He worked on the production and research staff of ABC game shows, The Big Showdown and The Money Maze, writing questions for the later about popular music.
Blumenthal led the initial team responsible for the music channel, producing its first pilot program with director Glenn Gordon Caron.
For Wiley, he developed and produced a product line for sophisticated business customers; topics included personal finance, creativity and innovation, power and authority, and high-level corporate strategy.
For Parker Brothers, Blumenthal developed a computer game to demonstrate the cooperative thinking skills provided by various parts of the brain.
[3] Early work as a television producer resulted in various series for Warner and its QUBE network, including a popular movie game show, Screen Test.
As Showtime attempted to compete with fast-growing competitor HBO, the U.S.’s second largest pay TV network invested in entertainment specials and the re-staging of Broadway shows.
Completed works in this domain include The Me Nobody Knows, a musical whose lyrics were written by inner-city children, presented by James Earl Jones; The Passion of Dracula; Spectacular Scandinavia!, featuring ABBA and Victor Borge at Tivoli Gardens; and Richiardi's Chamber of Horror & Illusion, hosted by Vincent Price.
For MTV, the 24/7 format was broken by Remote Control, its first half hour series, developed by Joe DaVola, Lauren Corrao, Michael Duggan and Blumenthal, who appears on the program's credits as "high-priced consultant."
[citation needed] From 1990 until 1994, Blumenthal served as project lead for Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, produced for PBS by WGBH, Boston and WQED, Pittsburgh.
[4] Based upon the computer game published by Broderbund, the series presented three "gumshoe" contestants in a fantasy detective office, attempting to track down animated gang members who stole, for example, the Eiffel Tower.
He also supervised production, and served as story editor, for Cartoon Network's first original series, The Moxy Pirate Show, produced by using then-new motion capture technology, featuring the voices of Bobcat Goldthwait and Penn Jillette.
The column reported and commented on consumer electronics products, music, photography, digital literacy, and changes in the media landscape.
The column appeared regularly in over 100 newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Plain Dealer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Cincinnati Enquirer, and many Gannett papers.
The Complete Time Traveler: A Tourist's Guide to the Fourth Dimension, was written with Dorothy Curley and Brad Williams, and was among the first illustrated books to be produced with desktop publishing software (Aldus PageMaker, later reworked as Adobe InDesign).