Pat Sajak and Vanna White tape a whole season in less than 40 days including road trips, promotions, and commercials.
As of 2019, it is estimated Vanna White has cumulatively walked more than 2,000 miles on the stage revealing letters.
When first working on the show, producer Harry Friedman was not pleased with the fact that it took nearly 1 hour to tape a 30 minute show. After each puzzle the crew had to stop tape which allowed the crew to manually pull out the letters from the last puzzle and set up the letters for the next puzzle. This time consuming process took about 10 to 15 minutes to do. Within 30 days after attending a taping as producer, Friedman started asking around about what would it take to get the puzzleboard electronic. Eventually, in Season 14, the old trillion puzzle board was retired in February 1997 and was replaced with a new electronic one using touch screens. The letters were no longer manually put in, instead a button is pushed and a new puzzle magically appears. Friedman felt this was also necessary for a cosmetic change as that is the same time the red, yellow, and blue backdrops were no longer used. The change didn't really affect anything on air but for taping the shows there were no more stops in taping the shows and a 30 minute episode could be taped in 30 minutes.
On March 6th 1986, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! (1984) become the first game shows to be close-captioned for the hearing-impaired. Strangely, this does not appear to have been noted in any way on Wheel of Fortune until at least October 1989. Although, a bug is used in Season 11.
Since Pat Sajak began hosting, he has almost never missed an episode, only trading places with Alex Trebek on April Fools Day 1997. However, Pat had to have emergency surgery and had to miss a few tapings while he was recovering from surgery. Vanna White filled in for Pat as host for a three-week stint of shows that aired in December 2019.