When The Buffalo Roamed TV Screens in the 1980s…

Just the other day, I was watching an old episode of the classic TV game show The Match Game. This lighthearted gameshow, in which contestants attempt to match celebrity panelists with fill-in-the-blank answers to humorous riddles, has always been good for a laugh. Gene Rayburn never missed a beat as the show’s host, and regular panelists included such famous names as actress Brett Somers, comedian Charles Nelson Reilly, actor-writer Fannie Flagg, and many other familiar faces.

I was working on a project and half-listening to a 1980 episode in the background that happened to be on the Buzzr TV network when the show’s Super Match segment came on. This is where a contestant, victorious in earlier rounds of the game, has a chance to win big by matching one celebrity on a short, usually common fill-in-the-blank phrase. The puzzle “__________ Nickel” made me take a second look up at the screen.

Remembering this episode was filmed in 1980, I expected “Buffalo” to pop up among one of the three possible answers for the puzzle. Of course, in 1980 pretty much most Americans could remember using or at least had personally seen Buffalo Nickels – produced from 1913 through 1938 and used for many years beyond. Plus, it was possible to still find the occasional Buffalo Nickel in circulation during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – the last years of the coin’s appearance in everyday commerce. Sure enough, “Buffalo Head” came up as the second-most popular of the three responses, ahead of “Plug” (as in “plugged nickel” – worthless) and behind the top answer of “Wooden.”

Interestingly, as I think back on Buffalo Nickels and their appearances on television during my childhood years, The Match Game certainly wasn’t the only place one could catch a reference to these beloved five-cent coins. As a railroad-obsessed child of the 1980s (my playroom was filled with BRIO wooden railway sets and electric trains – some of which I still own), I used to enjoy watching the live-action PBS television show Shining Time Station. This series, originally running from 1989 through 1993 and starring former Beatles musician Ringo Starr, Grease actress Didi Conn, and – later in the series – comedian George Carlin, centers around the characters who live, work, and play at a quaint railroad station in smalltown U.S.A.

In this railroad station is a jukebox that plays music whenever one of the characters drops a nickel in, prompting “live” music as created by a band of tiny musicians (Flexitoon puppets and marionettes) who play happy tunes. In one episode, as typical, a human character outside the jukebox decides to summon music by dropping a nickel in. But this time it wasn’t just any old nickel... It was a Buffalo Nickel – much to the delight of one of the band members who immediately recognizes the vintage coin and waxes nostalgia about these relics that hearken to the romance of the Old West.

Another place children of my generation encountered the Buffalo Nickel on TV? In the early 1980s, the iconic children’s cable network Nickelodeon prominently used the visage of a Buffalo Nickel in its television promotions. This little nostalgia trip back to TV Land during my childhood makes me wonder, where else did the Buffalo Nickel pop up on television back in the ‘80s? What about the ‘90s, the decade when I got involved in the hobby? I certainly don’t remember many Buffalo Nickels on TV then… And, perhaps more importantly, where will the typical American encounter such pop-culture references to classic coins today? Hmmm…