Round 1, Long proceeded to joke with host Todd Newton that he had seen this before. At one point, when she hit a hot streak to put herself in first place, Litras-Dakan joked "I'm a Larson!" before hitting a Double Whammy shortly afterward.

The two Larson episodes finally aired in their entirety on GSN in late 2003 and were shown in regular rotation and on special occasions until the network ceased showing Press Your Luck in March 2009. However, the Big Bucks documentary included additional footage, directly from the original master tapes, that had been edited out of the episodes for their initial broadcast.

In the summer of 2006, during the Gameshow Marathon episode of Press Your Luck, clips from the Larson episodes were shown on CBS itself for the first time in 22 years, including Tomarken's joke to Larson, "How does it feel to be the part-owner of CBS?"

On August 16, 2006, as part of GSN's 50 Greatest Game Shows of All Time series, Press Your Luck was ranked #13; the two Larson episodes were shown back-to-back.

On January 31, 2007, TV Land broadcast TV Shows Myths and Legends, which featured the Larson episodes with commentary from his brother, the past contestants, and Penn and Teller.

Michael Larson's performance on Press Your Luck was featured in a July 2010 broadcast of This American Life.