The "This is Your Life" Version
Yesterday, I posted the spoof of This is Your Life that was done on the comedy series, Your Show of Shows. I mentioned that it was deserving of view “for several reasons,” – but intentionally left out the most important for our purposes here.
It’s that several years later, when Dinah Shore had her variety show, they got Carl Reiner to sit in the audience as a joke, with him supposedly thinking he was there to be surprised as the subject of the real This is Your Life. That gave the producers of the real This is Your Life an idea. They contacted the Dinah Shore producers, had them invite Carl back on the show – and then actually did surprise him to be the guest on the real This is Your Life.
And yes, we have that episode here. And happily, it includes those Dinah Shore appearances to help set things up. It’s a lot of fun, though oddly a bit more distracting than most – in part, I think, because (having done the spoof), Carl Reiner wants to anticipate what’s coming next. Also, because they got the idea of doing the episode as a result of the Dinah Shore Show, and therefore had to rush theirs together, they weren’t able to get as many surprise people as I’m sure they’d have liked to. But it’s still a good collection of folks from his past and better known guest – including his young son “Robby.”
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