Trivia / The Hollywood Squares

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• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: As listed under Memetic Mutation on the YMMV page, one of Paul Lynde's most-quoted zingers, usually done by the quoter with Lynde's trademark mannerisms and voice, is "Because chiffon wrinkles!"^note given to the question "Why do Hell's Angels wear leather?", despite that not being what Paul actually said — what he actually said was "Because chiffon wrinkles too easily."
• Bury Your Art: VH1 seems to be trying really hard to pretend the MTV2 version of Hip Hop Squares doesn't exist. Original host Peter Rosenberg mentioned this in a tweet.
• Creator Backlash: Peter Marshall reportedly wasn't too fond of the Whoopi-era Bergeron seasons, believing Whoopi's humor (and the show's humor in general at the time) to be too crass for his tastes. Apparently, the changes made to the show for the 2002-03 season (the beginning of the H² era) satisfied him enough to make an appearance as the center square during that season's "Game Show Week".
  • He also had no love lost for The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour, telling USA Today in 1985 the show was "basically a CIA plot to destroy (Squares)" and adding in his 2002 memoir Backstage with the Original Hollywood Square that he was "happy" that the show lasted less than a year (October 31, 1983 to July 27, 1984, to be exact).
  • Squares co-creator Merrill Heatter told game show historian Jefferson Graham ^note credited author of Come on Down!!! The TV Game Show Book, published in 1988 he thought the Davidson version was "a circus ... not my vision of the show."
• Died During Production:
  • Happened to two regulars in the Marshall era.
    • Wally Cox died suddenly of a heart attack in 1973. His final 14 shows aired after his death.
    • Charley Weaver had a massive stroke in 1972 that forced him off the show for quite some time. He died of another stroke in 1974, on the same day that the Monday show of what would be his final week aired. George Gobel, who had been substituting for Weaver, took his place as a regular.
  • On the Bergeron version, John Ritter taped a week of shows before his September 11, 2003 passing. This week started airing September 29.
• Dueling Shows: With Match Game, which inevitably led to The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Peter Marshall-hosted versions were believed to have been largely destroyed until around 2002, when several hundred episodes (the number varies- Peter Marshall said in a webchat there were 3500 episodes they stumbled across) from both the daytime and nighttime versions were found unintentionally as part of a search for episodes of Dark Shadows, of all shows (read more here). Even then, GSN aired them only from 2002 to 2003. The 3500 count Peter was talking about could very well have been just duplicates of the Syndicated shows (the Syndicated version was made at a time when bicycling was the norm, before the days of satellite broadcasting).
  • The Davidson version was rerun on the USA Network for a few years in the '90s and hasn't been seen since. ^note  Music rights are an issue, and there are rumors that this version's masters no longer exist.
  • For the Bergeron version, the 2000-01 season was never rerun on GSN, and the seasons that did air sometimes had episodes missing from the rotation due to celebrity clearance issues, including the 1998 Comic Relief week (though at least one ep of that circulates, taped from C-band satellite). The show has recently resurfaced with an entire channel on Pluto TV, currently running a mix of episodes from the H2 era (which haven't been seen since 2006).
• Long-Runners: The original NBC version ran for 14 seasons and the 1970s syndicated version ran for a decade.
• Looping Lines: On the June 20, 1980 NBC Daytime finale, Wayland Flowers' puppet Madame took a jab at Fred Silverman, by saying "You can fuck some of the people some of the time, and you can fuck all of the people some of the time, but you can't fuck all of the people all of the time!". NBC decided to go back and redub that line, by replacing each use of the word "fuck" with "fool".^note Of course, NBC could have just bleeped it. Whether that was actually Wayland dubbing himself or not is unknown. This is further evident that Madame was actually saying something else, based on the audience reaction.
• Milestone Celebration: The Bergeron version's 500th episode featured a sparkler-filled cake wheeled out at the end of the show, with confetti going off and the day's winning contestant allowed a slice.
• No Budget:
  • Bergeron's final season. Oy!
    • Games were played best of three with the winner getting only $2,000 and the loser $1,000 for one Tic-Tac-Toe or parting gifts for none. Also, no bonus money was given for captured squares and the Secret Square prize was a flat package which changed per game instead of a Progressive Jackpot.
    • The Bonus Round's prize structure originally had the car, $25,000 and the trip around the world as the first three prizes. In the final season, they became the last three with a sub-$10,000 trip as the first and $10,000 cash as the second, replacing the upper tier prizes of $50,000 and $100,000. It got better. Contestants no longer got a bad key taken away for each time they'd previously been to the bonus round. The consolation for each question also got halved to $500.
  • The first run of Hip Hop Squares, which offered a top prize of $2,500 in 2012. Could be justified, as it was produced for MTV2, a cable network (plus most of the budget likely went towards getting the celebrities). The VH1 version is quite a bit higher-budget.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • Tom Bergeron's last two seasons had a slightly redone version of Teena Marie's "Square Biz" as its theme song.
  • Julie Brown's "Cause I'm a Blonde" was used as the opening theme for the two "Blondes Have More Fun" weeks in the H² era.
• Role Reprise: Noel MacNeal, Carol Spinney, Kevin Clash, Steve Whitmire and Eric Jacobson reprised Bear, Big Bird, Oscar, Elmo, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy for their respective episodes.
• Saved from Development Hell: VH1's Hip-Hop Squares was originally announced for fall 2016, but it was delayed to March 2017.
• Screwed by the Network: The NBC version. Despite pulling in successful ratings, then NBC president and CEO Fred Silverman abruptly cancelled it, after moving its time slot around several times (helping to kill off Whew! in the process), along with Chain Reaction and High Rollers, to make room for a 90-minute talk show hosted by David Letterman. Reportedly, Silverman had passed on the show back when he was vice president of daytime programming at CBS, and after seeing it become a big hit on NBC, was obviously not happy.
• Troubled Production:
  • The 1965 pilot. Various technical problems and other stops-and-starts led to the taping session running so long audience members ended up walking out. Producers became so desperate they started paying $10 to customers of the nearby Farmer's Mart to come in and fill the steadily-emptying audience. Ultimately, taping didn't end until two in the morning. Both NBC and CBS rejected the pilot — twice, even — before NBC allowed for a second pilot to be shot with Peter Marshall at the helm in lieu of Bert Parks.
  • The Vegas episodes. Paul Lynde was frustrated by the supposedly inferior lodging facilities in Vegas (among other things) and in general soured the overall mood. Not only that, there wasn't much time to play the game, some contestants were tourists (and drunk, to boot), and some celebrities, particularly George Gobel, would often rush off to gamble.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Bert Parks hosted the original pilot which was pitched to CBS primetime. NBC was interested in picking it up for a daytime run, but they only agreed to do so if someone else hosted. The job eventually went to Peter Marshall who hosted the second pilot. This would have been Parks' first game show since Yours for a Song was cancelled in 1963. With the exception of an unsold pilot called The Celebrity Game in 1968, he would not host another game show in his lifetime.
    • Marshall also said that NBC considered hiring Dan Rowan, and that he took the job to prevent Rowan from hosting.^note In his memoir, Marshall felt his pre-Squares comedy partner Tommy Noonan was professionally—and later personally—betrayed by Rowan. Peter stopped speaking to Dan Rowan as a direct result. Despite Peter Marshall staying close friends with Dick Martin, producers felt awkward about booking Dick Martin without also including Dan Rowan, so they never did.
  • Marc Summers was slated to host the 1998 revival but was dismissed for fears that his OCD (which he had revealed on The Oprah Winfrey Show a year prior) would make it difficult to work with him. John Tesh was also considered as a potential host.
  • Before Whoopi came on board, Roseanne Barr was attempting to create the Planet Hollywood Squares in the mid-1990s. This Game Show Forum thread revealed that it was intended to be paired with a revival of The Gong Show (which did have a pilot taped), but held off until 1997 to see if their revivals of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game were working out; by that time, Roseanne presumably had pulled out and PH was in deep trouble (having overextended themselves with far too many locations and crazy concepts).
  • For the 1998 revival, King World first offered Billy Crystal and later Jason Alexander multi-million dollar contracts to be the permanent center square, but they both turned them down.
• You Look Familiar:
  • John Davidson was a semi-regular panelist on the Marshall Squares before becoming host of the mid-'80s revival.
  • Before hosting the 2017 incarnation of Hip Hop Squares, DeRay Davis was an occasional panelist on the 2012 version.

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