I know Arlene was the girlfriend of both Howard Sprague and Sam Jones on Andy Griffith/Mayberry RFD, but I first became aware of her in1965, listening to this record that my dad had:
This was my introduction to Jewish humor,* which has stayed with me ever since. When Arlene turned up in Mayberry a few years later, I couldn’t help thinking that she seemed somewhat … out of place?
*Along with MAD Magazine, of course.
She also played a prostitute in Hang 'Em High and All in the Family, so she was more out of place than you thought!
Yes, she had quite a career. She apparently had two roles in Mayberry. I also saw her recently in an episode of Matlock, in which she played a rich cougar. Turns out she was a roommate of Valerie Harper too.
I just want to say that if you’re of a certain age, like born in '63, almost all of this is ‘Yeah, summer, 73, 8:00, CBS . . . and why did have to remind me of how terrible television was when I was a kid?’
I remember Paula Prentiss mainly from this movie, which I saw at a very impressionable age.
Before he was Ralph and Randy’s dad…
Much earlier, Darren McGavin started with a young Burt Reynolds in a Gunsmoke-meets-Route 66 show called Riverboat. Regardless of how we now look back on each of them, I do like the classic insult Burt Reynolds used to describe his co-star’s ego; “Three days after he dies, McGavin is in for a big disappointment.”
“Traveling around helping people” seemed like a common theme for shows back them. Besides the two mentioned above, it was just came as second nature. Even if the cops were chasing you, like David Janssen, or you only had a few months to live, like Ben Gazzara, or would turn green and bulk up like Bill Bixby, you still had time to fix other peoples messed up lives once a week. Can’t imagine that today. “who was that masked man?” “I don’t know, but when my husband was drinking up the grocery money, he just shrugged and his horse shit in front of my house.”
The complete CBS documentary series. narrated by Robert Ryan, is on YouTube. Unfortunately, the quality of the episodes I’ve watched is pretty poor.
I remember them too and Comedysportz. From the looks of it, some of them did stick it out in entertainment. I saw their pilot on air.
I think she was actually a prostitute on Maude, not AITF.
The only thing I remember about that show is that the “power pill” was enormous—about the size of a large gumball. I found this very disturbing, because I had a childhood phobia about swallowing pills.
Oh, and I also remember that he had to flap his arms to fly.
There was a show in the late-'70s, or possibly very early-'80s about a space ship that got caught in a time warp and returned to Earth in the future. The space ship was a Space Shuttle, and I’m pretty sure one of the actors was Ike Eisenmann, I can’t remember the name of it.
There was also a show about colonising Mars, that had Tim Curry in it.
That sounds like the opening to the Buck Rogers series starring Gil Gerard and Erin Gray.
That show still runs once a week on one of those channels for old people like me……
I remember Emerald Point, N.A.S., which only lasted one season 83-84.
I found the episode on YouTube. It’s S2 E8. The three men who could have been Bialik’s character’s father were Larroquette’s character, someone described as a politician in Colorado, and Kinky Friedman. I presume that Friedman gave the people who ran this series permission to have him listed by Bialik’s character as one of the three possible fathers.
Anyone else remember “Babes”, an early-'90s sitcom about three overweight sisters? It was fairly controversial at the time, yet fairly funny.
yep it had ted shackelford who had just finished knots landing a year or two before this …
that and a spy show called Adderley was part of the infamous cbs “late show” either before or after the pat Sajak show flopped … it was partly written by sonny Grosso a cop that turned to writing tv shows that the networks loved for some reason until something happened or was discovered …
They had like 2 seasons partially filmed after the aired ones but the producers and production company went bankrupt
In one episode of Xena, characters in trouble say something to the effect (when Xena comes to the rescue), “Oh, we were hoping for Hercules, or at least Sinbad”
There was a short-lived UK science fiction show back in 1970 that I loved but have never seen since it first aired. It was The Adventures of Don Quick and was loosely inspired by Don Quixote. Quick was a member of a Maintainance Squad who visited different planets to fix problems - but he always misinterpreted things and caused problems instead of solving them.
Before that, in 1966, there was another UK production called Vendetta, which appeared at the height of The Man From UNCLE’s popularity. It wasn’t a secret organisation, but the hero did spend all his time taking down various Mafia characters. The IMDB link above describes it as ‘Intrigue from the Mediterranean Islands as Danny Scipio dispenses his own brand of revenge against organized crime outfits around Europe.’ It ran for 2 series and I think I watched every episode but I don’t think I’ve met anyone else who remembers it!
(It’s nothing to do with the 1980s show with the same title about a demoted tv producer.)
And, finally, there was a short season of only 4 episodes of a sitcom called Room at the Bottom from 1964. Obviously based on Room at the Top, it featured the janitors, cleaners, etc. of an office block and how they really ran the show! Looking at the link, it had a top cast of British actors so I’m not sure why it only lasted 4 episodes.
I expect I was too young to get a lot of the jokes but my father (who worked in an office) enjoyed it and so I watched it too and still remember little bits of it…