Honor students shine in new ‘Millionaire’ quiz show

LAST May 15, we had a fun time watching the comeback staging of the popular quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” on TV5, especially because its contestants were young honor students.

While the questions’ degree of difficulty was appropriately reduced, some of them were still difficult for the young contestants to figure out or divine — and, more to the point, even for their adult resource persons when they resorted to the “Phone a Friend” lifeline.

So it was a testament to the young contestants’ “smarts” and lucky hunches that the first two of them went home with P100,000 and P250,000, respectively. Even more affectingly, it looked like some of the kids really needed the money — why, one of them even had to share one pair of shoes with an older sister, they were that strapped for cash.

While the show did share the young contestants’ tales of woe, it was to the production’s credit that it did so simply without resorting to bathos and excessive heart-tugging. In addition, the kids earned our respect by not riding on their poverty to win viewers over.

They were simply smart kids who came up with the right answers — and ended up winning a lot of money for themselves and their families.

In fact, if they spend or invest their winnings well, they could turn out to be life-changers, and that would really be a blessing to behold!

Good with kids

Quizmaster Vic Sotto should be congratulated for giving the show the right combination of wry humor and authority. It turns out that he’s particularly good with kids, so the production should continue featuring young contestants for a few more weeks.

To be fair to the contestants, however, the production should give more time to its “Phone a Friend” lifeline. Last May 15, all of the resource persons failed to be of any help, because time had run out on them.

New lifelines like “Ask the Audience” and “Switch to Another Question” proved to be more helpful, so they should be retained.

We daresay, however, that some of the questions asked last May 15 were too difficult for young contestants to answer correctly, like the name of the first space satellite (Sputnik 1), simply because the events they were associated with happened too long ago for kids to be able to even hope to know. So, some updating is decidedly in order.

Having said that, however, we must share that a young contestant did get the correct answer to a question involving the art practiced by National Artist Napoleon Abueva (sculpture), just because “wala lang (lucky hunch).”

So, there’s that factor at work in “Millionaire,” too, and we trust that it’ll continue to kick in to help other needy kids make a lot of much-needed money for themselves and their loved ones, enough to turn their lives around.