Perhaps it’s a weird form of sadism, but we love when things go wrong on game shows. Not seriously wrong, like the Wheel of Fortune wheel spinning out of control and taking out half of the audience, but more like lapses in intelligence. As such, we can’t get enough of this video, in which a Price is Right model accidentally lets a woman win a new car.
And you see, if that would have been me on the show, the accident would have involved a complete lack of a “win” card, and I would have to walk away empty handed and confused. But for this woman, what a way to spend a day! As great as I feel for the contestant Andrea, though, I feel equally terrible for Manuela Arbelaez, whose extremely random game-ruiner hit her like a bag of emotional bricks. All while Drew Carey is laughing, because what else could be done there, really?
I’m also fairly certain that if I’d ever make a $20,000 mistake at any of the jobs I’ve ever had, I would have gotten windburn from being thrown out the door so quickly. Luckily, the team behind The Price is Right were forgiving, according to Arbelaez’s Twitter posts. As they should have been.
This isn’t the first time that a Price is Right mistake has allowed a contestant to walk away happy. Several years ago, the fan-favorite Plinko game was rigged for a commercial so that every drop was a $10,000 winner. And nobody set it back to normal before the next show taping, so someone ended up winning $30,000 before the crew figured out what was happening.
Just yesterday, the iconic former host Bob Barker returned to the show as part of an epic April Fools’ prank, so this is clearly a case of taking the bad with the good. Maybe next week a contestant will accidentally give Arbelaez a car.
