They tried to do a new version with Zachary Quinto (the movie Spock) as host. I never saw whether it actually happened, or was just in the planning stages.
It did make it to production. 2 seasons, 18 episodes.
I remember his plugs for the show always ended “I think you’ll find it … fascinating.”
My favorite episode will forever be the one about the Compte St Germain:
Surely the biggest problem with the remade version is that Quinto did not get to wear those stylin’ 1970s threads that Nimoy sported!
Oh for sure. When Mr. Spock, with full Mr. Spock gravitas, told ten-year-old me to fear the Bermuda Triangle, I for sure spent the next several years fearing the Bermuda Triangle.
I used to love In Search Of…
They all seemed so…plausable.
Then, a couple years ago, I decided to try one again. It was about the Lost Dutchman and his mine. I live about ten miles away from it…wherever it is. The Lost Dutchman is a BIG deal out here. Anyway, it was such happy hooey! Not only didn’t they get the facts right, they didn’t even film in the right locations! Major bringdown, man.
Yeah, it seemed so very thoughtful and deep to youngster me.
In the late 90s I saw my first infomercial which had Tom Bosley. By no means a pillar of gravitas nor stately acting, he still seemed too shilly for what he was doing.
I don’t know that Leonard Nimoy’s reputation suffered at all from narrating ‘In Search of’. I found the entire run of ‘In Search of’ on YouTube this weekend and watched a random episode. It happened to be about Atlantis. It was filled with over the top, sensationalistic, innuendo. It was every bit as fun I remembered it being as a kid. The show not so subtly guides the viewer along by “asking questions” which, while not answering them, encourages the viewer to draw certain conclusions (e.g. tales of a great flood wiping out civilization thousands of years ago are found in folk lore and mythology from sources as far flung as Mesopotamia, the Bible, India, China, and even South America. Is this just a coincidence involving fanciful stories, or could they be documenting an actual cataclysm?….)
To me, Nimoy helped the reputation of the series rather than it dragging him down.
What dragged his reputation down was his attempts at being a hippie, with amateur poetry and singing…
Check out this album:
The model Nimoy / Spock is holding on that album cover makes me think of this recent thread
William Shatner heard Nimoy’s musical stylings and said “hold my beer”…
The album Golden Throats is chock full of ill-conceived celebrity forays into the world of music. Celebrities that either have no musical talent or are alien to the genre of music they’re singing.
I had that album on cassette- Jsck Webb/Joe Friday’s “Try a Little Tenderness”
You can see the temptation to stretch your skills. But sometimes somebody ought to take them aside and suggest this particular stretch is gonna be a bust.
As horrific as that album is, consider the stuff that didn’t make the cut since it was even worse.
Wayne Gretzky, formerly know as the Great One now known as the Great Once, has jumped the shark for a lot of Canadians within the last few years. With his support for Trump, and Team USA during the four nations Face-Off, he has really shown his true colours.
Interesting…I chose around a dozen of those videos, and listened to a snippet of each. There’s a real variety of ability and talent (or the lack of it) displayed in that motley collection. It’s certainly not all terrible or embarrassing. I think a lot of those actors came from an era when they were expected to be a ‘triple threat’ while they were coming up- able to sing and dance as well as act. They may not have that ‘it’ factor that separates a serviceable singer from a real star, but they’re not all awful. Others are clearly parody efforts, not meant to be any kind of high art.
Pernell Roberts, for example, was a singer and stage actor before he had his ‘Bonanza’ run. There were several times on the show where he sang and played guitar just to sneak his musical talent in. One might not like his musical genre, but he’s not too shabby. Mary Tyler Moore, singing and dancing to ‘With a Little Luck’ puts out some good old-tyme showbiz energy.
On the other hand, Bill Cosby didn’t sing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, he shouted it in a weirdly high off-key pitch that must have shredded his vocal chords. It certainly shredded my eardrums…
