Humble confession: as a kid, I looked forward to It’s About Time. In my defense, my interest was mainly due to Imogene Coca, who really was a talented comedian. It was a stupid show, though.
Hated I Dream of Jeanie with a passion. I watched it only when really bored. Something about that pouty, whiny, robotic, “Yes, Master” and the stilted dialect they gave her (“I only wanted to please thee, Master!” “Do you not wish it, Master?”) set my teeth on edge. Ugh. And all the plots were the same. No.
I only watched My Mother the Car once. It creeped me out that Jerry Van Dyke’s car could talk to him–or his mother’s spirit IN the car. Ugh.
Also loathed Lost in Space. Cardboard characters; dark sets; stupid plots.
Oh, and the cartoon series I]Hercules*. Newt’s falsetto saying everything twice (“Attaboy, Herc! Attaboy, Herc!”) drove me nuts even then.
No, I remember it also, and its theme song. Heck, buried somewhere in a box in the garage, I think I have the Gold Key Comics adaptations of both “It’s About Time” and “Captain Nice.”
Eleven-year-old me never really thought about it until the episode set at Jericho. When the big dude strode into the tent and said “I am Joshua, commander of the Israelites,” I went “Hey, wait a second…”
This was, BTW, the episode aired on 27 January 1967, when the Apollo 1 astronauts died inside their capsule. I can still remember the exact second (soon after the 30-minute station break) ABC interrupted the program to report what had happened.
I also remember the exact moment on 16 March 1966 when they broke into “The Purr-fect Crime” on Batman to report Gemini 8 (commanded by Neil Armstrong) had had a major malfunction. The switchboards at TV stations all across the country lit up that night to complain about the interruption.
FUN FACT: Sam Groom, who played Dr Simon Locke on the Canadian series Police Surgeon, was “Jerry the Technician” on Time Tunnel.
The earlier British series Police Surgeon starred Ian Hendry and was sort of the forerunner of The Avengers (with John Steed).
CHCH stripped Lost in Space on weekday afternoons a year or so ago. Even knowing it was 1965/pre-Star Trek, I could not *believe *how thoroughly wretched it was. I got through the first four or five episodes before I finally said “Oh, to Hell with it!” :mad:
I think the original parody was Police Photographer with Eugene Levy on ***SCTV ***(also Canadian):
*“He came from the cushy world of commercial photography, looking for something a little different. He found it as Police Photographer, an exciting double-action career!” *
I can still remember all the words from the F Troop theme song (first season only, when the show was in black and white). How’s that for wasted space in MY brain?
I remember 'Arnie" and the Glen Campbell Show. I watched the former to see Sue Ann Langdon.
How about “Car 54, Where Are You?” It seemed like an attempt to recreate “The Honeymooners”, but with cops.
There’s a holdup in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights;
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights;
There’s a Scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild …
Car 54, Where Are You??
Another execrable show that I am plagued to remember is The Second Hundred Years. It’s about a Yukon prospector who has been frozen in a glacier and sixty or so years later gets thawed(of course he’s still alive) and goes to live with his grandson(?) in the lower 48. The can’t fail comedy revolves around the now hundred year-old guy being flabbergasted by all the newfangled stuff. Seeing a TV set(with a character speaking) for the first time he exclaims “Theres a midget in that box!”
It lasted as long as It’s About Time - one season.
True story: When the Star Trek pilot was being pitched to the networks, CBS turned it down on the grounds they already had a show set in outer space. Now, Star Trek is one of CBS’s most profitable properties from their acquisition of Paramount Studios.
All I remember about, “The Girl With Something Extra,” was cute-and-perky Sally Field and the plethora of three-cup brassiere jokes that made the rounds for several years after.
When I watched The Brady Bunch as a kid in the 1970s, I couldn’t make sense of the layout of the house compared to the shot from the outside. The roof didn’t look high enough for the upstairs bedrooms, for one thing. (There were other shows where it was easier to reconcile these things.) And recently HGTV bought the house used for the exterior shots and went through an enormous amount of trouble to reproduce the actual interior. So I was pleased to find that the actual house didn’t really have a second story, so there was no way to reconcile the outside with the inside. (The team from HGTV ended up building a two-story addition off the back that contained the upstairs bedrooms and other spaces that couldn’t fit in the square footage of the original house.)
BTW, its Sue *Ane *Langdon. I watched the Dick van Dyke episode “One Angry Man” with her in it yesterday on YouTube. She played a bimbo falsely accused of diamond smuggling, and Rob was Foreman of the jury. Laura was in the courtroom, and of course was POed because he was drooling all over the defendant. (I would have too! :o )
She was also in an episode of McHale’s Navy as a Russian liaison officer. Of course, she was cold and off-putting until she let her hair down and donned a sarong: “Wow! No Sherman tank’s built like that!”
:o
