I think Monk would have the greater problem here. Columbo looks so disheveled that it would give Monk fits!
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And Columbo will eat a sandwich that he’s had tucked away in a jacket pocket; Monk would not like that.
No, it’s not an act. He’s genuinely clumsy, and has habits that annoy people. We see the same happening when he’s buying lunch, or taking his dog to the groomers, and so on.
Granted; but he takes that as his starting point, and then builds from there for his process. Like, take Negative Reaction, where he isn’t clumsy enough to destroy the evidence of a man’s innocence — and isn’t dimwitted enough to fail to realize what he’s done — but everything depends on it being plausible that he is. Or take Death Lends a Hand, where he only says some woo-woo-sounding stuff about palmistry because he’s innocuously reaching out to feel a man’s hand for another reason altogether, kind of like how his go-to move in Dagger of the Mind is to cough into his hand as a prelude to planting something incriminating in front of a room full of potential witnesses: that last bit would, if anything, presumably work even better if he were up against a fastidious germophobe — just like his feigned gullibility in Sky-High IQ is tailored to irritate a perfectionist into demonstrating howdunit, and much like his faked absent-mindedness in Double Exposure is a bluff so the murderer will fill in the blanks.
(Admittedly, that last one didn’t actually work; but the point is that he hadn’t actually forgotten — just like he hadn’t actually been suckered in Short Fuse, and hadn’t actually let his guard down to gloat while shooting pool in How To Dial A Murder, or whatever.)
Which causes everyone to underestimate him everywhere he goes.
please don’t.
If i had a time machine i would fetch Jack Cassidy to play Voldemortrump in a feature film. Oscar’s in the bag.
Cassidy is the smarmiest actor in the history of made for tv movies.
I’m watching this episode right now on Vision TV. One thing that strikes me is that even though it was filmed in 1990, no one has a cell phone! The plot might have fallen apart if they had, since the empty cartridge was found in the street. If they could have called from the garage, there would have been no need for Justin to drive to the security officer.
Cell phones weren’t that popular in 1990 (about 2.5 phones per 1000 people if my Googling is right).
Considering the amount of electronic gadgetry in this episode, I’m surprised that even the rich college boys didn’t have at least one between them.
Cellular phones were like a brick with an antenna, and we’re rate outside of showoff businessmen. Certainly not common on college campuses
That’s how I remember 1990.
The very cusp of when cell phones began to make plotting much more complicated!
But I’ll bet Robert Culp’s character had one.
The people I worked for in 1990 had a cell phone. Not only was the phone itself the size of a brick, the unit that lodged it was a bit larger than a typical answering machine. They kept it in their car (which would probably be called an SUV today).
When I returned to Moscow in 1992 after having been gone for two years, all of the yuppies who had come to Russia to make a killing carried a cell phone. I used to sit in the business lounge at the Radisson watching them parade back and forth carrying their new toy and status symbol.
I think the episode with Shatner as a radio host was the first Columbo to feature cell phones. It came along just four years after the college episode. Columbo was always in the dark about such new technology in the early '90s.
A lot of Columbo episodes involved “high tech” by the standards of the time - like a fancy typewriter in “Now You See Him” (1976), or a multiple line phone system in “Candidate for Murder” in 1971
I haven’t seen all of the episodes, but my favorite is Columbo vs. Mensa Guy. My favorite scene is the one where he drives up to a junkyard murder scene and a police officer tells him he can’t drop off his car because it’s a crime scene.
And a VCR to create an alibi in the first Shatner episode.
Yep. And “Columbo goes to College” had closed circuit TV and radio controlled toys
OK, that one, as the kids say, made me LOL!
Almost as good is the one in which Columbo goes to a Catholic mission and is assumed to be a homeless man.