Movies and music fetishize the past so effectively that audiences can be forgiven for wondering if what they're seeing and hearing is new or old. You can't really say the same thing about television. TV always looks like the present, and old TV always looks like it was made a thousand centuries ago, especially when it's released on DVD. Often, this is a huge bummer, particularly if you consider yourself a fan of some show—or worse, an apologist for something your friends never "got." DVD is proving to be a great equalizer. Burn, therefore, on St. Elsewhere, Crime Story, Beauty and the Beast, Family Ties, Hill Street Blues, and plenty of other fondly remembered shows that have aged about as well as a vinyl record on a hot dashboard.
Which is why I didn't have massively high hopes for the DVD of Match Game highlights I bought for eight bucks at Walgreen's. Something to watch while laid up with a back injury, I reckoned. Something to make my friends chuckle when I tell them about it or show them the cover art, featuring a tidy Gene Rayburn, replete with weird, extra-long penis mic. What I found instead was something like a portal to my childhood, and to television's adolescence. Like all old TV, Match Game (1973—1984, roughly) is full of raging, hilarious anachronisms—ashtrays next to every panelist, smokers' teeth, preposterous clothing (a forest of plaids, muumuus, pinky rings, three-quarters dark glasses, maximum spread collars, soaring lapels, knit ties, pantsuits, wholly unironic ascots!!!), laughable hair (facial, artificial), dubious set design (orange shag carpet, sparkling stucco walls, turquoise panels), forgotten advertisers (L'eggs, Adolph's Instant Meat Tenderizer, Westclox), and so forth. The show was so analog that the guests—even the puppets—wrote their answers with markers on index cards, and so cheap—HOW CHEAP WAS IT?!—that a show's champion could walk away with the princely sum of $350.
Unlike with more "produced" programming from the past, however, this show's solecisms aren't damaging. Just the opposite: They're spellbinding, at least partially because you can see the participants—host, guest "stars," contestants—learning how to create their personas as they go. MG was a game show, but really, it was just an opportunity for semi-stars to be naughty on TV, answering questions like "Dumb Dora is so dumb, she tried to BLANK her birthday suit." The double entrendres grow in boldness—one early utterance of the word "boobs" sends the whole panel storming off set in mock disgust; a few months later, they're making jokes about "laying hens"—and so does the self-satisfaction. After a few hours of nonstop cackling and badinage, the regulars (Richard Dawson, before getting tapped to host Family Feud; Brett Somers, who gets an obvious nose job midway through the disc; and the late, great Charles Nelson Reilly, the Match Game's own Paul Lynde) form a kind of Z-grade Algonquin Round Table.
Not that you'd ever want to read one of their books. Then again, I don't see any Dorothy Parker DVDs lying around Walgreen's.
