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 and/or culture:
“Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“We do not need to minimize the poverty of the ghetto or the suffering inflicted by whites on blacks in order to see that the increasingly dangerous and unpredictable conditions of middle- class life have given rise to similar strategies for survival. Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)