Most of us have a passing familiarity with the Press Your Lucks and $25,000 Pyramids of game-show history, but there are countless other gems that, for whatever reason, have faded from memory.

Since the game show is TV’s most ephemeral genre, its fans have an especially active community on YouTube. The uploaders—a mix of hardcore tape traders and casual fans who happened upon an old VHS trove—have brought back to light shows that, in some cases, haven’t aired anywhere for decades. In this series, I’ll take a look at a few forgotten would-be classics that I think hold up well.

Time Machine

Watch a clip here.

Host: John Davidson

Originally aired: 1985

Forgotten because: It was short-lived, lasting only 80 episodes or so.

What makes it great: OK, it’s not great. But it’s interesting. There haven’t been many game shows based exclusively on date recall, probably because the conceit wears thin quickly. Time Machine barely pulls it off, yet it does indeed pull it off, with a nice variety of games and an irresistible play-along factor. Great set, too

I don’t know why John Davidson kept getting emcee jobs in the ’80s. He’s not a complete loss, sure, but there’s a Sisyphean quality to his hosting: He’s always trying to catch up to the show, but as soon as he gets there, it’s moved on without him. Davidson’s friendly, he looks good in a suit, and he locks onto those cue cards with the force of the Federation’s finest tractor beams. That’s about it.

Watch the clip linked above—Davidson is ill at odds from the start, flubbing his little joke about the morning news. You can discern his internal process for handling contestants: He picks one fact about each contestant to remember and then structures all his remarks around that fact. For the first game, John builds a little billboard in his brain that reads “RON: LIKES BOATS.” The next billboard says “SHIRLEY: IS A NURSE.”

I like when Davidson refers to the clothes washer in a Tide ad as a dishwasher.

Game-show fans know this is a Reg Grundy production by the opening drum roll, a staple of Grundy’s more successful ’80s games, Sale of the Century and Scrabble. Charlie Tuna, the announcer here, also did Scrabble, and his voice is one of my favorites.

Another Reg Grundy staple comes after John says that the prize package is worth $24,000. The resultant “Yeah! Woo! OW! Wow!” crowd noise was used with unapologetic frequency on Grundy shows. Which is an odd production choice, because it sounds artificial from the first time you hear it—even as a kid I found it weird that the same people went “Yeah! Woo! OW!” every time a jackpot was announced. Not knowing the concept of audio “sweetening,” I presumed they were show staffers who reacted the same way every time. (It never occurred to me that something on television would be fake, heaven forfend.)

Further viewing:

• Part two and part three of the above episode.
• Another episode, in not quite the same sparkling quality, but watchable: part one, two, three.