Charles Nelson Reilly, who introduced schoolchildren of a certain age to the art of the brilliant double entendre on Match Game, died Friday. In the lull between his death and my re-opening the blog for business post-holiday, the comments on my Price Is Right post became a sort of impromptu shrine to Reilly, and commenter LB offered Reilly and the ’70s daytime game show a better memorial than I could hope to top:
I was too young to get some of the jokes and double entendres they threw around, but half the fun was the physical humor of watching them (and various other inanimate objects) being thrown. Hollywood Squares of course is a cultural icon, but Match Game had its own cachet. Before Comedy Central, before VH1 and its various celebrity combo “reality” shows, we basically got to sit in on a daily happy hour / roast with the likes of Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Betty White, Richard Dawson, Fannie Flagg, and various others just trying to keep up — while Gene Rayburn prowled the stage with his foot-long microphone and acted as our vaudevillian host when he could take a break from leering at the pretty women.
Seconded. There really was something distinctly ’70s about Match Game, with its rakish, racy, not-quite-a-key-party air of adults testing the era’s new licentiousness in language just safe enough for the kids. And Reilly, bookended with Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares, was to many kids of my generation our first experience of brilliantly bitchy gay men sending bon-mot missives from within the celluloid closet–even if we had no idea at the time.
Nervousness about copyright keeps me from embedding the video, but you can see Reilly cutting up on Match Game at YouTube. What’s more, here’s a mind-blowing clip of the theme from Lidsville, Reilly’s postpsychedelic Krofft kids’ show, complete with intentional or not drug references, that I had forgot ever watching until I just came across it. (Talk about a period piece: check out the Strawberry Alarm Clock-like music and the groovy color-wheel effects as the magic hat grows, and grows and grows!)
Watch the clips and remember a time when TV shows had two-minute-long theme songs, kids blithely unwound with innuendoes and psychedelia and Charles Nelson Reilly amused the BLANK out of America.