Bill Cullen looks psychotic

Happened to see a thread on Matt Ottinger's board with this funny I've Got a Secret caricature. The drawings of Henry Morgan and Garry Moore are relatively humdrum. But Betsy Palmer looks scarily like her Friday the 13th self, and Bill Cullen has apparently just escaped from the asylum.

Bess Myerson isn't around. She had become a regular well before this Al Kilgore cartoon appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in December, 1960. Guess he just didn't want to draw her.

I've Got a Secret was then coming off its top ratings years, 1955-1959. The show would run until 1967 but things were never quite the same. Moore would leave in 1964 and Steve Allen would see out the final years.

Nowadays shows get lost in the 500-channel jungle. But this simple little panel show could corral a huge percentage of American households back in the old days of three networks and nothing else. The black-and-white caricature brings back that era for me, though not with complete fondness. I wouldn't want to return to the ancient network triopoly, anyway.