Jack Barry (March 20, 1918-May 2, 1984) was an American television game show host and producer.
Barry was born in Lindenhurst, New York. He began his television career with partner Dan Enright in the 1950s. During that time, he had hosted Tic Tac Dough and Twenty One on NBC. In 1958, on one episode of 21, a game between contestants Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel was found to have been rigged. The 1994 movie Quiz Show was based on this incident.
Enright had left for Canada after the quiz show scandals while Barry headed out west to California. He purchased a radio station in the Los Angeles area. In the late 1960s, Barry found work again on ABC, hosting The Generation Gap. In 1969, Barry produced a pilot for a new show, The Joker's Wild, hosted by Allen Ludden. CBS held off on picking up the series at first, because the format did not impress them. Barry would go on to rework the format, and he put a local version on KTLA before the show debuted nationwide on CBS in 1972. He hosted and produced Joker until CBS canceled the show in 1975.
Barry would later reunite with Enright, and they produced Break the Bank, hosted by Tom Kennedy, then later Barry, both versions in 1976. That fall, Barry would sell reruns of the final season of the network run of The Joker's Wild to several stations, including WOR-TV in New York City and KTLA in Los Angeles. After an entire year of reruns with high ratings, new episodes of The Joker's Wild were produced for first-run syndication, once again hosted by Barry, in the fall of 1977. The new episodes were so successful that Barry and Enright went on to revive Tic Tac Dough, with new host Wink Martindale, a year later. Other Barry and Enright productions of the late 1970s and early 1980s included Bullseye, Play the Percentages , Hot Potato, and Hollywood Connection . They also produced several unsold pilots such as Decisions, Decisions and an attempted Twenty One revival.
After the seventh syndicated season of Joker, Jack Barry died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 66 while jogging through Central Park in New York. He is buried in Los Angeles.
Sony Pictures Entertainment now owns the rights to the Barry & Enright programs, and reruns of their shows have aired on GSN.
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Last updated: 05-21-2005 20:13:16