I’ve encountered a video edited from a Dragnet episode in which shots of the criminal are replaced with shots of Obama, while the two protagonists lay into him, with the following dialog:
Poor citation practices on the internet are foiling me here. Does anyone know what episode this is from, and what the context is for the dialog? What were they mad at this person for? Is the scene available online? Etc.
If it’s the episode I’m thinking of, the entire “story” is a prolonged debate between Friday and Gannon, and a “spiritual leader” who is an obvious stand-in for Timothy Leary–a highly educated professorial type who advocates the use of psychedelic drugs.
It’s a fascinating episode to watch, very much of its time, very much Dragnet responding to Leary and his message through a thinly disguised TV analogue. The late 60s Dragnet occasionally did those sort of episodes, where they don’t investigate a crime per se, so much as stand around making anti-hippie speeches.
and in the end the hippies became thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Jack Webb started in radio doing hard guy roles, mostly private dick. the dialog was always sharp and sarcastic, which was the style at the time. this carried through into Dragnet. though it also portrayed everyone except the cops as not totally right in the head. the sidekick, radio and tv, was made to be a bit of a comic foil which was the style at the time.
Apropos of not much, the guy who played the Prophet in that episode was the same guy who played Parmen, the philosopher-king in the Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.”
I liked this episode (just rewatched it, for nostalgia’s sake). I think the writers did a good job of presenting both sides of the story (especially in light of the fact that the episode came from a time when LSD had only recently been legal and people weren’t sure exactly what kind of effects it would have long-term). The Leary stand-in made some excellent points, and Joe and Bill rebutted intelligently.
I also like that they cast an attractive, well-spoken older guy with some gravitas and obvious intelligence as the pro-drug guy, rather than the stereotypical young dirty hippie type.
Yeah, Webb did some weird episodes in that era. I remember one where putting on a leather jacket made him an Authentic Drug Pusher to make a buy. (R. Crumb reference: “I’m wit’ you guys, hokay?”)
Barry Williams tells some hilarious stories about his appearances on Dragnet as a child star. He had never realized that all the actors, Webb included, read their dialogue from cue cards, which is what gives the show that peculiar, monotone style.
Whenever anyone was tried, they looked vaguely ashamed as the narrator announced the results of the trial and they simply stood there looking shifty.
But I only remember one episode where I thought the hippie character really did evince genuine shame at what he’d become – “Forgery,” in which Gary Crosby (son of Bing!) played a writer whose wife had fallen in with some ne’er-do-wells and stolen/forged some checks. At the end, both Crosby’s character and the wife have cleaned up, he’s shaved the awful beard, and the detectives don’t recognize him for a moment.
The Jack Webb biography says Webb, who also directed, used teleprompters so the actors would read their lines fresh, not memorized.
Has any other show ever had a Christmas show where a child gets killed by a gun meant as a present? Dragnet did in 1952.
I’ve listened to some of the old radio Dragnet episodes on the Old Time Radio app on my phone. They’re actually quite good if you like radio drama–very gritty and often surprisingly gripping. Listening to the radio show, it’s obvious where the quick scene-setting that Webb always did (“Monday, 6:15 PM. It was warm in Los Angeles.”) came from.
I used to watch the 60s Dragnet when it was a mainstay on Nick at Nite. It was always good for a laugh, it was fun to see Harry Morgan before he became Colonel Potter, and it was a nice little game to recognize the various members of Webb’s “stock company”–those actors who showed up again and again as witnesses, victims, criminals. And the occasional face, like Howard Hesseman or Barry Williams, who went on to bigger things.
the 50s tv version used plots and scripts from the radio show.
one actor he liked was Virginia Gregg. she was a radio actor with many roles in a number of series. she then had roles all over on tv. she was on radio Dragnet, 50s Dragnet, 60s Dragnet, Emergency and Adam-12.
Sitting in mud and mainlining heroin is such a wonderful lifestyle. Not.
Actually the l966 revival of “Dragnet” began as a tv movie. Networks were just beginning to realize that besides showing two year old theatrical releases, they could make their own. NBC decided to revive its 1950s success in Dragnet and Webb, whose recent productions failed, went along. Those alimony and child support checks needed money in the bank to be cashed.
When completed the tv movie impressed people, among them Mort Werner, NBC’s programming director. Werner had been recent mugged in a New York City subway station
by six guys in broad daylight. It shook him up and he began thinking that we needed a good cop show. Webb wanted to do three or four two-hour movies but NBC and Universal wanted a series. The tv movie didn’t air until January, 1969
And then Webb undercut the goodnatured presentation of both sides by ending the episode with “oh by the way, eventually he was found guilty of selling drugs to children and is currently serving time at San Quentin.” So much for taking the high (sorry) road in the debate.
But at least we get to hear Joe Friday say, “LSD is the bomb!”
Funny thing about the Star Trek hippie episode is how dumb it makes the hippies look. Not only do they lay into Kirk and unfairly try and paint him as some kind of square. (Yeah…Kirk is a square. Scotty, yes. Kirk? No.) but the entire message of the episode is “Grow the **** up.”
Just to be clear, the Star Trek episode that Liam Sullivan appeared in wasn’t the “space hippie” one. It was the one with the Greek-like planet where everybody had mental powers except the little guy who everybody pushed around. It was the one that had TV’s first interracial kiss, between Kirk and Uhura.