The
Bill Cullen Homepage
Here's what you
can find inside:
| A Bill
Cullen biography with little-known personal information, rare photos and
interesting trivia. |
| The
most comprehensive list anywhere of Bill Cullen's TV series (more than
thirty of them), with a separate page of details for each. |
| From
his early days as a CBS staff announcer to being a top disc jockey, read
about Bill Cullen's busy radio career. |
| A huge
list of guest appearances Bill Cullen made on game shows and other programs. |
| A chronological
chart of Bill Cullen TV series, showing how often he had two or more programs
on at the same time. |
| Other
places on the World Wide Web where you can find information and pictures
of Bill Cullen, other game show personalities and game shows themselves. |
| Our guestbook,
where you can tell us your favorite memories of Bill Cullen, and read the
comments of others. |
| Our favorite
page, full of rare and unusual Bill Cullen appearances in other media,
including his movie role, his record album and much more. |
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Matt
Ottinger is a television producer, educator and host based in Michigan.
He is a lifelong fan of game shows in general and of Bill Cullen
in particular. He has two other web sites devoted to game shows.
The Game Show Home Game Home
Page offers detailed information about commercially released game
show memorabilia, such as box games, books and records. The
Game Show Compendium is a list of more that 1700 links to game
show pages throughout the internet.
Fred Wostbrock is a game
show, infomercial and broadcasting agent based in Studio City, California.
He owns the largest private collection of game show photos in the United
States. He is also one of the three authors of The Encyclopedia
of TV Game Shows. We are grateful to Fred for allowing us to
include some of his pictures of Bill on this tribute site. Because
they are his photos, we can't grant permission for their use in any other
way, including on any other website.
Kenneth Johannessen is
a radio professional in the Pacific Northwest and a researcher currently
working on a history of the Mutual Broadcasting System. He is responsible
for tracking down all of the Variety reviews seen on this site,
as well as countless additional facts, dates and details.
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A TRIBUTE TO THE GREATEST GAME SHOW HOST
OF ALL TIME
FEATURING PHOTOS FROM THE FRED WOSTBROCK
COLLECTION
BILL CULLEN PHOTO OF THE
MONTH
In honor of the new clips from
Pulse, one of our favorite pictures of Bill. Philippe Halsman
was a portrait photographer of celebrities and politicians with more than
a hundred Life magazine covers to his credit. For about a decade,
he asked his subjects to be photographed in mid-jump (after their formal
portrait session had concluded, naturally). His experiment in "jumpology"
yielded hundreds of fascinating shots of some of the most famous figures
of the day, including the classic Dali
Atomicus.
The picture above was taken
following a session to promote Pulse,
Bill's radio show. We don't have any other pictures from the session,
but we do have print ads in which they are featured, including one which
shows Bill asleep against the microphone. This picture comes from
a collection of Halsman's work called Jump Book, originally published
in 1959 and reprinted in 1986.
The New York Times described
him as, "the slim, alert man with the big horn-rimmed glasses, the large
eyes, and the elfin grin which splits his face wide and lights it like
a ball park at night." Time Magazine said "his smile gleams as brightly
as the lens of his eyeglasses, and whatever else may happen, he is never
speechless." Groucho Marx called him "the second-wittiest man on
the air."
Bill Cullen was one of
the busiest and most popular personalities in the history of television.
He appeared as a regular in more different television series than any other
performer, and in a field where careers are sometimes measured in months,
he was employed almost continuously for more than forty years in radio
and television, often with multiple series on the air at the same time.
We hope you enjoy this site dedicated to the remarkable career of Bill
Cullen.
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We would like to thank some
webmasters who have kindly mentioned us and added links from their pages
to ours:
THE
GAME SHOW FORUM
In addition to these fine sites,
you can also find many more links to sites related to Bill Cullen
and game shows on our LINKS page, and on
pages dedicated to specific series.
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February 2007
First, Bill Cullen news about
a Bill Cullen who's not OUR Bill Cullen. Minnesota Republican Bill
Cullen was unsuccessful in his attempt to oust incumbent Maria
Ruud in their state house race in November. Best as we can tell,
he continues to speak out for smaller government and other conservative
issues. We wish him the best in his future pursuits.
In Bill Cullen news about OUR
Bill Cullen, GSN recently aired a documentary series claiming to count
down the ten greatest hosts of all time. Even though the list predominantly
featured recent hosts (as such lists usually do), they managed to include
Bill at number seven. Rather than be upset at his low ranking, we've
chosen to be pleased that the presumably young people who put the list
together managed to include him at all. His segment featured clips
from various Goodson-Todman and Bob Stewart shows in the
GSN library, as well as some terrific pictures from Fred Wostbrock's
amazing archive.
Meanwhile, a similar recent
listing of TWENTY top game show hosts on the WNBC website failed
to mention Bill at all, yet did find room for such game show titans as
Anderson Cooper and Mike Adamle. The less said about
that foolishness the better.
Here, thanks to the generosity
of Fred Wostbrock, we now have even more examples of Bill's radio
work, including a couple of syndicated series that we didn't know about
before. While samples from Looking
Inside Sports and something called Knowledge
Mod Style are amusing enough, the really big news is a series of
clips from the Pulse series
that he did for WNBC radio in the late fifties. These clips came
from vinyl pressings in Bill's personal collection, and are presented here
for the first time in more than half a century.
Fred has provided us with other
delightful treasures that we really can't talk about, but eagle-eyed visitors
might notice changes to some of our listings based on what we've now seen.
Finally, and at long last, we're
happy to begin providing video clips of Bill in action. Look for
our YouTube clips as BillCullenNet. First up is a classic
blooper from To Tell The Truth.
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The Bill Cullen Homepage
is created using an old version of Netscape Composer and is designed to
be best viewed with a 1024x768 screen resolution and a small font setting.
The font is Verdana. Pictures are from a variety of published sources
and from the collection of Fred Wostbrock. No video frame
grabs are used in any of these pages. We could, and we'd have some
amazing ones, but it's more challenging this way. This is a non-profit
fan site and we don't mean to mess with anybody's copyrights. Finally,
we never got to meet the man, but everybody on TV called him by his first
name. So do we.
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