In the meantime, I'm a little confused about Kimble's luggage situation. He always seems to walk into town with the same suitcase, but I've see the end of more than one episode where he's walking out of town completely empty-handed, hands in pockets, like it's his first day as a drifter. Banner had a system--You always saw the duffel bag. The duffel bag should have gotten fourth billing on the show.
See also
The Time Tunnel, where, even when Tony and Doug change out of their 20th-century clothes during the course of the episode, they magically change back into them at the end so that the same stock footage of them tumbling through the time vortex can be shown.
It's just the nature of TV continuity in those days. Sometimes it seemed that we weren't seeing a progression of consecutive, continuous events as a series of separate parallel realities, each episode having no impact on any others. For instance, there were a couple of
Mission: Impossible episodes whose climaxes entailed team members showing their faces on live national or global television, and yet the following week, they were able to be totally anonymous secret agents again. And then there was the first-season episode ("The Legacy") which ended with Dan Briggs sustaining a serious gunshot wound to the abdomen, but next week he was totally fine. (Although if you rearranged the episode order and treated that as the first-season finale, you could assume that Dan died or retired from his injuries and that's why he was replaced with Jim Phelps.)
It even continued in more modern times with the
Law & Order franchise. Normally a murder investigation and trial would probably span a few months, and the dates given in the scene headings often suggest this, and yet the detectives and prosecutors are able to cram two dozen of them into a year. And somehow it's always the same two detectives in the same precinct investigating a crime that ends up getting tried by the same two assistant DAs. I sometimes think L&O, like many older shows, would make more sense if you assume the episodes are in parallel rather than in series -- each one being an alternate reality in which the same characters end up in a different situation than they did in the realities of the other episodes.
Of course, this is often overtly the case in comedies.
The Simpsons has run so long that it's soft-rebooted its continuity a dozen times, and has often done terrible things to characters who've come back fine later on. (How many times has Hans Moleman been killed?) There was Kenny dying every week on
South Park, and I think
Teen Titans Go! often has episodes ending with the characters being killed or going through some other permanent change that's forgotten in the next segment. Which, of course, goes back to the format of old theatrical cartoons, like the Tom & Jerry cartoons where Tom dies at the end but is back in the next cartoon.
On a slightly less facetious note, I think I've realized a potential fourth element of the "Fugitive Premise"...the fugitive character tends to have special skills, training, or abilities far beyond those of ordinary drifters, which often causes him to be underestimated by guest stars of the week.
There aren't many TV shows where the heroes don't have special skills of some kind. After all, we're watching stories where they get into trouble, so they must have a way to get out of it.
Kimble and Banner were both secretly doctors, in addition to Banner's special condition; Caine had his Shaolin Kung Fu skills and discipline; Bennu had all kinds of powers and knowledge....Do the other shows mentioned have examples of this? I know one of the protagonists was a werewolf....
There's
Starman from 1986, the TV sequel to the 1984 Jeff Bridges/Karen Allen movie of the same name (although it retconned the movie's events to be a dozen or so years earlier so that the title character could have a teenage son in the present day). That was a
Fugitive-style show with Starman (Robert Hays) and his teenage half-human son Scott (Christopher Daniel Barnes, then going by C.B. Barnes) on the run from government agent George Fox (played by Michael Cavanaugh in the series, replacing the movie's Richard Jaeckel). Starman had alien powers that he could focus through the small glowing orb he carried, though they were fairly gentle and understated powers for the most part.
And yes, they were searching for something too, namely Jenny Hayden (Karen Allen's character, played by Erin Gray in the series). They actually found her midway through the show's single season, but their reunion didn't last. I don't remember what happened. However, I've just discovered that the series is now available as a print-on-demand DVD set pretty cheaply -- I'll have to pick that up when money's a bit less tight.
(By the way, Barnes went on to be the voice of Spider-Man in the '90s FOX Kids series, and Hays was the voice of Iron Man in the syndicated cartoon from the same period. They had a "father-son" reunion of sorts when Iron Man guest starred on
Spider-Man.)
Good catch. Hopefully Iron Man's faceplate didn't rust.
