out of 239 redshirts in TOS, 25 died, which is 10 percent. Out of 55 goldshirts, 10 died, which is 18 percent. So more redshirts died, but goldshirts were more likely to die.
Joe Cartwright managed to have relationships with 45 single white ladies.
[…]
Of the 45 women, 10 of them went to the Great Soundstage in the Sky within the episode in which they appeared. This is a mortality rate of 22.22%
Combine Little Joe’s over 22% girlfriend death rate with his dad’s 100% wife death rate, and clearly it’s much more lethal to have been romantically involved with a Cartwright than it was to be a crewman on the Enterprise.
Speaking Bonanza makes think of Michael Landon’s other show Little House of Prairie and they had multiple episodes where Charles Ingalls would lose his crop and have to take another job to pay his bills.
Mark Evanier recently had a column about how DC recycled their “Dobie Gillis” comic from the early 1960s as “Windy And Willy” in 1969, with hair and fashions crudely redrawn to reflect more modern styles. The story is that the “Windy And Willy” comic was the worst-selling comic book DC ever published.
I remember that very clearly. It wasn’t just that BJ argued with him. It was a completely different tone. The earlier show was played just for laughs. They thought it was great and hilarious to cut the guy open. The later show was very serious. In the end Hawkeye does the surgery but is very remorseful. I remember him coming back to the Swamp and saying “It was pink and healthy and I threw it in the garbage.” I can’t help but think they purposely recycled to fix the morality.
ETA I looked it up and the first episode is “White Gold” in season 3. They operate on Colonel Flagg without remorse. The other episode is “Preventive Medicine” in season 7. They operate on Colonel Lacy played by James Wainwright. Leslie Neilson was in a different episode. He was in the season 1 episode “Ring Banger” where he was a similarly gung ho officer. In that one they make him believe he’s going crazy which isn’t any better than operating.
Alan Alda and Mike Farrell, who wasn’t around in Season 3, got into a heated argument about recycling the script. Farrell said it may have seemed funny the first time around, but he was adamantly opposed to playing surgical mutilation for laughs. It suddenly dawned on them that working their argument into the story would make a far better episode than the original.
I think recycling scripts itself has been recycled as a plot.
Young aspiring writer authors his first script and sends to Hollywood which’s is rejected. Somehow the young writer finds their way into the studio chiefs office who, instead of calling security, explains that the young writers script has been done a million times.
In the second season of sci-fi show Lexx they broadcast two consecutive episodes (The Web and The Net) and both episodes are almost identical. About 90% (from my recollection) of the episodes is the exact same footage.
In The Web the Space Ship Lexx and crew get caught in the web of a giant Space Spider but seem to escape. The changes in The Net make clear they never escaped.
The episodes are either 1) A creative and artistic experiment or 2) A blatant way to get the episode count up with barely any extra budget being spent.
