Mr. Thicke’s talents also included songwriting. He wrote the theme songs for numerous game shows, including “The Joker’s Wild,” “Celebrity Sweepstakes” and the original “Wheel of Fortune,” and he wrote the themes for the sitcoms “Diff’rent Strokes” and “The Facts of Life” with Al Burton and Ms. Loring.

The “Diff’rent Strokes” theme is a masterpiece of the genre, setting up in less than a minute the story of a white multimillionaire who took in (and later adopted) two black children. It begins:

Now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum,

What might be right for you, may not be right for some.

A man is born, he’s a man of means.

Then along come two, they got nothing but their jeans.

But they got

Diff’rent strokes.

His career also included stints as a talk-show host, both real and fictional. His syndicated late-night show “Thicke of the Night” was seen in the 1983-84 season, and he played the talk-show host Rich Ginger on the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful.” He also played himself on several episodes of the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.”

He was a writer on the satirical talk show “Fernwood 2-Night” (1977), a spinoff of “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” that starred Martin Mull and Fred Willard, and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for his writing on a later version of the show, “America 2-Night.”

He was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1988 for best performance by an actor in a comedy or musical series for “Growing Pains,” and for a Daytime Emmy in 1998 for his work as host of the game show “Pictionary.”