Search, the high-tech private-eye series from the 1972-73 season (whose credits included Star Trek alumni Bob Justman and Fred Phillips) has just been released on manufacture-on-demand DVD. http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Search-The-Complete-Series/19420 http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Search-The-Complete-Series/19433
Hmm. Looking for "intelligence" on network TV these days? Good luck. Better off watching Food Network. Seriously, though, no, I don't think the two series have a whole lot in common. Probes had satellite transceivers in their ears, not brains wired into the Internet (And doesn't Intelligence have some kind of subplot about the protagonist wondering if he's being controlled by his implant?)
Your loss on that front, although I must warn you you are in the minority, and that we are living in another Golden Age of TV right now. I can't believe that people are so quick to go towards older TV shows like this when we have similar concepts done somewhat better on TV now (or at least the tech is not the main focus, but the characters are.) As I said, it sounded similar. And yes, Intelligence has that plot, which gives it an added dimension character-wise.
Holy <CENSORED>, THAT was QUICK! The tracking page said I'd get it by Thursday. I got it TODAY! 6-DVD set. Without an index page to tell you which episodes are on which volume. But as a Pandronian might put it (this is TrekBBS, after all), "This One is more than pleased. Not to look gift zintar in the masticatory orifice."
You got yours too, today? Or did you mean the movie-of-the-week pilot? Of course, since I'm at work, and even my portable DVD player is at home, I couldn't even watch anything on my lunch break (I read two articles in the current Smithsonian, instead: a fascinating one on cave dwellers in Italy, and a depressing one on environmental activists being assassinated.)
After watching the first four episodes (the third and fourth on my lunch break, yesterday and today), I'm struck by two things: 1. It's as good as I remember it 2. I knew that some of the sound effects were straight out of Star Trek (especially one that's associated with viewscreens in both series), but I never realized the extent: Probe Control scenes are positively loaded with "feedback tones" from U.S.S. Enterprise consoles, and either yesterday or today, I'm almost certain I caught one of the bridge background sounds (albeit overlaid with the one almost ubiquitous non-ST sound effect, a loop of rapid DTMF that's become almost a cliche for 1970s depictions of computer equipment).
Dat Terriffic Mo' Fo' ? Dasterdly Termites Masticating Fokkers? Doris Terwilliger Making Fondu? Drowned Teenagers Murdered Friday? Dos Tacos, My Friend? Dogs Taking Mary's Fritos?
Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency. Be thankful that I'm not one to rub people's noses in LMGTFY. Something else about Search: the presence of women and minorities in positions of great responsibility at Probe Control (e.g., Albert Popwell as Dr. Griffin, fluent in any language the scriptwriters can throw at him, Ginny Golden as Keach, expert at data retrieval, Angel Tompkins as Gloria Harding, monitoring medical telemetry [and recently cleared for "code 10" briefings], Byron Chung as Kuroda, telemetry and electronics specialist, among others) is very Roddenberry-esque. And some of the banter among the "Computerized Kibitzers," particularly when a Probe starts to "womanize," reminds me of Roddenberry's infamous line,
Honestly, I'm not sure "Roddenberry-esque" is the best word for diverse casting, since if you look at his overall body of work, he wasn't as inclusive as he liked to claim. "The Cage" had no ethnic diversity at all in its main cast, and part of the reason NBC asked for a second pilot with a new cast was because Roddenberry had failed to deliver the diversity he'd promised them. His Genesis II does have one major black lead and an Indian character named Singh (which seems to be the only South Asian name Roddenberry knew), but it also had Ted Cassidy as a "white Comanche" wearing brownface makeup and speaking broken English. The second pilot for that concept, Planet Earth, lost Singh and reduced the black character to a minor role, and though Cassidy's character lost the brownface and spoke coherent English now, he was still called a "savage" by one of his colleagues. In The Questor Tapes, there are no nonwhite cast members aside from James Shigeta in a minor role, and one character, on being told that the title android has adopted a medium-light skin tone, says "So he looks normal." And as far as I can tell, Roddenberry's 1977 Spectre pilot had an all-white cast, as did the first feature film he wrote and produced, Pretty Maids All in a Row. To Roddenberry's credit, he did try to tackle racial prejudice in an episode of his first series The Lieutenant (where he first worked with Nichelle Nichols), and his frustration at the network's refusal to air the controversial episode did help inspire his decision to do a science-fiction allegory with social commentary. And his unsold pre-Trek pilot Police Story did have a black second lead, Rafer Johnson. But considering his whole body of work, it doesn't appear that ethnically diverse casting was really something that can be called a Roddenberry trademark, not consistently anyway.
Speaking of women in positions of responsibility and authority, "Operation Iceman" has the late Mary Frann (a decade younger than she was when Newhart had its debut) as a medical telemetrist who is also a fully-wired Probe (the first female Probe seen in the series), and a member of Bianco's team. One thing I don't quite get about that episode: the writer obviously understood foreshadowing and the Chekhov's Gun principle (Pelham's platinum earjack), so why is it that we see Burnside (Ms. Frann) putting something in Bianco's drink, and Bianco knows she put something in it (as soon as she leaves, he dumps it), so who exactly was she working for, when she did it, and why, without any explanation, was she back in Probe Control in the tag, as if nothing had happened? Somebody cut a scene at the last minute, without realizing that it left a gaping hole? According to both my own memory and IMDB, that was Ms. Frann's only appearance, so if they were setting her up as a mole, they never did anything with that particular "Chekhov's Gun." Refreshing, the lack of product placement in Search: in a previous episode, we see Cameron munching on what appears to be a donut, and holding a conspicuously-unlabled soda bottle. I guess even mission directors need to eat.