I'd actually planned to leave the vintage game show discussion after my last post, but I had a few last thoughts I wanted to mention.
One of the weirdest things about watching these old shows is realizing how many of these people are dead. Richard Dawson, Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Gene Rayburn, Bert Convy, and a bunch of celebrities from Tattletales like Alejandro Rey, Robert Culp, and Christopher George to name just a few.
Some of them I discovered were dead as I searched for them online. For Rey, it was to discover who he was. For some of the others, I was curious if they were still married to the spouse they appeared with on the show.
That leads me to weird thing number two--Watching Tattletales and knowing who was divorced. Watching James Brolin with his then-wife, Jane, was painful. Not because I knew the marriage hadn't survived, but because they did really poorly on the show. It was like they didn't know each other at all. Also, James Brolin was seriously hot back then. Wow!
Then there was Robert Culp and his then-wife, Sheila. They were so sweet together, seemed so in love, and seemed to know each other so well. I actually searched online for him because I wanted to read about them still being married. Um, yeah, no. They weren't. Their marriage only lasted 5 years, I think.
Linda Day George and Chris George seemed like a likely couple to divorce. He was the one who kept calling her a "dingbat" when they missed a question on the show. To my surprise, they stayed married until his death. I never would have guessed that given his disrespect of her.
I still wish more game shows today were like the old ones, except without the sexism, racism, and homophobia. I loved the humor and fun they had on the shows, something that seems sorely lacking in our current-day fare.
