In Popular Culture
In 1985, The Dead Milkmen, a Philadelphia punk band, wrote a song about Charles Nelson Reilly called "Serrated Edge."
In episode 502 of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Hercules, Crow T. Robot performs an ode to Match Game, and winds up solemnly calling out to Reilly as well as the other guests of the show.
In 2001, Reilly was the subject of a sketch on Saturday Night Live spoofing Inside the Actors Studio, and was portrayed by Alec Baldwin. A later Baldwin character, the Generalissimo from 30 Rock, mentions both Julie Harris and The Belle of Amherst, directed by Reilly as noted above. A 2008 parody of "Match Game" on "Saturday Night Live" included Fred Armisen playing a Reilly-like character. In the sketch, the host is found murdered moments before the show's taping; the subsequent on-air police investigation reveals that he'd been having a clandestine homosexual affair with the Reilly character.
"Weird Al" Yankovic wrote and recorded a tribute song titled "CNR", jokingly caricaturing Reilly with parodies of the internet phenomenon Chuck Norris Facts, with absurdities like winning the Tour de France "with two flat tires and a missing chain", or how "every day he'd make the host of Match Game give him a piggyback ride". This was part of Yankovic's digital Internet Leaks EP and included on 2011 CD release Alpocalypse. The music video was released by JibJab on August 4, 2009.
Read more about this topic: Charles Nelson Reilly
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The very nursery tales of this generation were the nursery tales of primeval races. They migrate from east to west, and again from west to east; now expanded into the “tale divine” of bards, now shrunk into a popular rhyme.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)