Bill Cullen, who at the time was hosting the show that preceded Password Plus on NBC, Chain Reaction, filled in until Ludden returned a month later.
[1] Ludden left the program again in late October 1980 due to further health problems and was replaced by Tom Kennedy.
)[1] Ludden made no further television appearances before his death on June 9, 1981, and Kennedy hosted the remainder of the series.
Johnny Olson, Bob Hilton, John Harlan, and Rich Jeffries substituted for Wood on different occasions on Password Plus.
"Cashword" was an additional bonus on Super Password played by the winner of the second puzzle for an accumulating cash jackpot.
The contestant had 60 seconds to guess 10 passwords beginning with consecutive letters of the alphabet (e.g., "A" through "J"), with the celebrity giving one-word clues as in the main game.
Coinciding with the changes made to the front game in 1981, for each time Alphabetics was not won, $5,000 was added to the jackpot.
Super Password's bonus round was also played for the same accumulating jackpot as in the final months of the Plus run.
Milton Bradley made an eight-track cartridge version of the game for its OMNI Entertainment System.
A Super Password video game was released for MS-DOS, Apple II, and Commodore 64 by Gametek in 1988.
Password Plus was first shown at 12:30 pm ET/11:30 am CT and PT, filling part of the time left when the talk/variety program America Alive!
On March 5, 1979, two months after its debut, the series made its first time slot move to Noon/11:00 am following the cancellation of NBC’s revival of Jeopardy!.
On June 20, 1980, three other NBC game shows were canceled to make room for David Letterman's morning talk show and in the shuffle that followed, Password Plus was moved on August 4, 1980 to 11:30/10:30 when the daytime drama The Doctors moved from 2:00/1:00 to 12:30/11:30 (this time facing the second half-hours of CBS' The Price Is Right and reruns of The Love Boat on ABC), with Card Sharks taking the Noon/11:00 slot on June 23, 1980, replacing Chain Reaction.
The program returned in September 1984 as Super Password and aired in the noon Eastern time slot, facing, for its first two weeks, the then 8-year-old Family Feud, then Ryan's Hope on ABC.
[6] In January 1988, a man later discovered to be a previously convicted felon with active warrants for his arrest appeared on Super Password.
[7] Kerry Ketchem, who competed on the program under the name "Patrick Quinn", won a total of $58,600 in cash over four days on Super Password, which included a record-tying $55,000 jackpot win in the bonus round.
Ketchem's arrest came as the result of an investigation started when a bank manager in Anchorage, Alaska, called the United States Secret Service after having seen his episodes.
He was discovered to have outstanding fraud warrants in Alaska and Indiana, and producer Robert Sherman was contacted by the Secret Service shortly thereafter.
Around the same time, Ketchem—claiming that he was leaving the country on work-related business—called Mark Goodson Productions and asked if he could collect his winnings in person instead of having a check mailed to him, which is the usual standard procedure.
When Ketchem showed up to the Goodson offices he ran down eleven flights of stairs and was apprehended and taken into custody by local officials after being found in the restroom.
[8] Booked on the outstanding Indiana warrant, Ketchem was found to have used his "Patrick Quinn" alias (which came from the name of one of Ketchem's college professors) to commit credit card fraud in Alaska;[8] to defraud a used car dealer; and to collect illegally on an insurance policy on the life of his ex-wife.