One interesting thing about Tenspeed and Brown Shoe is that the character of Tenspeed (played by Ben Vereen) was brought back for several episodes of the program J. J. Starbuck.
Back in the first half of the '60s, there was a whole slew of prime-time game shows, most of which were hosted by the same guy who did their daytime versions, e.g., Password (Alan Ludden), To Tell the Truth (Bud Collier), and I’ve Got a Secret (Steve Allen).
One that was on when I was in fifth grade (I think) was The Face Is Familiar. Celebrities were shown the face of some famous person cut into horizontal strips and then scrambled. The point of the game was to be first to recognize the face as the strips were slowly put back together in their right order. I don’t remember what the reward was or who was host, but I know it didn’t last long.
I wonder if there’s anyone alive today who remembers seeing this game show in 1961:
I remember watching Clerks: The Animated Series and liking it it, but it disappeared very quickly and I never hear about it anymore. Looking at Wikipedia, I see only six episodes were produced and only two of them aired. I suppose it’s a wonder that I remember it at all.
I remember that. It was very…Richard Benjamin.
It was pretty funny, despite basically being “Roseanne giving her husband his own show as a gift”. Tom Arnold is capable of being funny when he’s not being incredibly annoying.
NBC News Overnight.
A really atypical (for the time) news show, anchored by Linda Ellerbee and a couple of dudes (in sequence, not at the same time, and I can’t remember their names).
It ran in the middle of the night (like 2:00 AM), so they could pretty much do whatever they wanted.
It was smart, and sometimes funny. And in those pre-internet, pre-YouTube days, they’d often run bits of video sourced from God knows where, but that were interesting and relevant in some way to the events of the day.
I also liked “It’s Like You Know…” At least I remember liking it. And I actually have Clerks The Animated Series on DVD here somewhere.
Here is another one:
I remember watching a TV movie in the 90s that was set up as if it were a series of news reports about a meteor hitting the Earth. My memory is it turns out it’s aliens and at the end the world ends. As best as I can tell this only ever aired once.
Struck by Lightning.
(Working from memory) Jack Elam as Frankenstein’s Monster, now working as a handyman at a New England resort, who entices the Doctor’s descendant to stay there because he is starting to need repairs himself.
Johnny Bago was a summer series from sometime in the early 90’s. The main character was a guy on the run from the mob, who hitches a ride from an old guy in a Winnebago. When the old guy dies Johnny commandeers the camper to aid his escape. Besides the mob being after him, he is also being pursued by his parole officer, who also happens to be his ex-wife. Every week there was a different mob hitman chasing him. He’d get close, then die somehow, so the next week they’d send another one after him.
I really liked that show!
I remember busting a gut with laughter when I saw an episode of the TV show Ask Dr. Science as a kid. I had a hard time finding anything about it on the internet until relatively recently. I guess it’s more famous as a radio show.
The only thing I remember about it is a scene where Captain Justice is in a diner with a kid who was embarrassed to been seen with him. Captain Justice says something like, “What? Most kids would be thrilled to be here with me.”
I remember it. I was disappointed when it was disappeared. From my memory, there wasn’t even an announcement it had been cancelled. It just…wasn’t on anymore. My favorite character wasn’t Captain Justice, though, it was Robert Forster as the noir detective that also gets transported to the real world.
The one scene I clearly remember was Captain Justice coming to the rescue by smashing through a brick wall and the bad guys unloading Uzis at him and the bullets bouncing off. After he subdues the bad guys, he reveals he used demolitions charges to destroy the wall (How did he get them? Or learn to use them?), and was wearing a bullet-proof vest under his costume (that’s…that’s not how body armor works in the “real world”). It all made sense to me at the time, though.
I loved that show! I think a big problem it had gaining traction is that it was on an obscure channel that re-branded itself several times - I think at the time, it was ABC Family, and I think the pilot also aired on ABC in an obviously failed bid to increase its exposure.
I remember the actor who played the Middleman turning up shortly afterwards on Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse as a psycho killer. I just couldn’t take the character seriously. Nothing against the actor, but he was pitch perfect as the Middleman, and I just couldn’t take him seriously as a menacing villain.
The pilot movie was great, the series not so much.
Toward the end of her time on Blossom (and thus well before finishing her Ph.D., having two sons, and starring on The Big Bang Theory), Mayim Bialik in three episodes played a young woman who showed up and surprised Larroquette’s character by saying that he was one of three men who might be her father. (Her mother was a long-ago girlfriend of Larroquette’s character.) She wanted him to take a genetic test to determine which of them was her father. He turned out to actually be her father. I can’t find it anywhere online, but the three old boyfriends of her mother that she thought could be her father were Larroquette’s character, a random made-up character, and a real well-known man (whose name she mentioned). Apparently this man had given his permission to be mentioned on the show as one of the three possible fathers.
I remember many of these shows. I watched My World and Welcome To It, and He and She, and both Mr. Terrific and Captain Nice (and read the Captain Nice novel) and many of the others.
how about
Hank – about a college “Drop in” who takes courses on the sly because he can’t afford tuition. How he was supposed to retain credits towards graduation I don’t know. It’s memorable because it was one of the few 1960s shows that had a final episode that wrapped everything up (and Hank got his degree)
Camp Runamuck – hijinks at a summer camp in the 1960s, long before all those summer camp movies came out.
One Step Beyond – Twilight Zone-like creepy stories, often with a twist ending, made about the same time as Twilight Zone (alte 1950s-early 1960s)
Man Into Space – late 1950s near-future hard science fiction. William Lundegan stars as an astronaut. The stories didn’t have aliens, FTL travel, interstellar travel, teleportation, or any other highly speculative gadgets. Stories were set in the Solar System, mostly in Earth orbit of the moon.
Future Cop in 1978 about an android policeman. It was not bad, as I remember, but Harlan Ellison sued it into oblivion. So it transmorgified into
Holmes and Yoyo
Was it realy worth it Harlan?
I remember that one. Not just Space Precinct, but Gerry Anderson’s Space Precinct. I remember it actually having fairly impressive prosthetics/puppetry for the aliens, especially given that it was an ultra-low budget production. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of sci-fi on TV, and there were very few sci-fi shows I wouldn’t watch. This one was one of them.
In discussing 80s and 90s TV with geeky friends in my age range, pretty much everyone remembers this show existing, but no one I know remembers watching it.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but I do remember No Soap Radio. It was a surrealist comedy that didn’t last long.
Strange Report, which ran on NBC in the spring and summer of 1971. Anthony Quayle was the titular character, a detective who hadn’t carried a gun “since the end of the War.” He had a young American sidekick to make the show more palatable to US audiences, plus a hot young female assistant. The crimes he investigated were unusual, to say the least. One episode I remember in particular involved Soviet diplomats in London, and the Russians weren’t the bad guys!
It also had a kick-ass signature tune:
