“Alex, what is The Courtship of Eddie’s Father with Bill Bixby?”
One show that’s actually worth suspending your disbelief 100% for an hour, just to see Lee Meriwether in those tight skirts and lab coat! :o
I remember the MAD Magazine satire was called “The Courtship of Eddie and His Father.”
His *identical *grandson. Both were played by Monte Markham, who later went on to play a guy with even more bionic limbs than Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man. (Not a bad show, actually; just very, very '70s.)
Markham was also in an early episode of Mission: Impossible as a guard at an Iron Curtain prison. That was the two-parter where Barbara Bain got into a catfight with Mary Ann Mobley to create a diversion. Needless to say, Markham was diverted. :rolleyes:
***M:I ***is another one of those series that just blew you away once a week fifty years ago, but watching it stripped nowadays you can see how bad most of the episodes really were.
From the MAD Magazine satire “Loused up in Space”:
PUNY BOOBINSON [Penny Robinson]: Robot, Robot, over there: Is there danger anywhere?
ROBOT: The-only-danger-on-this-particular-planet-is-from-tripping-over-one-of-the-papier-mâché-sets.
She was also in the movie comedy “A Fine Madness”, with Sean Connery playing a screwball poet. It was a small part for her as a sultry secretary.
SGT MORGAN O’ROURKE: (On numerous occasions) Agarn, I don’t know why everybody says you’re so dumb! 
CPL RANDOLPH AGARN: (Hours later, each time) Who says I’m dumb?!? :dubious: :mad:
Yes, but isn’t Edward’s one of the places where experimental air/spacecraft were tested in the '60s?
Do any of you watch the MeTV network? Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Green Acres (which actually is still funny and watchable).
Last night I couldn’t sleep and ended up watching an old episode of Voyage to the Bottom of Sea. The Seaview discovered a space capsule on the bottom of the ocean and brought it onboard, which was pretty stupid because they didn’t know what it was and it had a pointed nose cone and fins and looked kind of like a big bomb (at least to me).
After it was on board it opened up and a lobster man from space emerged. It pretended to be friendly but actually planned to steal their nuclear fuel and use it to destroy the human race.
The lobster was an actor in a ridiculously bad rubber costume. It wasn’t meant to be funny but I couldn’t stop laughing.
I suppose we only watched this junk and took it seriously because we were kids.
I liken it to, say, 1970s-era culture. We all looked stupid but thought we were cool. Same with 1960s TV. That probably represented the cream of the industry at the time, and we all thought it cool. But looking back? Nah.
thanks to ted turner(who realized people in the 80s would watch stuff from the 50s and 60s) and channel splitting if you go deep in the lower channels youll find many stations that play nothing but 50s-80s stuff : cozi MEtv MOVIE ect …
One oddity that I’ve only seen on the original nick at nite was the smothers bros series where the blonde one was an angel … even after the midnight/1 am reset it was usually the last thing on before it switched back to the normal programming
IT still is … there’s been a couple of different looking planes that been flying around enough that they put out the normal "those are test planes, not ufos " statement
That’s OK. If you ever need to remember where the duodenum is, they have charts that you can just look it up on.
For most of its run, I remember Voyage being on at like 18:30 CST on Sundays. This is about the time I started falling asleep out of boredom and actually looked forward to going back to school the next morning. “Who the hell watches TV this time on Sunday evenings, anyway?” I used to wonder.
When it first came on (in B&W, I think), a lot of the stories were about spying and the Cold War, and I remember thinking it was pretty good. By the time it went color and got the Sunday time slot, I already felt my intelligence was being insulted. There was one story where silver-skinned humanoid aliens wanted the Seaview’s nuclear reactor, to hatch their eggs. There was another where they were haunted by a long-dead sea captain (played by Alfred Ryder, “Dr Crater” in Star Trek’s “The Man Trap”). And there was one where they found Nazis who had been in suspended animation on the sea floor since the later days of WWII and tried to take over the submarine for the Glory of the Third Reich. (Perennial TV Nazi John van Dreelin was the *Kommandant *in this episode.)
The one that I laughed longest and hardest at, though, was actually one I watched in German when I was hooked up to satellite TV. It was called “Der Werwolf” (the name of the series in German is Mission Seaview) and the guest star was Charles Aidman, the guy who played “USSS Agent Jeremy Pike” on The Wild, Wild West. He and some of the other crew paddle a dinghy to investigate a strange island shrouded in mist, and before you know it … well, you can guess what happens.
So far as I understood, they offered no explanation of how this transformation came about; it was just triggered by … the mist. :eek: For some reason or other, which I also could not fathom, the monster wanted to get his hands on the submarine’s nuclear reactor, which took up about as much space on the set as a kitchen cabinet. Damn, it seemed like *every *weird life form that invaded the *Seaview *wanted that freakin’ reactor! It was one thing you could count on every other week!
I bet Admiral Rickover was sorry he ever came up with the idea by the eleventh or twelfth time that happened…
One man is responsible for a number of bad 60s SciFi shows; Irwin Allen.
He was like the Ed Wood of 60s SciFi, except he was somehow successful. Not that I’m comparing him to Wood’s personal life, mind you, just the quality of hia creations.
Voyage did start out as a more or less serious show. One thing I heard was that a number of shows switched to ridiculous camp because of the success of Batman.
Missed this one the first time around, dammit! It’s Edwards, not “Edward’s.” Maybe I was still thinking of Mr Ed and Connie Hines… :smack:
You mean it doesn’t belong to Edward?
Allen’s series basically followed a pattern: Maybe a half-dozen really good episodes to get the network on board, and then a rapid, steady decline as the creative juices ceased to flow. I remember one interview where the guy who wrote the “humanoid vegetables” episode of LiS apologized for it, saying “I just couldn’t think of anything to write anymore.”
A better grounding in science (or at least some good science advisors and/or experienced SF writers) might have helped avert this trend, but it was not to be. 