On This Day…

Johnny Carson Saves Twister

May 3, 1966

The game Twister strikes gold when Johnny Carson plays the game on The Tonight Show with actress Eva Gabor, star of TV’s Green Acres. Up to then sales of the game were slow as many stores felt the game was too risqué and refused to carry it. Sales were so slow the game was about to be pulled from the market. However, the day after Carson and Gabor played it on TV, people were lining up at stores asking for the game and 3,000,000 were sold the following year.
Twister was originally going to be called “Pretzel”, but that name was already being used for a toy dog.