This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.
This article has been tagged since September 2006.
Alan Thicke (born Alan Willis Jeffrey on March 1, 1947 in Kirkland Lake, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian actor, songwriter, game show host and talk-show emcee. Throughout the late 1980s to early 1990s, he was most famous as Jason Seaver, the patriarch on the ABC television series Growing Pains. His son, Robin Thicke, is a popular musician. Alan is an avid hockey fan and player.
He graduated from Elliot Lake Secondary School in 1965 as the homecoming king. He attended the University of Western Ontario, where he worked as a disc jockey. He is a member of the Delta Upsilon international fraternity.
Thicke composed the original theme song to Wheel of Fortune (1975), titled "Big Wheels," which was used until 1983. Among other game show themes, he also composed The Diamond Head Game (1974), "The Joker's Jive," the theme music for the third and final CBS season of The Joker's Wild (1974), and Whew! (1979). Thicke also composed and sang the theme for The Wizard of Odds, a 1973 NBC game show that he produced. The show also featured the U.S. television debut of fellow Canadian Alex Trebek.
Outside of daytime TV, Thicke also composed (with then-wife Gloria Loring) the themes to the NBC sitcom Diff'rent Strokes and its spinoffs Hello Larry and The Facts of Life.
A clip of what appeared to be a Thicke-hosted Canadian game show from the early '70s, Face the Music, was screened when Thicke was a guest on Later with Bob Costas. In the 1980s, he hosted a Saturday morning game show called Animal Crack-Ups. Then in 1997, he also hosted a television version of the board game Pictionary. In the early 2000s, he hosted All New 3's a Crowd on Game Show Network.
Thicke was also the host of his own popular talk show in Canada during the early 1980s, called The Alan Thicke Show. The show at one point spawned a prime time spin-off entitled Prime Cuts, which consisted of edited highlights from the talk show. Based on the success of his talk show, Thicke was signed to do an American late night talk show Thicke of the Night. Although it helped launch the careers of Arsenio Hall and Louie Anderson, it was a spectacular failure against The Tonight Show.
Thicke also made a cameo appearance in a holiday Lexus commercial in the late 90s where he played various characters, including a golden retriever and a black woman. He also appeared on the American television series Hope and Gloria, which lasted only 35 episodes. In 2004, Thicke hosted the Miss Universe Canada pageant. In April 2006, he hosted Celebrity Cooking Showdown on NBC which teamed celebrities with famous chefs in a cooking competition.
Thicke also had a quick cameo in the 2007 movie Alpha Dog starring Emile Hirsch, as one of the boy actors' father. Thicke endorsed the popular early 90s beverage, Boku.
