Nickelodeon's daytime slate was still green slime, game shows, and cartoons for kids too old for Sesame Street but too young for prime-time comedy. At 8 PM, the kids' network signed off, the "When it's nighttime across the nation" bumper rolled, and the channel became something else: TV Land before TV Land had a channel of its own.
The original days of Nick at Nite. What a time to be alive.
That week the usual sitcom rotation stepped aside. Bewitched, The Donna Reed Show, Mister Ed, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and Green Acres took a hiatus. In their place was 140 straight episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and a contest that asked America to sit there with a pen and paper and count the corpses.
It was Nick at Nite's Dead Giveaway contest.
The closing night of the marathon is still on YouTube if you look for Sunday, November 4, 1990. The contest ran into the early hours of the 5th. Between episodes, they dropped the usual Nick bumpers, plus a contest hosted by Wink Martindale, the game show host.
As you watched, you tallied up the number of people who "croaked" before calling in to a 1-800 number. Thirteen correct guesses went into a drawing and won a murder-mystery dinner cruise. One prize the network wanted to hand out never made it past legal.
This is not so much an article about Hitchcock as about peak early-90s Nick at Nite peculiarity. The same network had already thrown a 140-episode Donna-thon earlier that May. You have to appreciate the moment when a kids' network's nighttime block could still get away with gallows humor, a game-show legend slumming in cable bumpers, and a contest that required you to watch.
Early Nick at Nite treated ancient reruns like must-see events. The Super Bowl of classic TV every night.
By Halloween 1990, Nick at Nite was five years old and already a cable folk hero. Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman of Fred/Alan built it in 1985 from an old-radio idea: package vintage sitcoms the way a great FM station packaged oldies, and people will treat the packaging as the show.
The early IDs were short, strange, and proud. "Hello out there from TV Land," and "Better Living Through Television" were two of the memorable firsts. Images revolved around a warped '50s and '60s nostalgia: a homemaker with a vacuum, hula dancers, beauty-pageant winners. The tone was always affectionate and slightly unhinged, like an MTV appeal applied to Dobie Gillis.
In a world without streaming libraries or cheap box-set DVDs, marathons were the house specialty. Seibert and Goodman had seen radio stations lock the studio doors and play every Beethoven symphony, and they figured television could do the same with a sitcom library. Marathons weren't a brand-new idea; they just knew the trick would play if the show was beloved and hard to catch anywhere else.
In May 1990, Nick proved the point with the Donna-thon: 140 consecutive episodes of The Donna Reed Show over seven nights, plus a publicity stunt that sent a small army of Donna clones marching down Michigan Avenue with brooms. Entertainment Weekly called the campaign "witty, outrageous, and impossible to overlook."
Alfred Hitchcock Presents had only joined the lineup that August. These episodes were half-hour black-and-white crime stories from 1955–1962, hosted by a silhouette of the mystery master while Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette" played.
It did not look or feel like Mister Ed, and Nick at Nite sold the mismatch as the joke.
A later Nick at Nite promo, from a 1991 Hitchcock block of programming (not the 1990 marathon week itself), put it bluntly. "When they added Hitchcock to the family, a few people laughed, but not for long. Donna [Reed ]'s lamb surprise always hits the spot. So does Hitchcock. Steve Douglas has his favorite pipe. Hitchcock too. And just like Dobie, Hitch opens every show with a friendly greeting. Bang. You're dead."
Halloween was the obvious week to stop pretending this was just another classic show in a rotation packed with classics.
Nickstory's programming log dates the Dead Give-a-Way marathon as held from the evening of October 29th through the early morning hours of November 5th. At 140 episodes, it matches the Donna-thon's episode count and the same stunt logic. Just a wildly different temperature.
The surviving promos, almost word for word, read:
Watch as much Hitchcock as you can. Keep track of those dead bodies! Estimate how many you think will die in the entire 140-episode marathon. Call 1-800-235-DEAD with your name, address, phone number, and guess. Every correct guess goes into a drawing. Thirteen winners get a murder-mystery dinner cruise.
If anyone is brave enough to dial that number today, please report back in the comments. The last thing I read wasn't a "family-friendly" number anymore.
Unlike today, there wasn't a QR code or an extra app to download. No online forms or official running tally on a website that required a log-in code to be texted to your phone. If you wanted a shot at the cruise, you had to watch and physically count each and every murder (or just be super lucky at guessing).
Several recruited friends and family and assigned them times to split up the watching duties. The special 1-800 number stayed open until the event ended.
"So come on," Wink Martindale encouraged everyone. "Take a STAB at it."
Correct guesses only were entered into a random drawing. Each of the 13 winners and a guest would be flown to Los Angeles to join "TV Land stars" on a murder-mystery dinner cruise. The ads did not specify whether the flight was round-trip, but hopefully it was.
A 1991 recap later circulated by nostalgia-heads and collectors put the cruise itself on June 15.
Wink ran the interstitials.
By 1990 he was already a game-show institution from Gambit, Tic-Tac-Dough, and High Rollers, plus a stack of car commercials and other ads. Yet, here he was in 1990 working cable bumpers between Bewitched pre-emptions and Ritz Bits cheese sandwiches. He leaned into the joke the way a professional host leans into any prize, which made the writing even funnier.
On a tape from November 4th that still circulates the interwebs, he says: "Boy, a lot of people sure have died tonight on Al Hitchcock Presents, haven't they? Some horribly, but they haven't died in vain because they can turn you into a winner." Then, after reading the rules again, Wink asks you to estimate how many people "who, well, croak. Watch every show, or take a shot in the dark."
Wikipedia, citing promo language from the era, has him comparing the whole thing to guessing the jelly beans in a jar, "but instead of jelly beans, you're using cadavers."
The network told you, repeatedly, that the usual product was off the air. "Nick at Nite's usual TV Land's Happy Endings will not be seen this week." Instead, they offered endings of a different sort. One hundred forty straight episodes "coming to haunt your Halloween week with endings that go twist in the night. All night, every night."
The TV Land Weather Report
A "TV Land Weather" interstitial forecast showed warm, mild patterns (the classic sitcoms) giving way to cold and dark (Hitchcock). "Look for some partly dead patches with a 30 percent chance of murder and an almost unbearable increase in suspense."
Viewers were advised to lock the windows, stay indoors, and watch Nick at Nite.
The pre-emption bumpers were half the entertainment, and sometimes sharper than the episode they were interrupting.
Some claimed that Dobie Gillis will not be seen tonight "because sinister influences are working against him." Others informed viewers that "Donna Reed won't be seen tonight. Did anything tragic happen to her? Heck no. She'll be back next week."
A 1991 write-up of the Dead Giveaway (preserved now mainly in collector notes and YouTube comments on the surviving uploads) mentioned an early prize idea that legal and standards killed.
A family burial plot in the cemetery of your choice.
Too macabre, even for a Hitchcock body-count contest that ran over Halloween on late-night cable. They went with the mystery cruise instead.
Nick at Nite, especially in 1990, was willing to joke about cadavers, people "croaking" and happy endings (not that kind) being canceled in favor of mystery and shocking twists. It was also willing to put 1-800-235-DEAD on the screen and let a slick game show host tell you the victims had not died in vain... because you could enjoy a nice vacation thanks to their demise!
However, I guess a burial plot was too much of a line to cross. While fairly expensive to purchase yourself, it's not quite the prize worth watching television over. The line sat exactly where a kids' network could still stand in 1990... a bit past good taste but a step short of a lawyer's angry letter.
The whole cruise idea lands better once you know the burial plot came first.
Looking back, there is a Hitchcock joke buried in the rejected prize, whether anyone noticed at the time or not. Hitchcock's last film, in 1976, was titled Family Plot.
If you want to feel the full texture of the week, start searching for the long aircheck. You can find some on YouTube (I've added some here). These come from collector tapes from the final night (November 4th, 1990).
The video above features an hour-long (or longer) compilation of the show, including commercial breaks.
The videos below are a two-part "Dead Give-a-Way (Promos, Bumpers, and IDs)" set.
Part One
Part Two
These people are truly saints. They are also the reason the week still feels watchable in 2026. You're not just getting Hitchcock; you are getting the whole cable evening. Commercials from Frigidaire and Liquid-Plumr, Ritz Bitz, Columbia House, the Christian Children's Fund, and even an MTV 24-Hour Street Party promo. The short-lived HA! comedy network advertises a "24 Hour Mork-A-Thon" for Mork and Mindy, while Nick's own "Brand Reruns" campaign with Adam West. There's also Wink Martindale again, and again, and again.
On that last night, a continuity voice notes the scoreboard: 131 episodes so far, only nine more to go to complete all 140. If you have been taping "this exclusive twisted week in television history, you no doubt have gone through a lot of tape."
They even scheduled the three-part "I Killed the Count" back-to-back and in order, "because if we show them out of order, it wouldn't make any sense." Well, yeah, obviously. Someone at Nick-at-Nite decided to treat a 1950s mystery three-parter like THE must-see event television.
Adding to the difficulty of the contest, a death in Alfred Hitchcock Presents is not always simple. People die off-screen. People are already dead when the episode starts. People appear to die but then sit up or turn up later in the episode. Animals die (do they count as a "body?") Implied bodies turn up in trunks or closets. Do you count the man who dies after the fade-out because Hitch just told you so in the closer?
The contest never published rules. Only "Keep track of those dead bodies." The drawing only needed some people to land on the same number Nick's own counter had used.
Everyone else was free to argue about the lamb in "Lamb to the Slaughter." And speaking of the lamb, renowned vegetarian Casey Kasem, while hosting Nick at Nite's 1990 Rerun Countdown that New Year's Eve, paused on that exact episode and objected to murder by frozen leg of lamb. He said he would have gone with frozen peas or a summer squash. Not a real knee-slapper... but a nice connection between two Nick "big events" in the same year.
The series earned the marathon. Alfred Hitchcock Presents ran 268 half-hour episodes, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour added 93 more. The original run features people you already knew from other shows on Nick at Nite: Barbara Bel Geddes, Walter Matthau, Dick York, Gena Rowlands, Steve McQueen on the way up, a young Robert Redford, Vera Miles. The stories are neat as a pin and mean as a bear trap.
In one, a woman beats her husband to death with the dinner she then cooks for the detective. In another, a man bets his lighter against his finger. A housewife's perfect day curdles. Hitch walks out at the end and undercuts the moral lesson, or invents a sponsor-friendly "they were all arrested later" that everyone in the room knows is a lie.
That last part is why the show fit the network better than it first appeared. Nick at Nite's whole act was sincerity with a raised eyebrow and innuendo that only part of the room gets.
In each episode, Hitchcock really is serving a little morality play about greed or some other deadly sin. He is also telling you the corpse was a very good sport for playing dead.
Dead Giveaway just made the raised eyebrow the official contest.
Going forward from the Dead Giveaway contest, Nick learned a new move that it would use for nearly twenty more years. When a new (old) show arrives on the network, they didn't ease it into the schedule and hope people notice.
They drown the audience in it.
Dragnet got "Friday's Friday" that December. Newhart later got a "Bob's Bob, Bob Newhart, Newhart" pileup of episodes. Lucille Ball got "A Whole Lotta Lucy."
Hitchcock got Halloween and a body count. Same trick, worked every time.
If, like me, you already have a fond spot for Nick at Nite in this era, Dead Giveaway is the Halloween chapter of a book that includes the Donna-thon, Dixie the Pixie, Brand Reruns, How to Be Swell spots, and the long season when Dick Van Dyke was named honorary chairman of the entire network and nobody blinked an eye.
A Collection of 1990 Nick at Nite Promos and Bumpers
The stunt was not just nostalgia as comfort. It was nostalgia as a dare. Can Nick at Nite make you sit through 140 episodes of something your parents only half-remember? Can the network make the ads and bumpers funnier than the show? Can they take an aging game show host and have him talk about dead bodies without being canceled?
In 1990, the answer was yes. A few years later, Nickelodeon would spin TV Land off into its own network. The jokes got cleaner, and the sitcom library got younger. Things like the 1-800 contest would look like a museum piece.
That's fine, I guess. This site itself is a dedication to museum pieces.
In all of this, though, did you catch the one thing that you cannot glean from the surviving tapes and advertisements, and what no recap has ever published with absolute confidence?
The total number of dead bodies.
The surviving promos never read the total on air, and the 1991 recap that mentions the burial plot and the cruise does not include the body count either.
Somewhere, in some corporate archive, is an intern's spreadsheet. Perhaps the winner is still out there who knows the actual number.
Until that final number turns up, the Dead Giveaway contest and Alfred Hitchcock keep one last secret.
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