I my mind, I always get him mixed up with Robert Walker, who played Charlie on the ST:TOS episode “Charlie X.”
It was the pilot movie. You are correct, except it was theEmpire State Building. And it is cringe-inducing.
If you look at other scenes, it jumps between being filmed in NYC and Los Angeles. At lot of shows did that, and I really don’t understand how it’s cheaper to fly your actors back and forth than it would be to just film everything in NYC. But it must have been.
The production company and the casting directors were in LA. All of the actors lived in LA, and none of them were rich enough to keep a second home in NY.
All of the interior shots would be filmed in an LA soundstage. In the days of yore, many of the studios maintained permanent sets that mimicked the appearance of a NY street. So you could film the vast majority of the show in LA. Then you fly the cast out to NY for a few days to shoot the few scenes that absolutely needed a NY background.
Besides, the vast majority of the population has never been to either city, may or may not notice the difference, and probably will view the difference with more laughter than anger.
If you’re shooting a weekly show, “a few days” is half the production time. Actors and staff would be flying constantly. And staying in hotels, probably at the studio’s expense.
But you’re right about not noticing. When I watched Kojak when it was new, I thought it was filmed entirely in NYC. Now I watch reruns and it’s about 50% each. I couldn’t tell then, but it’s obvious now.
But then there’s examples like an early McCloud. the scene took place in a rail yard close to the WTC. In the long shots, you could see trains with cars that said New York Central, and Penn Central, and the WTC was in the background. Then they’d switch camera angles, and the locos all said Santa Fe.
It just doesn’t seem efficient.
its available on you tube.
I remember kind of liking it. I was 13 when it came out and had always liked the Saturday morning cartoon, so a live-action version seemed cool and novel at the time. That doesn’t necessarily mean it was good, but I was smack dab in their demographic target.
this was a favorite for KTLA 5 in la to run pretty often in its pre cw/wb days in the 80s
even as a kid I knew it wasn’t much but when all you got was the “spiderman and friends” pap on Saturdays the segment on the electric company or the old 60s shorts (until the 90s fox series)
from what I gathered tho it was a series of tv movies and got enough ratings for it to be a short-lived series and then the series was re editied into more tv movies …
It was bad. The highlight of the series was JoAnna Cameron’s appearance in a white bikini. Stan Lee didn’t like it, studio executives were embarrassed to air a show about super heroes, to keep cost down they didn’t bring in any of Spidey’s villains, and the action was laughable and not in a good way.