FWIW, you put God in the movie-of-the-week* seat and Jesus in the dumb blonde seat. And have completely ignored the fact that Brett and Charles are dead, too.
Also, funny trivia for non-MatchGameaholics. Because Richard became so much the go-to star for the big money Super Match, they put in a wheel the contestant had to spin to choose who they would match for that part of the game. Guess which star the wheel landed on the first time it was used.
*Not literally, but this is the seat normally given to the person starring in the hottest thing out at the moment.
Yeah, I remember watching that one on GSN. Gene specifically mentioned it was to reduce how often people went to Richard, then… Probably the funniest moment on the show. (Which had a lot of deliberately funny moments, obviously, and more than a few interesting accidental ones.)
When I was a kid he made me think of an English Dean Martin- swarthy, usually liked some bling and always had a cigarette going when he did guest shots, exuded 60s/70s cool. From what I’ve read he was an open and unrepentant horndog between his marriages (though he and fellow player Bob Crane apparently couldn’t stand each other), but then settled down once he went from kissing the young contestants on the show to impregnating them (he met his much much younger second wife when she was a contestant).
His return to Family Feud was a famous disaster. After years of the ill-fated Ray Combs and ratings declines they asked Richard to return; he was living on a yacht with his young wife, being out of the public eye he’d let his hair go white and he’d put on a good bit of weight and he was enjoying doing nothing and really didn’t want to go back to work, but they pulled up in a truck full of money and he did have a late in life baby to support and it’s not like it was ditch digging so he thought ‘why not?’. However, the studio announced he had to lose X number of pounds (they specified how many), he had to dye his hair again, he couldn’t kiss the ladies anymore due to changed sensibilities, and by the way they’d totally changed the game (4 players per team instead of 5 and a totally different bonus round and the like).
On the day appointed Richard showed up with white hair and if anything he’d gained a couple of pounds. He made no secret in interviews of how terrible he thought the rebooted show was due to the changes and how stupid he thought the no kissing policy was. It was generally a disaster, but they did pay him a lot of money and then he went back to his yacht and wife and baby and that was that.
Somehow that refusal to cooperate always made me like him a bit more.
Thank you. I like these anecdotes. Dawson may not have been as consistently funny as The Match Game’s Bret Somers and Charles Nelson Reilly (an “openly gay persona” per the New York Times), but he was good for some moments.
There was a Match Game 74 episode with Richard Long (in the movie-of-the-week seat, per KneadToKnow) and, at the end of the episode Long promoted his being-filmed ABC Mystery of the Week movie, “The Cruise”. Dawson piped up, “The Life Story of Charles Nelson Reilly”.
