Come on down

Rambling around the game show Interwebs, I stepped in some of the usual older-is-better nonsense at Golden Road.

This time it was the well-worn whine about how contestants on The Price is Right aren't what they used to be. The players are just so excited nowadays. Don't they know that the TPiR set should be a funeral home? This brilliant line of thinking leads to the usual grumps that nobody should watch the show any more because...OLDER IS BETTER.

To put it mildly, this thread is highest-grade manure, even by the web's demanding standards of manure. There has always been plenty of mirth about the over-caffeinated players on The Price is Right. The classic statement was Gary Burghoff's parody on Match Game in 1975. That's more than forty years ago, if you want to do the math.

Which leads to the real point of this entry, a bit of praise for Gary as one of the very best of the semi-regular panelists on the greatest game show ever. He started out a little wobbly, as if he wanted to score on every answer on every ep. He soon realized that Match Game was always an ensemble show and that he should pick his spots more carefully.

With a dead-on imitation of Charles Nelson Reilly and a reasonably wacky - is that a contradiction in terms? - sense of humor, Gary then established himself as one of Match Game's old reliables. It's great that he's one of few central performers on the show who's still with us.