NEW YORK -- "Hollywood Squares" is tick-tack-toe with a wardrobe budget.
It's nine Skinner boxes with celebrities inside. When the stars are fed a question, they respond by showing off.It's a shopworn exercise with delusions of grandeur. Just get a load of the opening visual: a computer-generated gala sprawled across Hollywood, with acres of revelers plus searchlights, confetti and helicopters hovering above a giant game board. This would dwarf Mardi Gras and the pyramids of Egypt.
Oversold? Never mind. With "Hollywood Squares," disinformation is the stock in trade.
A trivia question posed by host Tom Bergeron ("What's the happiest place on earth?") will trigger a jokey comeback from the occupant of the chosen square ("It's the proving ground for Viagra").
Then, when the swells of laughter subside, the celebrity will tender the official answer (Disneyland). But is this the truth or a bluff? That's what Contestant X or O must correctly judge to claim that square.
Of course, the biggest bluff by these celebrities is their own conviviality, as if their "Squares" appearance were only for fun.
As the show wears on, you can imagine each of them -- whether Jenna Elfman, Estelle Getty, Coolio, a pair of Baldwin brothers, or some celebrity you'd never seen or heard of before -- reminding themselves why they came: to gain a wider audience, to promote a current project, or maybe just to savor a pause in an inexorable plunge back to obscurity. No, this is serious business.
Premiering last fall, the current "Hollywood Squares" revives what in 1966 began a 14-year run with chipmunk-faced Peter Marshall playing host to personalities like Rose Marie, Wally Cox and Paul Lynde.
But the corny charm of the original -- with its $1.50 daytime-TV look and its gang of has-beens on their last roundup -- is absent in this early evening '90s rehash. (In Utah, the show airs weekdays at 4:30 p.m. on Ch. 2.)
Now everything is too glitzy, too self-aware, too exaggerated. (In the cavernous studio, Bergeron and the contestants are poised on a riser so high it looks like they're expecting a flash flood.) In short, too Hollywood.
One thing, however, hasn't changed. It's still fun to see how dumb certain contestants can be.
For instance, Laura (who is O) picks the square inhabited by Bronson Pinchot, to whom Bergeron directs this question: "If you combine boric acid and silicone oil, what do you get?"
"Pamela Anderson's breasts," Bronson Pinchot quips. But, seriously, folks: "Bleach."
Laura agrees. Uh-oh. "You get Silly Putty," Bergeron discloses. X gets the square.
Next turn, Laura picks the square with Katsy Chappell, for whom the most obvious question might be, "Who's that?" Instead, Bergeron asks, "What famous brothers are named Leonard, Julius, Herbert and Adolph?"
To this, Katsy Chappell answers: "The Brothers Karamazov." Laura agrees. Oops. Turns out these are the real names of the Marx Brothers. X gets the square.
For Laura and any alert viewers, there's a valuable lesson here: Don't place your faith in celebrities; star worship can lead you astray. But that's not the only principle at work on "Hollywood Squares" in its current incarnation.
"Here's how we play our game," Bergeron began one recent edition. "First of all, we don't alienate the center square."
Center square, of course, is the permanent address of Whoopi Goldberg, and it's Whoopi who rules. Come what may.
Question: Two male fish give birth to their young. One is the pipefish. What is the other? Whoopi: "The blowfish."
Question: How is the speed of a boat measured? Whoopi: "By the number of barf bags."
As glib as she is tacky, she holds sway in the center square with the sense of entitlement befitting an executive producer of the show, as well as its designated star. (Host Bergeron is only second-billed.)
Even as contestants choose other squares and their resident celebrities, viewers get frequent reaction shots of Whoopi. Just to stay current on how she's doing. Whose importance, as you are forever reminded, surpasses all else.
Now Luke Perry is asked, "What powerful underworld figure did both Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro play?"
"Chewbacca," cracks Perry.
One, two, three. From an audience so jazzed it would laugh at a 10-car pileup . . . dead silence.
You lose. "Squares" gets the X.