I remember the Highwayman, the pilot aired as a movie in the summer, if I recall correctly. Then the network picked it up the next fall. It was from Glen Larson so it had a very Knight Rider vibe to it except the Highwayman drove a semi truck with a helicopter jammed into the cab. Between the pilot and the show, they picked up Jacko, the Australian rugby player who had a little pop culture cachet at the time from his Energizer battery commercials.
Another show I just thought of is Tattinger’s. It started out as a 1 hour drama and got decent reviews but nobody watched it, so they retooled it into a half hour sitcom. A few big names were in this one but it didn’t last as a sitcom either
I found the first episode on youtube. Man that truck is ridiculous. Not exactly subtle. Should have made it a generic truck and kept the heli in the trailer.
I regularly watched Bizarre as a kid. Strangely, it was a show made by Americans but shot here in Toronto. It was fairly racy for prime-time comedy (plenty of dorsal nudity and double ententres), but I think maybe it was made for American cable? It always seemed very low-rent, kind of shoddy production values. And it also was an odd mix of meta fourth-wall-breaking, pull the curtain back on the comedy-style sketches, and hoary old schtick (ie: lots of pies instead of a punchline). Really hard to find now, I think there were a couple of best-of DVD compilations at one point but that’s about it.
That’s brilliant, though it’s an Easter egg that I imagine fairly few Americans would get.
I remember watching the original Danger Mouse regularly back in the '80s. One thing that I noted, even back then, was that, in what was clearly an effort to save some money, the animation studio took a lot of shortcuts – a big one was that they often had characters talking without their mouths being visible (so that the animation didn’t need to be precisely synced to the voices). There were lots of shots of Danger Mouse talking while his lower face was obscured by the dashboard of the car, characters talking while facing away from the “camera,” etc.
“Eat, Drink and Be Merry…” begins with plastic, the plastic credit card, and the concept of credit, then leaps back to the time of the dukes of Burgundy, the first state to use credit. The dukes used credit for many luxuries, and to buy more armour for a stronger army. The Swiss opposed the army of Burgundy and invented a new military formation (with soldiers using pikes) called the pike square. The pike square, along with events following the French Revolution, set in motion the growth in the size of armies and in the use of ill-trained peasant soldiers. Feeding these large armies became a problem for Napoleon, which caused the innovation of bottled food. The bottled food was first put in champagne bottles then in tin cans. Canned food was used for armies and for navies. In one of the bottles, the canned food went bad, and people blamed the spoiled food on “bad air”, also known as swamp air. Investigations around “bad air” and malaria led to the innovation of air conditioning and refrigeration. In 1892, Sir James Dewar invented a container that could keep liquids hot or cold (the thermos) which led three men – Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth – to construct a large thermal flask for either liquid hydrogen and oxygen or for solid fuel combustion for use in rocket propulsion, applying the thermal flask principle to keep rocket fuel cold and successfully using it for the V-2 rocket and the Saturn V rocket that put man on the moon.
I’d love to get Connections, Connections2, and The Day The Universe Changed on DVD. (I know I can get them, but I have other priorities.)
Agreed. I’ve got The Day the Universe Changed on DVD – the gift of a friend. The others are kinda pricey, but I know a local library that has them.
If you’re interested in that sort of thing, Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are available on audio. And there are companion books to the PBS series. james Burke has also written a lot of books in the same style
The Knowledge Web
The Pinball Effect (which is a “hyperlinked” book, with three different tracks in the printed version)
Circles
American Connections
Twin Tracks
Of course! And after all these many long years, I remember one specific line. Garth… Or was it Barth?… is interviewing a lady of the evening who is advocating for licensing, including having a fully visual ID card.
Garth holds it up for a moment, and says “nice, and really convenient, you can hold it with just one hand!”
We weren’t getting those jokes in network prime time, I will tell you.
I remember how they showed DM and his sidekick riding in their car. The car would be pointed at the viewer and remain stationary while the scenery sped past them in a continuous loop at the edges of the screen.
I thought these shows were the bee’s knees when I was four. I was surprised to learn recently that Cannonball (starring the Squire of Gothos) was actually a Canadian import.
Not a sitcom but a couple of pre-MTV shows with live rock music.
Rockworld. This clip is from 1980:
I recall a similar program that was broadcast late at night in the Chicago area toward the end of the 1970s, I think. It might have been shown back-to-back with Rockworld, but I’m pretty sure it was before 1980. It looked like it didn’t have much of a budget, and there was more of a focus on punk. I don’t recall the name, but I do remember a couple of details that might jog someone’s memory:
One is that the opening sequence included a brief shot of someone sticking his/her head into the bass drum. That was always seen at the beginning of the show and is sort of burned into my memory.
The other is an interview with a young woman who sang for some group and includes this exchange, which I thought was hilarious at the time (not so much now):
“What’s your name?”
“Dinah.”
“Dinah what?”
“Dinah Cancer.”
I remember those, vaguely. I was sick a lot as a kid and watched those shows with my grandma. Also, The Arthur Godfrey Show (I called it the Offy Goffy Show), and Pete and Gladys (Henry Morgan was Pete) and finally, I Married Joan. this last was a blatant ripoff of I Love Lucy…these shows are hardly remembered since the viewers back in the day are now mostly deceased. But I remember bits and pieces.
Mentions of documentary series reminded me of one I had been fascinated by as a teenager, but had not seen again for decades.
At some point in the late '70s or very early '80s, I stumbled across a documentary about Einstein, and his Theory of General Relativity, on a PBS station; the program was hosted by Peter Ustinov. Though I didn’t understand some of the details, the show included a number of interesting demonstrations and illustrations to explain how relativity worked – and Ustinov, himself, was interesting, as he often was.
Last year, during the early days of the pandemic lockdown, I was remembering the show, and looked for it – it turns out it was called “Einstein’s Universe,” and it’s available on Amazon Prime. I watched again, for the first time since around 1980, and while it’s really slow-paced (not uncommon, when comparing old TV shows to the present day), I still found it to be fascinating.
Don’t know the show, but Dinah Cancer was the singer for 45 Grave, best known for contributing “Partytime” to the soundtrack for 1985’s Return of the Living Dead. They broke up in 1985.
Edit: Wikipedia says they formed in 1979, and that she briefly dated Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue
