Now You See It

Now You See It was an Australian children's game show that aired on the Seven Network from 1985–1993. It is based on the US show of the same title and was originally hosted by Mike Meade from 1985 and 1990 and "co-hosted" by a robot named "Melvin", who was a Tomy Omnibot toy, and pitted individual children against each other. The show's narrator, and original operator and voice of Melvin, from 1985 to 1988, was Brisbane-based New Zealand-born radio announcer and voice-over artist, Phil Darkins. Melvin's uncle Morton (another, much more primitive-looking Omnibot) had his own segment on the show entitled "Morton's Mouldy Movies", in which Morton would comically narrate stories in a grandfatherly voice accompanied by black-and-white footage from silent film shorts. The original grandfatherly voice of Morton was performed by Phil Darkins (1985-1988) and included quick-fire 'live conversations' between Mike Meade, the narrator (Darkins), Melvin (Darkins) and Morton (Darkins), which required quite some vocal dexterity. From 1991, the show was hosted by Sofie Formica, and ran as a week-long competition between two primary schools. The winning students in each episode would win individual prizes, and the overall winning school would win a larger prize, typically valued at around $2,000. In 1998, Becker Entertainment, along with Fremantle Ltd. (then known as FremantleMedia), revived the show. Broadcast on the Nine Network, it was hosted by Scott MacRae and produced by Tony Ryan, with Bill Davidson as Executive Producer. In 2000, the show was replaced with another game show, titled Download, which was also hosted by MacRae. Format