Entertainment

Wink Martindale, the king of the television game show, dies at 91

Published

9 months ago

April 16, 2025

Wink Martindale, the king of the television game show, dies at 91

Wink Martindale, the king of the television game show who hosted “Tic-Tac-Dough,” “Gambit,” “High Rollers” and a slew of other programs that became staples in living rooms across America, died Tuesday in Rancho Mirage. He was 91.

Martindale, a longtime voice of Los Angeles radio who had an unexpected hit record in the late 1950s, died surrounded by family and his wife of 49 years, Sandra Martindale, according to a news release from his publicity firm.

Throughout a long career in radio and television, Martindale was frequently asked how he came by his unusual first name.

As he would explain, one of his young friends in Jackson, Tenn., had trouble saying his given name, Winston, and it came out sounding like Winkie. The nickname, shortened to Wink after he got into radio, stuck — with one exception.

After Martindale signed to host his first national TV game show in 1964, NBC’s head of daytime programming felt that the name Wink sounded too juvenile. So, for its nearly one-year run, “What’s This Song?” was hosted by Win Martindale.

Not that he particularly minded having the “k” dropped from Wink.

“Not really, because I loved those checks [from NBC],” he said in a 2017 interview for the Television Academy Foundation. “They can call me anything they want to call me: Winkie-dinkie-doo, the Winkmeister, the Winkman, you name it.”

The genial, dapper TV host with the gleaming smile and perfectly coiffed hair had hosted two local TV game shows in L.A. before going national with “What’s This Song?”

Over the decades, according to his website, Martindale either hosted or produced 21 game shows, including “Words and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.”

“That’s a lot of shows,” he acknowledged in a 1996 interview with the New York Daily News. “It either means everybody wants me to do their show or I can’t hold a job.”

Martindale was best known for hosting “Tic-Tac-Dough,” the revival of a late 1950s show, which aired on CBS for less than two months in 1978 but continued in syndication until 1986.

Unlike tic-tac-toe, in which two players simply try to get three Xs or three Os in a row in a nine-box grid, “Tic-Tac-Dough” required contestants to select a subject category in each of the nine boxes, everything from geography to song titles. Each correct answer earned the players their X or O in the chosen box.

“Tic-Tac-Dough” achieved its highest ratings in 1980 during the 88-game, 46-show run of Lt. Thom McKee, a handsome young Navy fighter pilot whose winning streak earned him $312,700 in cash and prizes and a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Our ratings were never as big until he came on and were never as big after he left,” Martindale said in his Television Academy Foundation interview.

As he saw it, the simplicity of “Tic-Tac-Dough” and other TV game shows helps explain their continued popularity.

People at home, he said, “gravitate to games that they know. They can sit there, and they say to themselves, ‘Man, I could have gotten that; I can play that game.’ And when you get that from a home viewer or a person in the audience, you’ve got them captured.”

Martindale left “Tic-Tac-Dough” in 1985, a year before it went off the air, to host a show that he had created. Alas, “Headline Chasers” lasted less than a year.

As Martindale told The Times in 2010, “There have been a lot of bombs between the hits.”

Born Winston Conrad Martindale on Dec. 4, 1933, in Jackson, Tenn., he was one of five children. His father was a lumber inspector and his mother a housewife.

While growing up, Martindale was a big fan of the popular radio shows of the day and early on dreamed of becoming a radio announcer. For years, he recalled in his Television Academy Foundation interview, he’d tear out advertisements from Life magazine and, behind a closed bedroom door, he’d ad-lib commercials as he pretended to be on the radio.

All that practice paid off. After repeatedly hounding the manager of a small, 250-watt local radio station in Jackson for a job, Martindale was offered an audition less than two months after graduating high school in 1951.

At 17, the former drugstore soda jerk was hired at $25 a week to work the 4-11 p.m. shift at radio station WPLI.

On-air jobs at two increasingly higher-wattage local radio stations followed before he landed his “dream” job in 1953: hosting the popular morning show “Clockwatchers” at WHBQ Radio in Memphis, Tenn.

For Martindale, working at WHBQ was a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

One night in July 1954, he later recalled, he was showing some friends around the station when popular DJ Dewey Phillips played a demonstration disc of a recently recorded song that had been given to him by Sam Phillips (no relation), the founder of Sun Records in Memphis.

The song was “That’s All Right” and the singer was a young Memphis electric company truck driver named Elvis Presley.

“Dewey put it on the turntable and the switchboard lit up,” Martindale said in a 2010 interview with The Times. “He kept playing it over and over.”

The song caused so much excitement that a call was made to Presley’s home to have him come in for an on-air interview. Elvis wasn’t home, so Gladys and Vernon Presley drove to a movie theater, where their son was watching a western, and drove him to the radio station for his first interview.

“That was the beginning of Presley mania,” said Martindale. “I think of that as the night when the course of popular music changed forever.”

After WHBQ launched a television station in Memphis in 1953, Martindale branched into TV, first hosting a daily half-hour children’s show called “Wink Martindale of the Mars Patrol.” The live show featured a costumed Martindale, who would interview half a dozen kids in a cheaply built spaceship set, and segue to five- or six-minutes of old Flash Gordon movie serials.

Then, influenced by the success of Dick Clark’s still-local teenage dance show “Bandstand” in Philadelphia, Martindale began co-hosting WHBQ-TV’s “Top 10 Dance Party.”

He scored a coup in June 1956 when he landed Elvis, by then a show-business phenomenon, for an appearance and interview with Martindale on his live show — for free.

Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, “would never speak to me after that because he wanted to be paid for everything. We had no budget. They hardly paid me, for Pete’s sake,” Martindale told The Times in 2010.

Because of Martindale’s local popularity with his “Top 10 Dance Party,” a small Memphis record company, OJ Records, signed him to a recording contract.

His recording of “Thought It was Moonlove” led to his signing with Dot Records, for which he recorded well into the 1960s.

Martindale, who had a pleasant but not memorable singing voice, also played himself as the host of a teen TV dance show in the low-budget 1958 movie “Let’s Rock!,” in which he sang the mildly rocking “All Love Broke Loose.”

While working on radio and TV in Memphis, Martindale graduated from what is now the University of Memphis, where he majored in speech and drama.

In 1959, he moved to L.A. to become the morning DJ on radio station KHJ.

That same year, he scored a surprise hit in “Deck of Cards,” which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 11 on its Hot Country Songs chart. Martindale, who received a gold record for the recording, performed the piece on Ed Sullivan’s popular Sunday-night variety show.

While working at KHJ Radio in 1959, he began hosting “The Wink Martindale Dance Party” on KHJ-TV on Saturdays. The popular show, broadcast from a studio, also began airing weekdays, live from Pacific Ocean Park in Santa Monica.

Over the years, in addition to KHJ, Martindale worked at L.A. radio stations KRLA, KFWB, KMPC and KGIL.

In 2006, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A year later, he became one of the first inductees into the American TV Game Show Hall of Fame in Las Vegas.

“I always loved games,” he said in his Television Academy Foundation interview. “Once I got into the world of games, I just seemed to glide from one to the other. … I never looked down upon the idea that I was branded as a game-show host, because most people like games.”

Martindale is survived by his wife, Sandra; sister Geraldine; his daughters Lisa, Lyn and Laura; and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

McLellan is a former Times staff writer.

Movie Reviews

Dead Man’s Wire review: Gus Van Sant tackles true-crime intrigue

Published

3 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Dead Man’s Wire review: Gus Van Sant tackles true-crime intrigue

In 1977, a man named Tony Kiritsis fell behind on mortgage payments for an Indianapolis, Indiana, property that he hoped to develop into an affordable shopping center for independent merchants. He asked his mortgage broker for more time, but was denied. This enraged him because he suspected that the broker and his father, who owned the company, were conspiring to defraud him by letting the property go into foreclosure and acquire it for much less than market value. He showed up at the offices of the mortgage company, Meridian, for a scheduled appointment regarding the debt in the broker’s office, where he took the broker, Richard O. Hall, hostage, and demanded $130,000 to settle the debt, plus a public apology from the company. He carried a long cardboard box containing a shotgun with a so-called dead man’s wire, which he affixed to Hall as a precaution against police interference: if either of them were shot, tackled, or even caused to stumble, the wire would pull the trigger, blowing Hall’s head off.

That’s only the beginning of an astonishing story that has inspired many retellings, including a memoir by Hall, a 2018 documentary (whose producers were consultants on this movie) and a podcast drama starring Jon Hamm as Tony Kiritsis. And now it’s the best current movie you likely haven’t heard about—a drama from director Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”), starring Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall. It’s unabashedly inspired by the best crime dramas from the 1970s, including “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Network,” and “Badlands,” and can stand proudly alongside them.

From the opening sequence, which scores the high-strung Tony’s pre-crime prep with Deodato’s immortally groovy disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” played on the radio by one of Tony’s local heroes, the philosophical DJ Fred Temple (Colman Domingo); through the expansive middle section, which establishes Tony as part of a thriving community that will see him as their representative in the one-sided struggle between labor and capital; through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nostalgia trip of the best kind. Rather than superficially imitate the style of a specific type of ’70s drama, Van Sant and his collaborators connect with the essence of what made them powerful and memorable: their connection to issues that weighed on viewers’ minds fifty years ago and that have grown heavier since.

Tony is far from a criminal genius or a potential folk hero, but thinks he’s both. The shotgun box with a weird bulge, barely held together with packing tape, is a correlative of the mentality of the man who carries it. His home is filled with counterculture-adjacent books, but he’s a slob who loudly gripes during a brief car ride that his “shorts have been ridin’ up since Market Street,” and has a vanity license plate that reads “TOPLESS.” His eloquence runs the gamut from Everyman acuity to self-canceling nonsense slathered in profanity . He accurately sums up the mortgage company’s practices as “a private equity trap” (a phrase that looks ahead to the 2008 financial collapse, which was sparked by predatory lending on subprime mortgages) and hopes that his extreme actions will generate some “some goddamn catharsis” for himself and his fellow citizens, and “some genuine guilt” among Indianapolis’ lending class.

He’s also intoxicated by his sudden local fame. The hostage situation migrates from the mortgage company to Tony’s shabby apartment complex, which is quickly surrounded by beat cops, tactical officers, and reporters (including Myha’La as Linda Page, a twenty-something, Black local TV correspondent looking to move up. Tony also forces his way into the life of his idol Temple, who tapes a phone conversation with him, previews it for police, and grudgingly accepts their or-else request to continue the dialog and plays their regular talks on his morning show.

Despite these inroads, Tony is unable to prevent his inner petty schmuck from emerging and undermining his message, such as it is. He vacillates between treating Hall as a useless representative of the financial elite (when the elder Hall finally agrees to speak with Tony via phone from a tropical vacation, Tony sneers to Hall the younger, “Your daddy’s on the line—he wants to know when you’ll be home for supper!”) and connecting with him on a human level. When he’s not bombastic, he’s needy and fawning. “I like you!” he keeps telling people he just met, but Fred most of all—as if a Black man who’d built a comfortable life for himself and his wife in 1977 Indiana could say no when an overwhelmingly white police force asked him to become Tony’s fake-confidant; and as if it matters whether a hostage-taking gunman feels warmly towards him.

Ultimately, though, making perfect sense and effecting lasting change are no higher on Tony’s agenda than they were for the protagonists of “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network.” Like them, these are unhinged audience surrogates whose media stardom turned them into human megaphones for anger at the miserable state of things, and the indifference of institutions that caused or worsened it. These include local law enforcement, which—to paraphrase hapless bank robber Sonny Wirtzik taunting cops in “Dog Day Afternoon”—wanna kill Tony so bad that they can taste it. The discussions between Indianapolis police and the FBI (represented by Neil Mulac’s Agent Patrick Mullaney, a straight-outta-Quantico robot) are all about how to set up and take the kill shot.

The aforementioned phone call leads to a gut-wrenching moment that echoes the then-recent kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, when hostage-takers called their victim’s wealthy grandfather to arrange ransom payment, and got nickel-and-dimed as if they were trying to sell him a used car. The elder Hall is played by “Dog Day Afternoon” star Al Pacino, inspired casting that not only officially connects Tony with Wirtzik but proves that, at 85, Pacino can still bring the heat. The character’s presence creeps into the rest of the story like a toxic fog, even when he’s not the subject of conversation.

With his frizzy grey toupee, self-satisfied Midwest twang, and punchable smirk, Pacino is skin-crawlingly perfect as an old man who built a fortune on being good at one thing, but thinks that makes him a fountain of wisdom on all things, including the conduct of Real Men in a land of women and sissies. After watching TV coverage of Tony getting emotional while keeping his shotgun on Richard, Jr., he beams with pride that Tony shed tears but his own son didn’t. (Kelly Lynch, who costarred in another classic Van Sant film about American losers, “Drugstore Cowboy,” plays Richard, Sr.’s trophy wife, who is appalled at being confronted with irrefutable evidence of her husband’s monstrousness, but still won’t say a word against him.)

Van Sant was 25 during the real-life incidents that inspired this movie. That may partly account for the physical realism of the production, which doesn’t feel created but merely observed, in the manner of ’70s movies whose authenticity was strengthened by letting the main characters’ dialogue overlap and compete with ambient sounds; shooting in existing locations when possible, and dressing the actors in clothes that looked as if they’d been hanging in regular folks’ closets for years. Peggy Schnitzer did the costumes, Stefan Dechant the production design, and Arnaud Poiter the cinematography, all of which figuratively wear bell-bottom pants and platform shoes; the soundscape was overseen by Leslie Schatz, who keeps the environments believably dense and filled with incidental sounds while making sure the important stuff can be understood. It should also be mentioned that the film’s blueprint is an original script by a first-timer, Adam Kolodny, with a bona-fide working class worldview; he wrote it while working as a custodian at the Los Angeles Zoo.

More impressive than the film’s behind-the-scenes pedigree is its vision of another time that unexpectedly comes to seem not too different from this one. It is both a lovingly constructed time machine highlighting details that now seem as antiquated as lithography and buckboard wagons (the film deserves a special Oscar just for its phones) and a wide-ranging consideration of indestructible realities of life in the United States, which are highlighted in such a way that you notice them without feeling as if the movie pointed at them.

For instance, consider Tony’s infatuation with Fred Temple, which peaks when Tony honors his hero by demonstrating his “soul dancing” for his hostage, is a pre-Internet version of what we would now call a “parasocial relationship.” An awareness of racial dynamics is baked into this, and into the film as a whole. Domingo’s performance as Temple captures the tightrope walk that Black celebrities have to pull off, reassuring their most excitable white fans that they understand and care about them without cosigning condescension or behavior that could escalate into harassment. Consider, too, the matter-of-fact presentation of how easy it is for violence-prone people to buddy up to law enforcement officers, especially when they inhabit the same spaces. When Indianapolis police detective Will Grable (Cary Elwes) approaches Tony on a public street soon after the kidnapping, Tony’s face brightens as he exclaims, “Hi Mike! Nice to see you!”

And then, of course, there’s the economic and political framework, which is built with a firm yet delicate hand, and compassion for the vibrant messiness of life. “Dead Man’s Wire” depicts an analog era in which crises like this one were treated as important local matters that involved local people, businesses, and government agents, rather than fuel for a global agitprop industry posing as a news media, and a parasitic army of self-proclaimed influencers reycling the work of other influencers for clout. Van Sant’s movie continually insists on the uniqueness and value of every life shown onscreen, however briefly glimpsed, from the many unnamed citizens who are shown silently watching news coverage of the crisis while working their day jobs, to Fred’s right hand at the radio station, an Asian-American stoner dude (Vinh Nguyen) with a closet-sized office who talent-scouts unknown bands while exhaling cumulus clouds of pot smoke.

All this is drawn together by Van Sant and editor Saar Klein in pop music-driven montages that show how every member of the community depicted in this story is connected, even if they don’t know it or refuse to admit it. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island/Entire of itself/Each is a piece of the continent/A part of the main.” The struggle of the individual is summed up in one of Fred’s hypnotic radio monologues: “Let’s remember to become the ocean, not disappear into it.”

Entertainment

‘Sinners,’ ‘One Battle After Another’ and ‘Hamnet’ among 2026 Producers Guild of America nominees

Published

5 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

‘Sinners,’ ‘One Battle After Another’ and ‘Hamnet’ among 2026 Producers Guild of America nominees

The Oscar race for best picture came into clearer focus as the Producers Guild of America announced its annual nominees for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award on Friday morning. The 10 nominees (full list below) represent established Oscar-season contenders like “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” “Hamnet” and “Marty Supreme,” as well as a handful of films whose awards footing is less certain, including “Weapons,” “F1” and “Bugonia.”

The Producers Guild Awards are considered one of the most reliable bellwethers in the Oscar race because their preferential ballot closely mirrors the academy’s best picture voting system. The PGA Awards have named the future best picture winner in 17 of the last 22 years. Last year, eight of the 10 PGA nominees went on to receive best picture Oscar nominations, including Sean Baker’s “Anora,” which ultimately won both prizes.

Winners will be announced at the PGA’s awards ceremony on Feb. 28 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Century City.

See the full list of nominees below:

Darryl F. Zanuck Award for outstanding producer of theatrical motion pictures

“Bugonia”
“F1”
“Frankenstein”
“Hamnet”
“Marty Supreme”
“One Battle After Another”
“Sentimental Value”
“Sinners”
“Train Dreams”
“Weapons”

Award for outstanding producer of animated theatrical motion pictures
“The Bad Guys 2”
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle”
“Elio”
“KPop Demon Hunters”
“Zootopia 2”

Norman Felton Award for outstanding producer of episodic television — drama
“Andor”
“The Diplomat”
“The Pitt”
“Pluribus”
“Severance”
“The White Lotus”

Danny Thomas Award for outstanding producer of episodic television — comedy
“The Bear”
“Hacks”
“Only Murders in the Building”
“South Park”
“The Studio”

David L. Wolper Award for outstanding producer of limited or anthology series television
“Adolescence”
“The Beast in Me”
“Black Mirror”
“Black Rabbit”
“Dying for Sex”

Award for outstanding producer of televised or streamed motion pictures
“Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”
“The Gorge”
“John Candy: I Like Me”
“Mountainhead”
“Nonnas”

Award for outstanding producer of nonfiction television
“aka Charlie Sheen”
“Billy Joel: And So It Goes”
“Mr. Scorsese”
“Pee-wee as Himself”
“SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night”

Award for outstanding producer of live entertainment, variety, sketch, standup and talk television
“The Daily Show”
“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”
“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”
“SNL50: The Anniversary Special”

Award for outstanding producer of game and competition television
“The Amazing Race”
“Jeopardy!”
“RuPaul’s Drag Race”
“Top Chef”
“The Traitors”

Movie Reviews

Controversy Surrounds ‘The Raja Saab’ as Makers Allegedly Offer Money for Positive Reviews | – The Times of India

Published

15 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Prabhas’s ‘The Raja Saab’ has hit theaters, but early social media reactions are mixed to negative. A netizen claims the film’s team offered him ₹14,000 to delete his critical review and post a positive one instead. The authenticity of this claim remains unverified, while fans continue to share their varied opinions online.

Prabhas-starrer ‘The Raja Saab’ is currently running in theaters; the much-awaited film was released today. The early reviews of the Maruthi-directed film have been receiving mixed to negative reviews on social media. However, a netizen has claimed that the makers of the film offered him money to delete his negative review.

Netizen alleges bribe by the makers

On Friday morning, an X user named @BS__unfiltered posted a screenshot online. He said he received a message from the official account of ‘The Raja Saab’ after posting his review. According to him, the film’s team offered him Rs 14,000. They reportedly asked him to post a positive review of the movie instead. Sharing the screenshot, the user wrote, “What the hell mannnnn!!!! They are offering me money to delete this!!! Nahi hoga delete #TheRajaSaab #Prabhas.” However, the screenshot shared by the user is in question for its authenticity and is not verified. At this time, it is not clear if the message was real or AI-generated. The claim is still unconfirmed.See More: The Raja Saab: Movie Review and Release Live Updates: Prabhas’ film to open big at the box office

Fans share their opinions online

Fans and netizens have been active on social media, sharing their opinions about the film. While some enjoyed it, many expressed disappointment. Another internet user wrote, “A horror-fantasy with a good idea but weak execution. Prabhas gives an energetic & comical performance, & the face-off with Sanjay Dutt is the main highlight. The palace setting is interesting at first, but the messy screenplay, dragged 2nd half, uneven VFX, & weak emotional payoff reduce the impact. @MusicThaman’s music & sounding are one of the positives. From the end of the first half, the story becomes slightly interesting. There are 3 songs featuring Prabhas & @AgerwalNidhhi. Nidhhi has performed well. Some scenes feel unintentionally funny, & the climax fails to impress. Overall, a one-time watch at best. This film gives a lead for The Raja Saab Circus—1935 (Part 2), where we may see Prabhas vs. Prabhas.”

About ‘The Raja Saab’

‘The Raja Saab’ is directed and written by Maruthi. The film stars Prabhas in the lead role. The cast also includes Malavika Mohanan, Nidhhi Agerwal, Riddhi Kumar, Sanjay Dutt, and Boman Irani.