Tom Selleck is getting candid on the future of his career after the axing of “Blue Bloods,” saying he’d love to star in a Western helmed by “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan.
The 79-year-old revealed he isn’t ready for retirement in an interview with Parade published on Friday, dishing on his dream role.
“A good Western’s always on my list,” the legendary actor shared. “I miss that; I want to sit on a horse again.”
Sheridan recently worked with Sam Elliott on the “Yellowstone” spin-off “1883,” and Selleck explained that’s a trio he’d like to join.
“Sam was great in [1883], Sam’s always great. We go way, way back. I love him dearly. I’d love to work with Sam,” he told the outlet.
Selleck has been in many westerns. Including two also starring Sam Elliott: The Sacketts and The Shadow Riders. So way back with Sam Elliott goes forty-five years as does Selleck’s experience with Westerns. Which is further back than Blue Bloods and even Magnum P.I. (the original, when the Cylons did not look like humans).
How could a twenty-something entertainment reporter or a six-month-old-generative-text-application even say “Waterworld” or “The Postman” without even known what the titles mean?
Jeez, Louise, children: After winning a couple Academy Awards for Dances with Wolves and a span of box office successes for the decade 1985-1995, he made the two post-apocalyptic films in the mid- to late-1990s which spawned a wave of articles just like this one which ran roughly from 1997 to, what, 2003 with the release of Open Range–or beyond.
C’mon, man, even entertainment history began before 2020.
I picked up this DVD in a cardboard sleeve sometime in the distant past. I cannot tell you whether I paid a full dollar for it in a grocery store around the turn of the century when they carried little public domain collections on turnable racks or if I bought it at a garage sale, but it doesn’t have a sticker on it which might indicate it was wrapped in cellaphane when I got it. The sleeve was open, though. So, who knows? (And, probably, who cares? Although, gentle reader, these details are interesting to me, such as Did I have this in the video stacks for twenty years or only three?)
This disc contains three first-season episodes of the television series which ran from 1951-1953.
“Frankenstein” retells, briefly, the tale of the movie version of Frankenstein. In his castle on an island on a lake, Dr. Frankenstein creates life. The monster, played by Lon Chaney, Jr., gets called ugly by a little boy who’s staying in the castle and becomes murderous. Bullets and a fall into the lake cannot stop him, but apparently electricity can. It’s a long book, but the story is more based on the movies more than the book.
“The Cosmic Egg” tells the story of an antiques dealer who asks a professor to examine a crystal egg for which someone offered a high price; the professor eventually determines that it is an alien device for monitoring people on earth. Based on a story by H.G. Wells.
“Appointment on Mars” tells the story of the three men who are first to Mars and hope to stake claims to minerals there. However, they start to get paranoid and turn on each other. The story stars a very young Leslie Nielsen, seemingly before his voice changed, and was written by Salvatore A. Lombino–Evan Hunter/Ed McBain.
The picture and sound quality are what you would expect from a seventy-five-year-old television show that was probably only incidentally taped and lapsed into public domain. Of course, it didn’t bother me because I have watched many such cheap transfers, both for television programs and for actual movies, some of which even had sound. So it’s no telling what kids today would make of them. Probably not enjoy them. But back in the old days, when television was starting to replace the radio, I bet the kids ate these up.
I bought this, the first half of the first season of the television program The Streets of San Francisco, recently, but apparently as part of a purchase that I did not enumerate for you, gentle reader. Perhaps it was the beginning of August, when I went to the antique malls to finish my Christmas shopping before I spent a couple days of my vacation ferrying my brother to and from his homestead to a medical appointment in St. Louis. I wanted to have the Christmas shopping done so I could take the Christmas presents over since I could not ship them because I lack certain stickers for the package. I bought a couple things for myself during this excursion, but apparently not enough to have posted about it.
Not that it matters where I got it, but I dived right into it. I remember that my sainted mother watched this show, whether on first run when I was really young or in syndication when I was what would later be called a “tween.” (Where did that word go? I haven’t seen it lately. Maybe I don’t see it because my boys are past that now.) But I didn’t remember much about it, and what I might have–San Francisco and Karl Malden–is undoubtedly mixed with Rice-a-Roni (the San Francisco treat) and American Express (Karl Malden saying, “Don’t leave home without them.”) commercials.
This set of 4 DVDs contains the first half of the first season, which is the television movie pilot (based on a book called Poor, Poor Ophelia which I might just look for now). This is actually a pretty good snack size for my television watching, as larger sets that we have which include complete series daunt me–they will consume my evenings for a couple of months–but this one was only a couple of weeks. I might pick other such volumes up if I see them, as I enjoyed the series.
If you’re not familiar with the series, it has an older police detective, Mike Stone (Malden) partnering with a new detective (Michael Douglas) who is educated/a college boy (not clear: how he came to be a detective; a few years in uniform would have acclimated him to police work and made him less of a college boy than he is in the show, but never mind–maybe that’s covered in the book). They work all kinds of cases, not just homicide–although they get their share of those. It was filmed on location. Well, from the second season on, the entire show was filmed in San Francisco, so you really do get a sense of place. I’ve been to old San Francisco twice in the early part of this century, and even then it was dingier than in this program comes out of the 1960s and shows a little bit of the seemy side. But not as gritty as modern shows, I imagine.
I won’t go episode-by-episode (Wikipedia has a list with short plot summaries). I will say that the story structure varied widely; it was not a formulaic body-detect-solve or body-we know who the bad guy is-detect-solve structures. In some of them, the actual crimes do not occur until the second or third act (each portion of the show is enumerated as Act I through Act IV with an Epilog outro). In others, the crime occurs within the first minute. We have some kidnappings, some assaults, and some homicides. In most cases, Malden wants to talk or negotiate with the criminal. There’s a little fisticuffs and a little gunplay, but most of the time the bad guy is taken into custody.
So it was a pleasure to watch, not only for the sudden nostalgia I’m having for the 1970s. Anemoia, I know, nostalgia for a place you’ve never been because I was very young then and did not have to deal with an adult’s cares, but I remember it as a secure time for young child Brian J. and I remember the look and feel of the time. The film made me want to get a couple of sport coats and return to going Grant which I have fallen out of again because I’m really not going anywhere, really, these days, and when I do, dressing business casual makes one stand out in not a good way.
I could not help but note how the intro kind of matches the style of that for Hawaii Five-O. Both have that sixties/seventies sound to them and feature a lot of quick clips of tourist locations with a lot of zoom effects. Compare:
The later program started earlier and lasted longer, and I watched it in syndication more completely than this program.
As my youngest took his driving test as I started watching, I could not help but chuckle that the drivers followed all of the obscure rules that trip you up on the driver’s test. They turn the wheels to the curb when parking, but that’s easier to remember when you’re parking in San Francisco on a thirty degree incline. When kidnappers nab a guy on the street, they signal to re-enter traffic from the curb. So a little extra for me. The lad passed first try, or I would have made him watch the series with me.
I couldn’t help but notice, also, the guest stars in many of the episodes went on to get series of their own. One episode has Hutch, and then a later episode has Starsky. An early episode has Mr. H., and another has Mrs. H. from Hart to Hart–and the latter episode has Devon Miles from Knight Rider. Mel from Alice is a recurring character as is Dr. Huer from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. So in addition to a bunch of that guys from 1960s and 1970s television, we get people who would go onto some success of their own. Lost, I am sure, on younger viewers. But are there younger viewers? Probably not.
And, yeah, the anemoia is hitting me hard these days, what with all the books from the 1970s I’ve been reading an my earlier excursion into Sha Na Na this summer. I suppose if it all turns out okay, my boys will have a similar sense of the 2020s that my parents probably would not share with their adult perspectives and no assurances.
So the other evening as I was making my toilet before bed, I sang to myself, “Doh doh it doh doh. Good night, sweetheart, well, it’s time to go….” And I will leave it to you to wonder if I flexed my bicep as I did so.
Because that’s the closing number from the television program Sha Na Na:
I saw that a time or two on a Saturday afternoon back in the day. I was not the target audience–it was probably geared towards my grandparents’ generation or maybe the early boomers who remembered doo-wop from their younger years–but as a kid, I am sure I watched anything.
So I went looking on YouTube for a complete episode, and I watched it.
The first one I found had the added benefit of having Barbi Benton as the guest star:
She was a Playboy model who also released some records, and so she did a number on the show. She had the country rock sound so common of the era (says the man who also owns Lynda Carter records).
Additionally, someone probably used a new VCR to tape this off of television, so you get all the period commercials as well. Man, I was young once, but that was long ago.
It looks like YouTube has other episodes, but I don’t know that I’ll watch many of them, and I’m certainly not going to seek out a box set (which does not seem to be available, although they have a bunch of records out). Because one or two episodes would be a nostalgia trip, and more than that might indicate a problem (says a guy who watched a bunch of The Best of the Dean Martin Variety Show on videocassette).
Ah, gentle reader. After successfully ploughing (as one does in England) through (which does not rhyme with “plough” though–although though and although do), ahem, after successfully ploughing through the first six series of Red Dwarf, I thought I might delve even further back in my DVD set acquisitions and watch the two seasons of Sledge Hammer! which I got in 2004. So, yes, it has taken me twenty years to get around to watching these (as opposed to only thirteen years for Red Dwarf). I felt compelled to watch it as I was reliving my television watching of the 1980s and because Lileks posted a picture of David Rasche recently (and I do mean like within a month or so ago recently).
I mean, I did run through the first season some years back, back when our DVD player was a PlayStation 2, but when it switched to the second season with its lower budget and “five years earlier” thing, and I couldn’t continue–which is also how it went with Red Dwarf–it stepped out of my nostalgia zone and I couldn’t deal with it. But I plowed through both seasons this viewing, and it took as long as Red Dwarf because it was basically the same number of episodes in two seasons of American television as it was for six series of British television.
So: Sledge Hammer is a police inspector, a spoof of Dirty Harry–underlined by John Vernon playing The Mayor in the pilot episode, wanting a man who gets results to locate his daughter who has been “kidnapped” by a terrorist group. Hammer is given a new partner, Dori Doreau, a woman to act as a straight, er, woman to Hammer’s excesses which include shooting his gun, roughing up suspects, and talking to his gun. Most of the episodes spoof on movies or detective show tropes of some sort or another, and I certainly benefited from being familiar with the source material. Perhaps not in 1986 when I watched it on television, but certainly now.
So I chuckled at some of the nearly 40-year-old gags. You can basically derive my sense of humor from droll English humour like Red Dwarf and spoofs like this. Maybe that’s what built my sense of humor as these were on the telly in my teenaged years.
And if the Internet had been a thing back then, perhaps we would have had Detective Doreau versus Officer Daley arguments.
Ah, gentle reader, we have been very light with the movie reports here at MfBJN, and that’s for a good reason: I have actually watched the boxed set entitled Red Dwarf: The Complete Collection which my beautiful wife gave me for my birthday in 2011. Soon, though, it was an incomplete collection, as they made two movies and four more “series” (seasons) of the program all the way up to 2020.
As I have mentioned, the PBS station in St. Louis played an episode of this television program after Doctor Who on Sunday nights. So I recorded a couple of them by programming a videocassette recorder like the ancients did. The first two “series” (seasons, as we spell it in the United States) were released in 1988, so they would have been the ones I have on the old grainy videocassettes. Given that each series is only six episodes, I must have seen quite a percentage of them in those old days. Not long after I got the set of DVDs, I started watching them with my beautiful wife, but she did not care for the common insult of the show, smeghead, so she dropped. And when I got to the start of the third series and saw its abrupt shift in the opening and the different look to it, I shelved it for a decade. But I powered through it this time.
So, the setup: The Red Dwarf is a mining ship, and Dave Lister is the lowest technician on the ship. He smuggles a cat on board and, when it is discovered, he is put into a stasis field for the remainder of the voyage (and will be docked that pay). A radiation leak kills the crew except for Lister, and the computer (known as Holly) releases him three million years later when the radiation levels have cooled. Holly can also project a hologram of a single ship’s crewman, so he chooses Rimmer, Lister’s immediate superior officer, roommate, and foil. Additionally, the pregnant cat gave birth three million years ago, and her progeny evolved to a cat civilization in the ship’s hold, of which only a single representative, called, appropriately enough, Cat, remains. Eventually, they pick up a fifth main character, a service mechanoid named Kryten.
So that’s basically the show: Four or five people dealing with zany creatures they encounter, time rifts, and so on. The first two series were just a couple of sets, but the show’s budget increased over time, and the individual series kind of have themes. The Red Dwarf is stolen for a couple, so they’re pursuing its trail. Or nanobots have rebuilt the Red Dwarf, including the crew (this is the last series in the set). The characters are kind of types: Rimmer is the Flashman type, a blustery nincompoop; Lister is a lower class slob; Cat is a dumb dandy; Holly is a bit daft; Kryten is servile. The humor tends toward the zany situations in which the characters find themselves, the characters playing to their types, and the crazy verbal metaphors they come up with to describe circumstances and situations. It’s funny in spots.
The Wikipedia entry uses the term “retcon” to describe changes between the series, but that implies a continuity that the show itself does not expect or enforce. Kryten, for example, is a one-off character in series 2–the first episode, actually, and he does not appear again in Series II but is a regular character in Series III. In Series III, the original Holly is replaced by a Holly from an alternate universe they encountered in Series II, but the substitution is not explained. Some of the series end in cliffhangers which are sometimes explained quickly at the beginning of the next series–or not. The series that features them hunting for the Red Dwarf starts without showing the precipitating events. Sometimes it tries to explain things–like how they swap out Rimmer for Christine Kochanski in Series VI. So they’re comfortable with having some recurring characters/situations/themes, but they’re not tightly bound to what has gone before (and I understand that later series kind of throw out the last couple of series in this set).
So amusing overall and funny in spots, and I planned to be discouraged about the crew going on for a decade without changing or finding earth, but the different concepts and shifts from series to series kept it fresh.
However, I found binge-watching–and I watched two or three episodes most nights for several weeks–to be kind of difficult. It’s probably easier to enjoy a show like this in its original form–an episode a week, which keeps the repeated tropes from being too obvious.
I am not in a hurry right now to run out and buy the rest of the series. But if I found them at a library book sale for a buck each or in an antique mall for a couple of dollars, I would be tempted. And you all know I cannot resist that temptation, so perhaps the word I’m looking for is fut accompli. That is, a fait accompli in the future.
An actor who was in Succession, but I remembered him from an ep of Miami Vice. He played a CIA agent named “Surf.” It’s the one in which (spoiler) he turns out to be a Russian agent, and has Castillo trapped. Of course Castillo pulls out a sword and assumes a pose that’s supposed to make us think “Oh of course Castillo is a Samurai dude, he has skills,” and the actor says “when you go, you go all the way.” Why do I remember that?
Lileks does not name the guy, but, c’mon, man, that’s Sledge Hammer. Apparently, actor David Rasche was in other things, but I haven’t seen them.
Come to think of it, I have only watched the first season of the complete Sledge Hammer! set I bought in 2004 (anticipated here and acquisition acknowledged here). I watched the first season again with my boys when they were younger (probably already a decade ago). When I finish up the current DVD set of a television show that I acquired a long time ago, perhaps I should dig it out. In addition to boxes of movies and documentaries of dubious quality, I have many box sets of complete (or almost complete) or random single seasons of television series to watch. Someday. Maybe.
But David Rasche. Say his name. Although if you’re like me and have only seen it in print (in my case, the Sledge Hammer! credits), you might mispronounce it.
The majority of the series [Ozark] is set in the dark, ominous Ozarks, but critics didn’t hesitate to point out that hardly any of the episodes were filmed in Missouri. The majority of the series was filmed in Georgia, according to IMDb. As for the lake scenes, most of these were filmed at Lake Allatoona, a reservoir similarly shaped to the Lake of the Ozarks about 45 minutes northwest of Atlanta.
In recent years, “Ozark” may have been at the top of people’s minds when it came to how Missouri was showcased by Hollywood, but there have been several other award-winning television shows and movies set in the Show Me State — some of which, like “Ozark” weren’t actually filmed here.
Perhaps the journalist is disappointed that she does not have the opportunity to see stars on location, but the article points out that Georgia ladles tax breaks and incentives on production companies. One wonders if this is supposed to serve as a call to action for Missouri to also ladle out tax money so Shia LeBeouf can fly in and film for a couple of days before flying out.
However, since it was presented as a quiz, I must ask myself: How did I do? The sixteen from the article are:
The Act
Sharp Objects
Three Billboards Outside Ebbings, Missouri
American Honey
Gone Girl
Switched at Birth
Winter’s Bone
Up in the Air
Waiting for Guffman
Road House
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
National Lampoon’s Vacation
Paper Moon
Meet Me In St. Louis
I’ve seen five of sixteen.
The list skews to recent and to piss-on-Missouri stories and includes a number of entries where a scene nominally appears in Missouri in a larger travel film. Coincidentally, the latter overlap a lot with the films on the list I’ve seen.
The journalist does disclaim:
Note: There have been countless television shows and movies set and filmed in Missouri. This list is not exhaustive.
However, if one goes to the AUTHORITY (the Wikipedia entry Films set in Missouri), one sees this pretty much is the pattern: Piss on Missouri or just passing through. Guardians of the Galaxy? Deep Impact? I have seen these films, and they might have a scene in Missouri, but to say they’re set in Missouri is a stretch.
I am glad to see One Night At McCool’s is listed. But Larger than Life is not. The latter falls in the “Passing through” category, with a scene in Kansas City, and something that was filmed in St. Louis–Mike and Todd, both veteran actors of The Courtship of Barbara Holt, were extras in a scene that did not make the final feature.
At any rate, I’m not much into movies, books, or articles that piss on the heartland or where the writer is from (after the writer has moved to the big time). So I probably won’t watch Winter’s Bone (although I did just check movie accumulation posts to make sure I hadn’t already bought the DVD somewhere) but I do have the book in the stacks somewhere (I ordered it from ABC Books during the LOCKDOWN).
I picked this DVD up at a church garage sale four years ago (which, come to think of it, was the last time our church had a garage sale, it seems). I watched Duck Soup and Horse Feathersin 2021, but I guess my recent viewings of old Twilight Episodes got me more in the habit of watching a couple of old shows in an evening instead of watching a film. So it continues here.
This show aired the same time as the Twilight Zone episodes: 1961ish, when television was still black and white. Color was coming a couple years later, although widespread penetration would continue into the 1970s–both my beautiful wife and I remember secondary television sets in our homes were black and white.
At any rate, this DVD features two episodes of the game show wherein a set of couples essentially play one category’s worth of Jeopardy! and try to amass a higher dollar amount than other participating couples. Each round begins with Groucho reparteeing with the couples, and this really amounts to about half of the show. Then the couple gets to choose questions from a category that they’ve previously selected with dollar amounts up to $100. If they get it right, the amount is added to their score, and if they get it incorrect, an amount is deducted–so you can see how I compare it to Jeopardy! At the beginning of the show, the duck drops down with the Secret Word, a common word, and if either of the contestants mentions it, it is also added to their score. The winning couple gets a crack at a question of higher value at the end of the program, and if no one gets it right, the value increases for the next program. That’s basically it. Groucho hamming it up and a couple of questions for contestants in between.
I found one particular thing interesting. The show looks to have three cameras: One on the contestants, one on Groucho, and one wider view. Most of the show uses camera’s one and two, but when they begin the question and and answer period, they go to the wider shot for a second, and the announcer comes in, and the viewer sees how small the set is. The contestants are on the left, the announcer has a hanging mike on the right, and Groucho is on the right, and the space between them is that of a small kitchen table (although they’re standing, and it’s not actually a table). Compared to modern game show sets, it’s tiny and intimate.
So I found it more interesting as an artifact of what was on television sixty years ago and because I like Groucho Marx more than a quiz show, although I did okay and the questions were, again, akin to the things you would find on Jeopardy! today. Maybe a little dated, but certainly closer to my wheelhouse than modern trivia nights. Where, I guess, I do okay which is not winning.
Well, the joke is indeed on me, as I said when I reviewed Volume 19:
I’m clearly not watching them in order–well, it will become obvious when I finish the next volume and its number is not higher than 19….
Even though I shuffled them into the cabinet instead of keeping them together, I somehow ended up pulling them out in order. Well, unless there’s another one that I haven’t spotted which is somewhere in the middle of the volume numbers. Which is, again, not akin to order in the actual television series as each volume includes episodes from different seasons of the original series.
The wingspan of this volume is wider than the others; it includes an episode from the first season as well as from the fifth season whose opening was the one used on the syndicated program when I was growing up, so the one I associate most with the series.
At any rate, this volume includes:
“Mirror Image” from the first season where a woman at a bus station finds that the man at the counter and a woman in the restroom mention encounters and conversations with her that she does not recall, and she has checked her suitcase–or has she not? When looking in the restroom mirror, she sees through the open restroom door herself sitting on the bench outside. A friendly man, played by Martin Milner (who played Tod on Route 66, some episodes of which I watched in 2021 and I mentioned here and here), listens to her story but agrees with the station manager that she must be crazy. After the nice policemen take her away, Milner’s character sees himself run out of the bus station door. And he pursues his mirror image but loses him outside. And the episode ends, not with a DUN DUN DUH! but without a resolution. More speculative.
“Dust”, a message-based episode. The son of an immigrant family accidentally runs down a girl in an old west town and is sentenced to be hanged. The grasping peddlar who sold the rope to hang the young man also sells the superstitious father a bag of magic dust–a fake–to save his son. At the actual hanging, the father throws the magic dust at the townspeople, and his actions and words cause them to rethink the hanging. A message program again with no DUN DUN DUH!
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” finds several different people in a featureless cell from which they seemingly cannot escape until a new resident convinces them to make a human pyramid to reach the edge where they discover they are toys in a toy collection bin in Victorian England. A nice bit of speculative work here even with its DUN DUN DUH!
“Ninety Years Without Slumbering” features an elderly man who believe he will die if his grandfather clock stops, so he tinkers with it constantly. His family, with whom he lives, makes plans to get rid of the clock to prove to him that it is not the case. AND IT IS NOT THE CASE! A reverse DUN DUN DUH?
An interesting collection, especially with the inclusion of something from the first season which might have been the strongest, before Serling and crew were driven by necessity to churn out more boilerplate and genre-adhering shows.
Still, my television watching these days has pretty much been confined to black and white, and it’s probably not at a personal loss.
This is the second volume of this collection that I’ve watched this month (the first was Volume 6). I’m clearly not watching them in order–well, it will become obvious when I finish the next volume and its number is not higher than 19–but this set of DVDs does not really have the episodes in any order, either, skipping through the seasons–and seemingly focusing on later seasons.
This disc contains:
“A Most Unusual Camera” wherein a couple of two-bit thieves knock over an antique store only to come up with cheap knock-offs, but they do discover something–a camera that takes photos a few minutes into the future. They figure out a way to monetize it–take it to the horse racing track and take a picture of the winner board before the race is run. They make a pile of money, but end up getting–their just desserts? In a totally tacked on twist.
“The Jungle”, wherein a project engineer who has been to Africa to scope out a hydroelectric project finds that his wife has become very superstitious, and they fear the magick of the shamans in a tribe opposed to the project. After a night at a bar, he has to walk home after car trouble and finds New York City turning into a jungle around him.
“The 7th Is Made Up Of Phantoms” wherein a National Guard tank crew finds itself on the path to the Battle of Little Bighorn with past events occurring to them in the present–or have they gone back to the past? This one ends with them cocking their modern weapons and charging down a hill into the battle. Which seems like a tactically poor decision. I mean, they abandon the tank and then do not use cover or concealment to approach but run down the hill close together. Maybe they taught things differently in the National Guard in the 1960s.
“Uncle Simon”, where a shrewish niece takes care of her wealthy but abusive uncle but is prohibited from entering his lab. When she accidentally kills him, she discovers that the will says she must take care of her uncle’s creation: a robot that comes more and more to resemble her uncle in its abusive behavior toward her.
So it’s a little better than Volume 6 in that it’s not both formulaic and sharing very similar topics, but by the end of the original series, Serling’s well must have been running dry and the stories were but a single quick DUN DUN DUH! at the end away from things you’d have seen on other programs in other genres.
I guess that’s the real story arc of most open-ended television series: they start out with imagination and promise, and after a couple of seasons the grind of producing a weekly show and probably network penny-pinching leads to weakened episodes and related viewer disappointment, ratings drops, and cancellation. I guess with modern television, they have a story arc to carry through a series, but the related knock is that they pad that story arc out with insignifica to fill a whole season.
At any rate, these programs are 60 years old at this point and can still hold my interest, although they don’t necessarily inspire me to speculative fiction as much as reading about them did.
My beautiful wife gave me the first season of the original Twilight Zone series, probably not long after I read The Twilight Zone Encycolopedia. I don’t know if she’d forgotten that, but she got me a couple of these individual DVDs with four episodes per for another gifting opportunity this year. So instead of figuring where I’d left off on the first season of the program, I popped in this DVD when I wanted to watch some shorter bits of television.
I definitely got the sense from watching that these episodes were chosen from a later season. I seem to recall from the book that the show had an auspicious beginning, but that the powers that be cut its budget and messed with its formula in later seasons (of course, I could be thinking of Star Trek based on Star Trek Memories). Maybe that was just the way back in those days. But the episodes on this disc really had a low budget feel to them, the kind of thing I associate a lot with the black-and-white speculative digest programs (I guess my other experience back in the day was with The Outer Limits).
The DVD includes:
“The Passersby”, wherein Civil War soldiers pass an old derelict plantation house whose owner sits on the porch and watches them go by. One soldier stops and asks for a drink of water, which leads them to discover–they’re in The Twilight Zone! DUN DUN DUN!
“The Grave”, wherein a villain is gunned down by the townspeople of his home town. When another gunman comes to town, one that the townspeople hired to track and kill the badman, he is challenged to visit the villain’s grave. DUN DUN DUN!
“Deaths-Head Revisited”, wherein a former Nazi camp commandant stops in a small town and discovers it is the place where his camp was–so he revisits the camp and enjoys some good memories until the ghosts of the dead return to put him on trial. DUN DUN DUN!
“The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, wherein a young man climbs out of the coffin at his funeral and tries to convince the suspicious townsfolk that he is not a threat to them. But is he? DUN DUN DUN!
So we’ve got four period pieces which can reuse sets from the Western television shows (“The Grave”, “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank”, “The Passersby”) with stories that thematically deal with the evils of war (“Deaths-Head Revisited”, “The Passersby”). They’re so themeatically similar and so aesthetically similar that they really didn’t provide the same sense of wonder nor the same inspiration to write other stories. And even though they’re still only 30 minute episodes–actually 25 minutes or so–they can seem a little longer than they needed to be, particularly “The Grave”.
I have a couple more of these four-episode collections, and I will undoubtedly get to them by and by, but I was disappointed with this one to say the least.
Your mileage may vary, of course. At least “The Grave” had Lee Marvin in it.
Please reset the counter for Days Since Someone at Nogglestead Made A Reference to Manimal to 0.
My oldest said if he had a superpower, he would like to be able to turn into a cat.
“What, like Manimal?” I said, knowing full well that Manimal turned into a panther, not just a house cat.
The Wikipedia article for the program mentions two other series from NBC 1983 that got axed, but which I remember acutely (as I previously mentioned): Jennifer Slept Here and We Got It Made.
Also, someone from Hollywood must read this blog, as I said when commenting on Jennifer Slept Here:
Jennifer Slept Here–really, I haven’t brought that up? It didn’t run very long, but I can still remember the theme song. Also, with this and the short run Eric Idle vehicle Nearly Departed makes me wonder why we don’t have reboots of ghosts-live-here sitcoms these days–but both of these were very short runs indeed, which perhaps answers my question.
As opposed to the The Best of the Dean Martin Show, this DVD did not come out decades after Chris Rock’s talk show and sketch comedy bit went off the cable (which is “off the air” in the late 20th century–the modern equivalent would be “out of the stream” or something). Rock’s show appeared on HBO, so I didn’t have access to it when it was on, and I am not one for the talk shows anyway, so I probably would not have seen it.
I have, however, seen the skit “How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police” a time or two.
This single DVD does not include the aforementioned skit, but it does have some humor poking fun at The Race Question from the perspective of the middle 1990s. One skit is purportedly about an academic who is barred from entering establishments or who gets thrown out of establishments because he’s black. But when they go to the video proof, the man is naked and is getting thrown out or barred entry for that.
Man, what a wonderful world that was. Imperfect, but better than what we have now, where these sorts of jokes and poking fun at minorities’ pecadilloes just don’t fly, and we’re not allowed to laugh at obvious stereotypes.
Man, Chris Rock was everywhere up until some point in the early part of this century, but he seemed to have disappeared. Actually, I was going to posit he got supplanted by Kevin Hart, but in reality, it’s probably that my pop cultural awareness took a nosedive this century. I see he’s been in several films in the Sandlerverse–I saw Grown Ups–twice, in fact–but not much else of his work in the last fifteen years. I guess that’s on me.
As I have mentioned, my Facebook feed is roughly 30% posts by about eight of my “friends,” many of whom I’ve never met in real life, 20% actual advertisements, 15% pages I’ve liked, and 35% pages Facebook recommends, many of which relate to television or movies.
Like this retro post about how old Cheers is:
They didn’t need to downgrade it to black and white to make it older, but they did.
The Best of the Dean Martin Show was a collection of videocassettes and later DVDs with songs and skits from the decade-long television program along with occasional commentary from guest stars and the producer/director who released this set. It comprises 29 volumes in all, but the Lutherans for Life garage sale only had 7 videocassettes, and not contiguous, which makes me wonder where the other 22 went.
At any rate, as it is a “Best of” series, it does not play the episodes in total. Instead, it features a couple of musical numbers, a couple of skits, and a bit of commentary in each hour-long videocassette. It starts often with Dean Martin sliding down the pole into the living room set and singing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime”, the show’s theme, but later with the Golddiggers, the all-female song and dance group that opened the show or the pre-show warning users not to touch the dial.
And the guest stars. Jimmy Stewart and Orson Welles team up with Dean Martin at one point to do a comedy and song number about men at a beauty salon. Dom DeLouise is a frequent guest, and Peter Sellers stops by. Lorne Greene from Bonanza sings a song with Dean while they’re astride horses and Dean’s won’t stand still.
The producer/director Garrison, who is behind the collection, said that they often did not tell Dean the punchline when he was being the straight man, or at least as much of a straight man that Dean Martin could be, so that his laughter and reaction would be genuine. And there’s a recurring bit where someone knocks from inside a closet, and when Martin opens it, he’s confronted by a secret guest star who makes a gag or something and then leaves, and Martin doesn’t know who it is in advance.
Much of the humor relies on Martin’s reputation as a sophisticated partier, but in real life, he wasn’t that way, so the Dean Martin character you see is only a character infused with Martin’s warmth and humor.
So it was a fun bit to watch–I am pretty sure I watched my seven cassettes in as many nights–but it would have been better if it was more of a complete first season kind of thing, with the actual episodes collected, but this collection precedes the confidence that people would buy that sort of thing by a couple of years–this collection was packaged in the middle 1990s and sold via infomercials. One assumes that the audience then would have been old people, perhaps my grandparents, who remembered the show and Martin’s movies fondly.
One can only speculate about the kind of audience finds these cassettes secondhand two decades in the twenty-first century, but old man is probably not far off the mark.
And as I mentioned yesterday, Sandahl Bergman, who played in Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja, was one of the Golddiggers, the singers and dancers that opened the show in later years and appeared in skits. So given that I have watched those two films and four or five of this set in which she appeared, I have seen more Sandahl Bergman on screen in the last two weeks than anyone in the world unless 1) Sandahl herself is watching her old films, Norma Desmond style, in a dark room in her mansion or 2) there’s some academic writing a dissertation on her for a film doctorate who has done nothing this summer but watch her movies over and over to gather evidence for some assertions or others. If I yield to the temptation to watch Hell Comes to Frogtown in the coming days, I might surpass either of those cases.
IT may be 58 years since he high-kicked across the roofs of London to Chim Chim Cher-ee but Mary Poppins star Dick Van Dyke hasn’t forgotten his most iconic role.
C’mon, man. More iconic than Rob Petrie (from The Dick Van Dyke Show, you damned kids)? Not even more iconic than Dr. Sloan (from Diagnosis: Murder)? I think not.
Tied, at best, with Caractacus Potts in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. You know, that one guy in that one kid’s movie you saw a couple of times. Not more iconic than something you might have seen dozens or hundreds of times on television or DVDs.
Maybe it’s iconic in Britain since it takes place in Britain.
As you know, gentle reader, I am about half way through James Blish’s short paperbacks collecting episodes from the Star Trek series (see also Star Trek, Star Trek 2, Star Trek 3, Star Trek 4, and Star Trek 5 for the recent re-reads or click here to see earlier and future re-reads–which will include the others in this timeline that I post later than I post this). Last Christmas, I received gift certificates for the antique mall again, $100 worth this time (with a six month expiration and no change returned, so a very old school type of giftcertificate). As I mentioned in the report on Star Trek 4, I looked for episodes of the original series at Relics Antique Mall last month. Although I did not find any physical media for the original series on that trip–one in which my buying focus was finding one big thing, like a set of fencing equipment, a receiver to serve as a back up in the parlor, or something that cost $100, I went again later with two certificates to look specifically at DVDs and videocassettes, and amongst a number of videos that I have not yet begun to watch, I spotted this DVD (and bought it, of course).
This 2009 release comes at a time when Paramount released the first season of the original series on Blu-Ray, remastered and with remixed sound. One assumes that this was a bit of a loss leader, a way to pitch the new set to people who maybe casually or perhaps a little more than casually enjoyed the original series but hadn’t seen it in a while. 2009, man. They probably still had video stores like Suncoast back then, ainna? Certainly the Best Buys and Walmarts still had fairly robust video sections in Electronics.
So this single DVD collects four episodes:
“The City on the Edge of Forever” (Blishified in Star Trek 2), the one with Joan Collins in it. C’mon, man. Joan Collins. Something something time travel and Joan Collins.
“The Trouble with Tribbles” (Blishified in Star Trek 3), the one with the little puff ball creatures that takes place on a disputed space station and where Klingons insult Kirk and the Enterprise (which is why the quote from Wilder’s post that I mentioned yesterday was fresh in my mind).
“Balance of Terror”, (Blishified in a later volume than I’ve read so far), the one where the Enterprise encounters the Romulans and their cloaking device.
“Amok Time” (Blishified in Star Trek 3), the one where Spock goes through Pon Farr and has to return to Vulcan to mate, much to his high Vulcan chagrin.
So I enjoyed spending a couple of evenings reviewing things I’d seen before and read recently, for the most part. Not enough to buy the complete series on Blu-Ray (although it looks as only the first season got the treatment and is only $22, whilst the whole movie collection with the original series and Star Trek: The Next Generation is only $44, which is not bad for new, but I’d rather pay less than $5 for DVDs).
I know, I know. By now you expect me to post photos of actresses from things I watch below the fold. But, c’mon, man, I already posted about Arlene Martel, who appeared in “Amok Time”, after I saw her in Route 66.