A Carol Burnett meltdown?

I have seen a lot of cases lately of YouTubers putting together videos of their own "best boards games" of some decade, or century, or from their own childhood, and I have been impressed at the wide range of clips they have been able to dig up from old TV shows and cartoons showing fictional family game nights.  So I have been trying to track down some of those clips.

Going wayy back, here is a gem from the Carol Burnett show.  It is a brilliant pick for the one board game this bunch of high-strung, irritable characters should never EVER try to play together ... Sorry!

Except that it's not quite the game of Sorry as we know it.  Interesting.  The writers have two main choices here: get the rules exactly right and come up with a set of rolls that produce the exact outcomes shown, or just do a basic setup of how you remember the game being played, and trust the actors to sell it to the audience, which will be a lot more fun to watch.  We're not here for a lesson on how a game is played, we're here to see some funny antics, probably lampooning our own gaming experiences.

I watched this one twice before I realized the main thing they got wrong.  Sorry doesn't use dice!  The big thing that made it different from Parcheesi was their printed deck of cards.  But maybe Carol's crazy family lost the cards, so they play with dice now.  Which means there are house rules to make up the differences.  Why not?  There is no official rule where whoever rolls highest gets to choose the color -- that was just playing on the characters.  What's funny is that after all the bickering over the colors, they sat down clockwise in the blue (Momma), yellow (Harvey) and green (Carol) positions to begin with.

There is no official rule that you have to roll doubles to start a main on the board; the actual rule is that you draw a 1 card to start a piece on the board, or draw a 2 card to start a piece and draw again to move that piece.  Even in Parcheesi, you enter a man by rolling a 5 on a single die or the sum of the two dice; nothing about rolling doubles.  The game sure didn't come with a little bell, at least not any edition I've seen, but I could picture this TV family throwing one in just to burn each other a little more.

It felt very accurate when Momma rolled the 6 and hit the slide for 5 more spaces.  Except a few minutes later I remembered that you only start a new man on the board on the FIRST space.  They don't move a full move until the next turn.  House rule?  I know that when we play with just two players we just draw cards and start moving.  It's just lame sitting there waiting for someone to draw a one or two.

What's hilarious is how the writers caught the classic game player types: the one who tells you all the rules like you were a child, the one you tries to tell you how to play your own moves, the one who always attacks, the one who chooses who to go after, the one who ignores all advice and does it their own way, the one who complains that it's just a kids game and then enjoys it too much, the one who "watches the board like a hawk".  Some players have several of these traits all wrapped into one.  Perfectly done.  Carol Burnett's voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard to my brain, but the cast just nails this whole scenario and how bitter the game can be if you take it seriously for any reason.  At least there is no money involved.  OMG the sarcasm and nastiness.

I wouldn't expect their die rolls don't add up to where the pieces ended up.  But it was the comedy that counts, and boy did they sell it.  I was impressed that with all the flamboyant outbursts, they never dropped a single die off the table.

It's a bit hard to make out but in one of the very first shots, before they choose colors, it looks like the 1972 edition of the game, which had solid slide arrows (not color coded) and a pale grey interior, with the blue corner facing the camera:

Here is a look at that board on BoardGameGeek.  The on-screen game is conspicuously missing the deck of cards.

In later editions, the slides were color coded so that the one downstream of your starting point is not usable by your color.  So you could never start with a 6 and a slide.  Or a 2 and a 5 and a slide.

Once the game gets going, the board is accurately handled, with pieces in their proper starting circles and at roughly the positions they should be around the edges.

But it's such a well-known game, it would be hard for three grown-ups (who were probably already parents) to get it wrong.  It was just odd that they were using dice this time around.  This skit is a classic by any measure, where games are part of our lives, and there are fights, but in the end it all just turns back to fun and we forget our differences.