I remember quite a few of these. I, too, saw Coronet Blue. If you get a chance, read the Wikipedia entry about it – it gives the Clever Plot Device underlying the entire series that they never got a chance to put on the air.
I remember [The Amazing Three, but never watched it. I gave up on anime after Astro Boy for a LONG time.
And I recall watching Man Into Space as a kid, and loving it. Hard-core SF without hyperspace, FTL drive, or aliens. Great stuff. The problem is that the show disappeared from our collective radar for a LONG, LONG time. Books on TV science fiction almost never mentioned it. Books devoted to listed every episode of TV Science Fiction in this case, didn’t. It never, to y knowledge, ever appeared in syndication, or on the Sci-Fi (or Syfy) channel, or on VHS, or on DVD, or Blue Ray, or Streaming.
It wasn’t until the internet became available that I even found background on the series, images from it, and episode listings. You can actually find one or two episodes now on YouTube and other services.
Does anyone remember Commander Bleep? He was the alien hero of a very limited animated series first broadcast in 1957 – Colonel Bleep - Wikipedia
I totally loved Meeting of Minds, Steve Allen’s late 1970s show. Panel discussion about various subjects, with a panel of famous people from the past. Aristotle and Cleopatra are examples.
No one I’ve ever met has heard of or remembers this show. I’m pretty sure some Dopers would remember it. Meeting of Minds - Wikipedia
Back in the 1970s the BBC did a series called “The Search for the Nile”, a drama series featuring each of the (all white, European) explorers searching for the source of the Nile. Burton and Speke, Stanley and Livingstone etc. I thought it was marvellous.
It has never been repeated and I don’t think it has appeared on DVD or even back in the days of VHS tapes. I guess nowadays it would be far too politically incorrect.
The old Sunday matinee horror show Chiller. Not the entire show, per se; there’s tons of stuff about it online. I’m mostly talking about the the opening title sequence(none of the one’s I’ve found seem familiar to me)and especially the graphic they showed just before they cut to commercial (or maybe it was right before they returned after the commericals). I described this here some time ago and didn’t get any response but what the heck. . .
This would have been early to mid 1970s, southern California channel 11 or 13. It was a still picture with a red or green background (in my mind’s eye I can picture both so maybe it even changed at some point) and it just a disembodied head. Long black hair, kind of shrunken head looking, with IIRC a maniacal smile / grimace. It would probably look really stupid to me now but it scared the ever lovin’ crap out of me as a kid. Far more than the movie did. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find it for years just to exercise the childhood demon
Another memory is a game show called Liar’s Club, where an oddball object was presented to a panel of celebrity guests and they’d all give a fake explanation about what it was, except one who told the truth.Gosh, I loved that show.
This last one popped into my head just the other day: an old commercial for the L.A. Zoo. It was just footage of animals with a song that I’m guessing was a reworking of an “actual” song that people older than my 4 year old self would recognize. The part of the words I remember is something about " . . crossed-eyed elephants and crazy baboons. Ape to zebra and don’t forget snakes (with a snippet of snake charmer music).
Misfits – The best superhero TV show. Part of the reason why The Umbrella Acadamy is challenging for the title is that they both starred Robert Sheehan (playing essentially the same character).
Homicide: Second Shift – a spin-off of Homicide: Life on the Streets, and probably the first attempt at a web-only show, long before broadband was common. No video, but an attempt to show an interactive story. It tied in with the broadcast show: supposedly a crime being investigated by the second shift of detectives, and was actually integrated into the main show (one of the second-shift detectives shows up on the broadcast show asking for help).
Awake – a cop living in two different realities. The two realities intertwined, and the events in one might show things for the other.
Better Off Ted – no show was better in showing the insanity of big corporations – and startlingly prescient.
The Sandbaggers – the gold standard for spy shows, and certainly the most realistic, where issues like budget cuts and political fallout are important.
Do you mean a black and white 1959 series called ‘Men Into Space’? Because Comet TV on cable was showing episodes as early as last year, in between sci-fi and horror movies and tv series, as filler, I guess. Rather dull Eisenhower white men talking about rockets and space. Comet TV might still be airing episodes today.
Does anyone remember getting up early on Saturday morning to watch the original ‘Astro Boy’ cartoons? Eerie, mesmerizing, sepia tinted early anime. I was fascinated, I can still sing the title song!
As for saturday mornings…sometimes Id get up so early as to just watch the Indian Head test screen, and then that weird Christian show, Jot, would come on.
Well, I said that to her, but she insisted that Rik’s parents were shown at their own house, telling him he was now on his own. “And then at the end, they changed their minds!” It wouldn’t surprise me if she saw Edmondson and Mayall in something else and assumed it was TYO.
Black Tie Affair. A summer series starring Bradley Whitford and Kate Capshaw. Whitford was a private eye investigating the murder of Capshaw’s wealthy husband. It was a comedy, and hilarious. It had tons of quotes that I used to use as signatures on my emails back in the day.
When I was a teen (before the web existed), it took concerted effort and a search of an old TV Guide to find that the name of a beloved cartoon that I used to also get up at the crack of dawn before the start of the broadcast day to watch was Colonel Bleep.
I think you guys are misunderstanding. I remember the sketch. I can’t remember who is in it or where I saw it. My best guess is it was Alfresco, because of vague associative memories. I am already well aware of Alfresco as a show and who was in it and all that, I just can’t be sure the sketch I think I remember was in that show or in another one even more obscure.
Not only do I remember it, I had both books from the series, in which scripts from both seasons were reproduced.
I had to miss one episode, and the nice mother of a friend taped it for me. When I asked if she’d liked it, she said “Well, it was kind of boring.” :rolleyes:
