Our ‘Wheel of Fortune’ Quiz is Worth a Spin

All-around media mogul Merv Griffin, who passed away in 2007, also created Jeopardy!, another hugely popular, long-running game show. In the 2007 book Merv: Making the Good Life Last, Griffin said Wheel of Fortune was inspired by games of hangman that he played with his sister during family trips.

Chuck Woolery,  who died in 2024, turned down the Wheel of Fortune hosting gig “two or three times” before finally accepting, according to a June 1977 article in  Billboard. The reason? He was much more interested in becoming a country music star at the time. (Woolery eventually left  Wheel in 1981 over a salary dispute.)

Pat Sajak bounced around broadcast jobs from the late 1960s until the late 1970s, when he landed a gig as a weather reporter for KNBC in Los Angeles. According to a June 2024 article by TV Insider, Merv Griffin saw Sajak doing the weather one evening and was impressed by his humorous approach to the job. Soon after, Griffin reached out to Sajak about the soon-to-be-open hosting gig on Wheel of Fortune. “Merv called me and said … ‘You ever think about doing game shows?’” Sajak told the Television Academy Foundation in an interview in 2007. The rest is TV history.

According to the Wheel of Fortune History Wiki, the tradition of the audience chanting “WHEEL…OF…FORTUNE!” began in August 1983, when the first nighttime show aired. Today, you can also hear the chant at casinos around the world thanks to the hugely popular slot machine version of Wheel of Fortune.

Rolf Benirschke, who spent most of his football career with the San Diego Chargers, hosted Wheel’s daytime version from January to June 1989 after Pat Sajak departed to host The Pat Sajak Show, his short-lived CBS late-night talk show. (Sajak continued to host the syndicated nighttime version until his retirement in 2024.)