Las Vegas Weekly

August 14, 2008 · 2:39 PM

News at Playgirl sends a chill

By John Katsilometes

Burt Reynolds, wishing a merry Christmas indeed ...

I love that this blog is about Playgirl magazine going under and the blog category is called, “Debriefing.”

Snort!

And I also like that I can write, “Playgirl is going under,” and not feel too terribly juvenile. But yes, Playgirl is going under and will be no longer after the first quarter of 2009.

You might be asking, John, what is Playgirl? And why do you know so much about it? Playgirl is the for-women (and for-gay men, assumedly) counter to Playboy. It was announced earlier this month by Nicole Caldwell, Playgirl’s editor-in-chief and foremost authority on the display of nekkid males, that the print operation would cease with the January/February 2009 issue. Playgirl will instead be going all-Web – digitized and circumcised. This, as reported by MediaBistro.com’s Daily Fishbowl report (and thanks to good friend and adroit Web scanner Jodi Gersh for tracking All Things Playgirl), “Details of the site’s look are scarce, but it will feature more videos and pictorials and less editorial content. In other words, just like Playboy’s site.”

Except for the obvious, natch.

Playgirl’s international notoriety probably climaxed – or let’s say “crested” – with the December 1974 cover featuring a spread (a fairly hairy spread) of Burt Reynolds. I remember this because he was on The Mike Douglas Show after the magazine famously hit the newsstands. I think he was a guest on the Mike Douglas Christmas show, or during a week of Christmas shows, because everyone was wearing Santa hats (on their heads) and Burt was talking all about how he posed on the cover of Playgirl, but they should have asked Engelbert Humperdinck to model because of, you know, the name.

What else can we say about Playgirl? No more magazine, and, we can expect, no more Burt Reynolds. Both are weathered relics of a bygone era. That's as brief as it gets.

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