So do I.
Mayor Teddy Burnside: “Handle it, handle it!”
Anyone else from the Indianapolis broadcast area remember “Time for Timothy” with Timothy Churchmouse? It came on early Sunday mornings.
Sometimes I think I’m not getting enough Stubby Kaye, but then someone like you comes along and shows me that “none” is pretty close to correct . Except for Cat Ballou, but that’s mostly for Jane Fonda in cowboy garb.
This show certainly had a dramatic opening:
John Bromfield was married to French actress Corinne Calvet, who was cast in the Martin and Lewis picture My Friend Irma Goes West. Bromfield’s movie career was sabotaged after Calvet refused to sleep with producer Lew Wallace.
US Marshall, also starring Bromfield, was a sequel to this series.
Supercar was my favorite show when I was about 6 years old! I did have a Supercar toy—an orange battery-powered thing that would scoot around on the floor in various patterns. I wish I still had it; it would probably be worth a fortune now!
I remember both. The genre got an addition about five years ago with a mini-series called Hooten and the Lady, which was slightly better than the terrible title would suggest.
Also about two years ago with Blood & Treasure. Although I think both of the latter two are in the neo-pulp genre of the Tomb Raider and Uncharted franchises rather than the retro-pulp of Indiana Jones, Tales of the Gold Monkey, and Bring 'Em Back Alive (but, of course neo-pulp draws heavily on retro-pulp).
Remember the “Magnificent Marble Machine?” I thought the ginormous pinball machine made for a cool game show prop.
A couple of us oldsters were explaining how we grew up listening to old radio shows (my Sunday nights were spent way out in the country at grandma’s cottage, with a huge floor-standing radio).
And I mentioned that The Shadow was my first superhero.
The Champions might have been my next ones. They also had “super” powers as a function of mental abilities they learned in the Tibetan mountains.
I was impressed by how restrained their powers were. At the time I thought “Well, of course, because the show is British.” Mental discipline only slightly augmenting their strength (and jumping ability… not sure why), and giving them telepathy with each other.
Handy for spies!
I may watch a whole episode, but I’ll bet it’ll seem slow-paced compared to today’s fare.
The PJs (1999-2001) - Claymation-style stop motion cartoon about an inner-city black project. It caught a fair amount of flak in its day for having “stereotypes”, but I never thought it went too overboard, and seeing poor blacks being acknowledged in any context in mainstream television was refreshing. Mainly I found the writing consistently good and didn’t see anything that was a massive turnoff, which was more than I could say for any other primetime cartoon at the time.
Siberia (2013) - A typical reality TV gaggle of contestants meet for what they think is going to be a Survivor-style contest in a remote part of Russia. Things quickly go south, with disasters wrecking both their camp and supplies, their host mysteriously vanishes, and they find themselves zapped several decades in the past and confronted by angry Cossacks. And then things gets weird. One of those “high concept” shows that got so wrapped up in its enigmas that it never bothered to nail down what the heck it was supposed to be. A survival drama? A time-slip mystery? A fight against nature and a hostile foreign presence? A surrealist adventure? Had some fun with this, but by the end I was as done with this as the actual Survivor.
Son of Zorn (2016) - Did a thread on this. The underlying lesson everyone should learn from this is that if your show is going to have any kind of liberal bashing, much less completely bake it into the premise, you absolutely have to blast it out of the park. The viewers must become slavering diehard fans right away and feverishly shout down any and all opposition. If they’re saying things like “It just didn’t click for me,” “It has potential,” “Something feels a bit off,” “I’m not seeing the point,” or “I’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes,” it is doomed. The chances of it surviving the backlash from viewers who don’t give a free pass to slavering right-wing punching down are zero. Here’s an idea of what I’m talking about. With each passing year South Park looks more and more like lightning in a bottle. Heck, even Beavis and Butthead got its Quote For The Ages. The only time you ever hear about Son of Zorn anymore is when I need something to harp on for a discussion like this. Shame.
I liked Son of Zorn and was disappointed that it got cancelled (or not renewed). I didn’t love it, but it was a fun concept and they did some fun things with it, albeit unevenly. Plus I like Tim Meadows.
I’m baffled by your characterization of the show here and in the other thread though, and unless the “backlash from viewers who don’t give a free pass to slavering right-wing punching down” was further down that thread you linked to than I read, I’m baffled by your characterization of those people’s reactions too. It was an okay show about a cartoon He-Man/D&D barbarian type trying (not very successfully) to live in the real world and relate to his somewhat estranged son, not political satire.
I remember The PJs. Eddie Murphy played the lead character, a property manager of a public housing project. Funny show.
I do, but only vaguely. I never really watched it, but I occasionally saw bits of it while getting ready for Sunday school. That was enough for me.
For those who never had the “pleasure” of seeing “Time for Timothy,” it was a religious-themed local show for children, with puppets of a mouse and his friends teaching lessons in morality.
The Magic Door, a Jewish kid’s show, was usually on very early Sunday mornings. Davey and Goliath would be on before. or after the Magic Door. And I think at one point they were followed by Gumby.
It wasn’t obscure, but I would suspect most on the board never saw the Huntley-Brinkley Report, which ran from 1956 to 1970 and featured in-depth news (unlike today). It also had the opening notes of the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as its theme music. It took me years to find that out back in the days of no internet. It’s still my favorite Beethoven symphony.
Also alluded to in Tom Lehrer’s “So Long, Mom, I’m Off to Drop the Bomb!”
I got hailed as a genius by an 8th-grade teacher for comparing The Courtship of Miles Standish to Cyrano de Bergerac. She was amazed I had even heard about the latter. I never had the heart to tell her that I saw the Mr. Magoo version.
I remember trying a couple of episodes and not laughing once. I could hardly believe Lorne Michaels produced it.
She-Wolf of London was fun. They avoided the trope of having the title character “wolf-out” every episode, and had her and the male lead run afoul of various supernatural menaces. Sort of a proto-Buffy. One of the few that didn’t have a supernatural element was a brilliant pastiche of Star Trek (ok, of ST fandom and conventions) that must have been an inspiration for Galaxy Quest.
I think this aired on showtime I remember this sow for 2 reasons … when I was in school one of my classmates mentioned he saw it and it had some skit about a man and a sheep… and he had questions and the teacher had a fit we were discussing it because well ewww
… Well when I finally saw the actual show … well I wasn’t impressed it was cheap and tried to be afunny dirty real people parody in a jr high age level way
the second reason was It was the first time I had seen “super dave Osbourne” which I found
laugh out loud funny because of the way they presented it it was like a "wide world of sports " promo where after every skit they’d cut to a promo saying "stay tuned for the super dave stunt grand finale "
… and I didn’t know yet he was supposed to fail so when he did after that hype
When I went back to school after summer break I found the friend that first mentioned the show and told him how dumb it was except for super dave he let me in on the fact he always failed …