No matter their costumes, the secretaries usually wore a pair of glasses with large round frames, one of the show's trademarks.

The "negative" cast consisted of characters from a fictional town called Tacañón del Todo (English: Complete Misers).

When a contestant gave a mistaken or repeated answer, a member of the negative cast stopped the clock immediately and the couple's time was over.

For example, contestants might be required to fill wine glasses sitting on a tray and then slide down a slide, and the winner would be the couple with the highest amount of liquid accumulated in a jar, or they might be required to climb structures like buildings, strings or poles faster than their rivals, or they could also have to wear clothes of the opposite sex and walk through a cat walk in front of a jury that would vote the funniest couple.

They could also lose money from the question round if they did not have luck, and usually there was a goal in the game which if reached gave the contestants a jackpot that was increased each week it was not won.

These games were more simple in their rules (usually simply choosing some numbers or letters from the sponsor's name), but the potential prizes were drastically increased.

When an item was discarded, the host would read the complete card, including the text beyond the point where they had stopped earlier, revealing a prize the contestants had passed up.

Prizes ranged from cars, apartments, travels, money, jewels... to thousands of matches, used tyres and bottles of laxative (a couple of contestants even ended up winning their own tombs on a cemetery of their choice).

An example of a card with this system is this one, from a 1991 episode dedicated to the Stock Exchange, found in a newspaper about the Great Crash: In a program dedicated to the stock exchange, there could not fail to be a mention to the terrific fall of the American stock exchange in 1929, the famous Great Crash [crack in Spanish] that sank economy in the United States...[end of clue]...The same way there had to be a reference to the Crash of 1929, in "Un, dos, tres", we are also forced to remember that in the past season, one of our mascots had exactly that name, El Crack... and here you've got it!...[pause]...

When the host reached the top offer or the contestants decided to accept the money, the prize they had won or lost was revealed.

Inspired on this, for the second season José Luis Moro drew and Narciso Ibáñez Serrador voiced a cartoon pumpkin named Ruperta that sang every week the show's main theme song in the title sequence.

For example, the biggest prize ever won in the history of the show was hidden in Ruperta: a car, an apartment in Xàbia, a yacht and a check worth 5 million pesetas (€30,000).

El Chollo (English: The Bargain) was a pink, pear-shaped creature who wore a top hat, leg warmers, a cape and a cane.

However, the idea of a positive mascot did not sit well with the viewers, so a negative counterpart was soon introduced in the form of Chollo's 'evil twin', El Antichollo.

Boom was an orange, pink-haired, frog-like creature who wore a brown tuxedo, boater hat and a cane.

Their function in the auction was identical to Chollo and Antichollo before them: Boom gave the contestants the possibility of winning whichever prize they chose, while Crack meant leaving empty-handed.

Un, dos, tres... responda otra vez premiered on April 24, 1972, hosted by Kiko Ledgard [es].

In the first episode, Don Cicuta bid farewell to the audience (Valentin Tornos was already very ill and would eventually die months later) and new characters took over his role.

This singing pumpkin was named Ruperta, and after Don Cicuta's disappearance, it became the most famous trademark in the history of the show, staying for years.

In 1980, the show's host, Kiko Ledgard, had a near-lethal accident, and though he survived, the brain damage he sustained spelled the end of his entertainment career.

The following week, a new mascot, Botilde the boot, replaced Ruperta, a new title sequence with a new main theme song was released and the new secretaries also came on board.

In the first episodes they were sat in the public's front row and in later episodes they were locked in a separated room decorated like a dungeon, and there they would watch the auction from a screen, while the secretaries gave them information written in signboards about where the best prizes were hiding (sometimes, subtitles on screen informed the viewers about what the suffering contestants were reading).

The negative cast was also replaced by a new character, called Eugenia Enchufols Deltot, who was an old whiner secretary with no relation with Tacañón del Todo.

Before each episode, a notary randomly assigned a number to each of the prizes appearing on it, writing them to a list, and then selected a letter similar to the ones sent by suffering contestants at the studio.

On this season, he would bury a coffin with elements and attrezzo of the show inside; a gloomy scene that became a classic on Spanish television.

Only for this season the show returned to Mondays, and it achieved the highest ratings ever with nearly 25 million viewers, more than half of the population in Spain.

In this season, the rules of the question round were brought back to the original ones from seasons one to three, only with the difference of letting the contestants choose on the third question a specific topic among four, which were "Art & Literature", "Geography & History", "Sports, Games & Entertainment", and "Science & Nature", and the envelopes would be in four piles so that they could choose the envelope from the preferred topic.

One of Las Hurtado Sisters, Paloma, could not join the negative cast on the first months because she had been accidentally shot in the face weeks before the launch of the season and was recovering from the surgery.

She was replaced by two actresses, Merce Comes and Vicky Plana, who joined the remaining Hurtado sisters, until Paloma returned in January, 1994, with great fanfare and the applause of all the public and members of the cast.

The last episode was dedicated to "The big boom" and the sets were all symbolically blown up, putting a definitive end to the show.