Farewell Millionaire Hot Seat; It ends in January 2024

I was wondering why Australia, one of the very first countries to buy the license of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, they had one of the most distinctive thing which was different compared to most of the other versions of WWTBAM, the catchphrase... Is there anybody who has the same thought like me? All the time when the classic format started in 1999 and then the Hot Seat format came up after, when a contestant was about to confirm the answer to a question, you know what they have to say, right? FINAL ANSWER, that's the most common sentence we can see in most version of WWTBAM around the world. However, in Australia, they use... "LOCK IT IN", just a simple word to simply lock an answer in like every other game show you may see. However, it's the word"FINAL ANSWER" which makes the show unique since it became a catchphrase that if someone's mentioning it, people will know that they are talking about "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" right away, if you what I mean. It is just simply the crucial part which can't be missed in any version of WWTBAM.

However, the Australian version didn't follow the tradition. As you can see most of the time, the host of the Aussie version, Eddie McGuire, literally simplified that unique and traditional catchphrase and turned it into the common one that you may hear in most of the quiz shows when a host wants to confirm a contestant's answer by asking whether they want to lock it in or not, and in this case, it was exactly "Lock it in", and not "Final Answer". I don't know why there's a case in a country like Australia while most countries in the world whose franchise of WWTBAM followed the original UK version with "Final Answer" in their own languages. Therefore, I thought that this was also a thing all of the countries which bought the format of WWTBAM must follow when running WWTBAM, but the Aussie version was absolutely an exception. (And not only the catchphrase, but the graphics as well when it was in the early years of Aussie WWTBAM. I didn't know why they made the graphics look so different to the original UK version either. However, I want to talk about the catchphrase at the moment, so I can't focus much on this, but I still want to know some reasons why this change applied in Australia)

In more than twenty years of hosting WWTBAM, both classic and hot seat format, Eddie McGuire always asked a contestant when they're about to confirm their answer to a question, which is "Lock it in?". This made Aussie people who attended WWTBAM as a contestant or simply were audiences at home or in the live studio feel familiar with it instead of the one which was supposed to be "Final Answer" and Aussie people may never know how meaningful "Final Answer " is to this legendary quiz show.

Talking about the use of "Final Answer" in Australia, not all Australian don't know about this catchphrase, Martin Flood
did say that most of the time he confirmed the answer to a question. However, the use of this catchphrase by Martin Flood was interrupted when Eddie asked Martin again "Final Answer, is it locked in?" in Martin's 14th question even though he had already said "Final Answer" which had already been the usual catchphrase used to confirm the answer of the contestant. This caused Martin to say "Lock in" to confirm the answer to his 15th question. About Eddie McGuire, he did ask contestants a couple of times using the popular catchphrase "Final Answer", but it's not that common in the Classic format that Australian viewers didn't have much impression about it. Usually after using "Final Answer" in one question, Eddie went back asking contestant to "Lock it in?" in the one after that. In the Hot Seat version, "Final Answer" was used more commonly by Eddie. However, to most Australian contestants who attended Millionaire Hot Seat, the fact this legendary catchphrase was spoken by Eddie tended to be a threat telling that the contestant would be wrong if they went for the answer they were about to choose and made them change their mind. This case was very common in Millionaire Hot Seat (MHS) and we can see in a lot of MHS episodes when Eddie asked contestants "Final Answer?", they would probably change their mind right then, some contestants who didn't notice it and fell for the answer that Eddie asked to confirm by using "Final Answer?" were usually wrong. However, when they were asked "Lock it in?", they would still be confident in the answer they chose even though it was actually the wrong answer. Australian are just too accustomed to using the simple word "Lock it in" in WWTBAM, so if they are asked with a catchphrase which seems unusual for them, especially for the first time, they may not acknowledge it and feel confused and in many cases in MHS, contestants literally answered "Yeah, just... lock it in!"

In the end, I can't believe that the most unique and recognizable catchphrase in Who Wants to be a Millionaire, one of the most popular trivia quiz shows, "Final Answer", the catchphrase which was supposed to be a vital part and the spirit of WWTBAM of all time, was literally missed in Australia! You might hardly find any countries running their WWTBAM version using any catchphrase other than "Final Answer", and once people hear that catchphrase anytime or anywhere, they will immediately think of WWTBAM. However, during all the time of running WWTBAM in Australia (1999-2023), they only sticked with "Lock it in, Eddie" and would only acknowledge this catchphrase when talking about WWTBAM and not "Final Answer". Moreover, "Lock in" is even more common and it is used in many trivia quiz shows, and in game shows it is just simply a fact that a contestant confirms the answer they are about to choose and doesn't even make any catchphrase, so the fact that "Final Answer" wasn't used in Aussie WWTBAM not only made Aussie viewers feel this unique catchphrase unusual to them and hard to recognize WWTBAM, but it also seriously decreased the uniqueness and specialty of WWTBAM and made WWTBAM seem to be just a normal trivia quiz show like any other one run in Australia. Now, WWTBAM is currently in hiatus in Australia, I don't know if they will revive or not in the future and if not, will Australian people still remember there's an amazing, fascinating, exciting and unique trivia quiz show aired on Nine Network from 1999 to 2023 like WWTBAM or not in the long future, but in the end I would say that "Final Answer" is one of the most crucial thing in Australia that Australian people has seriously missed and might be completely absent in any talks or medias writing about WWTBAM in Australia at present and in the future.

(P/S: jk but PLEASE DON'T TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY IF YOU WANT TO READ THIS PART, jokes only...

I think if I were asked to find an Australian among a group of international people, I would ask all of the people in the group if they watched WWTBAM and the catchphrase used in their own countries and the answers would mostly be "Final Answer" or at least the one which had the closest meaning to "Final Answer", and by that way I could find the only one who answered it was "Lock it in!", which I would immediately know that person was Australian. )

No, it isn't. "Final Answer" wasn't popular because it was in very early episodes when WWTBAM aired, so they couldn't think of any catchphrase to make it unique back then. And of course, you can see in very early episodes, Chris would simply ask contestants kind like "You want to go with that answer?". However, if you watch some episodes which were a little bit later, you will see Chris started asking "Final Answer" to contestants and see him doing that a couple of times, then, in late 1998, "Final Answer?" started to be used more commonly by Chris, and in the early 1999, it was mostly asked in every question when a contestant would like to play them, and it was even before the launch of WWTBAM in Australia on April 18, 1999. So obviously it's"Final Answer" that became the first ever catchphrase to be used in WWTBAM.

Well, it is understandable that in some countries where English is not their main language, they may not be able to apply the catchphrase in the exact meaning of their language, for example, in Italy, the host asks a contestant when the contestant wants to choose an answer kind like "Would you like to turn it on?" or "You want to make it orange?", basically illustrating the fact that the host wants to confirm the contestant's answer, or in the case in some countries like France when Jean-Pierre asks "C'est votre dernier mot?" means "Is that your last word", not exactly the same catchphrase but it has a close meaning to "is that your final answer?". However, they still noticed the "Final Answer" catchphrase and did ask contestants a couple of times using the catchphrase in their own language. And in the Greek version that greekmillionairefan mentioned, that is also applied, although it was somehow affected by the Hot Seat format adoptation which caused the catchphrase to become different from that time to even its recent classic format revival, I believe that Greece still had a good adoptation of the "Final Answer" catchphrase at the time of classic format back then before its launch of the Hot Seat format and so did other non-English-speaking countries. And it will still be OK even if they don't use the "Final Answer" catchphrase and make some adjustments which are based on the original one.

However, the Australia is not the case. It is one of the well-known countries which had their version of WWTBAM. Moreover, it's also an English-speaking country, so adoptation has no difficulty at all, I mean even many non-English-speaking countries were able to adopt the catchphrase pretty easily, why couldn't Australia? Didn't they want to make WWTBAM become unique by using that catchphrase? I don't think it's because of their laziness or because they were unwilling to adopt it, "Final Answer" are just 2 simple words that you could say very easily. You can see most of English-speaking countries which run their WWTBAM version(US, New Zealand, Canada, Nigeria, Ireland,...) apllied the exact catchphrase from the original UK version, which is "Final Answer" when their host confirm contestants' answer to a question, but Australia is a complete exception and maybe the only English-speaking country which didn't adopt and use this catchphrase that often. I've watched a video about the Australian '90s game show quick looking back and there were some people interviewed about WWTBAM and asked about what catchphrase in WWTBAM that they liked, most of them answered "It was "Lock it in, Eddie!" and "Can I phone a friend?"". I will put the link of that video here so you can know further: youtu.be/FUm5fuYBeNM?si=16iyeRJGuDFwU6U-

Um, I think he only screwed a little bit up about the lifelines and at the time he started hosting WWTBAM, he was 68, kinda old, so he might not be able to do exactly all the same things as the original UK version, like remembering the respective order of lifelines when explaining rules to contestants, and because of that, US producers might have allowed Regis to introduce and explain the rules in his way that he feel it's his best but still followed the tradition of the UK version, it's still those 3 lifelines that are explained to contestants, though in the wrong order, but no changes were made for those lifelines, so that's still fine. Furthermore, the fact that Regis introducing lifelines is only a part of the explaining rules procedure of the WWTBAM host, which is done only for instructing contestants how to play WWTBAM, and it's the part that people may skip whenever the host introduces the rules since it's just pretty simple, 15 questions with 3 lifelines, no more or less, which people are really used to with and may not care about that much if they have watched WWTBAM for a few episodes before and already known the rules. It's just a little part of a small procedure that doesn't cause a problem, there's nearly no difference between the way the host introduce the rules in UK and the US apart from the wrong order of lifelines. Even though the wrong order of lifelines was a basic mistake made by Regis, I believe people don't mind about that much and the main thing people would expect is the gameplay of contestants, how far they could go and most importantly, what Regis Philbin did and how he reacted to his contestants and audiences on WWTBAM. It's more than anything else that people can expect in every single episodes of the US version of WWTBAM. And no matter what the problem is, Regis Philbin is still reputated to be a legend and GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), one of the greatest hosts ever known in WWTBAM's history.