Normally I barely notice them, but when I deliberately rewind to catch the name of an act and get the blurb splattered all over it the entire time it's onscreen...!
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50th Anniversary Viewing
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The Ed Sullivan Show
Season 20, episode 2
Originally aired September 17, 1967
(as edited for
The Best of the Ed Sullivan Show)
The Doors open (unintended) with their brand-new single, "People Are Strange," which is practically a music video with the superimposed, polychromatic headshots.
Jack Benny, ported in from Apr. 30, 1967, was kind of dry, joking about his professional relationship with Ed.
I covered what I had to offer about Yul Brynner and Aliosha Dimitrievitch's "Two Guitars" in
an earlier post.
Next we got the Skating Bredos, a duo doing roller-skating acrobatics.
"Young" Flip Wilson--The knight routine didn't really do anything for me.
Robert Goulet, "Mame" (from June 5, 1966)--Was Robert Goulet on this? I must have been doing something else.
The Doors return with one of the most legendary moments of the show, their censor-defying performance of "Light My Fire."
The viewers at home likely had little idea that they were witnessing a moment in history that would live in memory 50 years later...there's no particular drama to it on-camera, they just do the song with the same words that got played on the radio. The set decoration with all the doors was a bit too obvious.
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Mission: Impossible
"Trek"
Originally aired September 17, 1967
Xfinity said:
The IMF matches wits with a hijacker and a disloyal prison commandant.
Phelps gets his orders in a phone booth, from a tape built into what I assume is the coin compartment.
The voice in the recording said:
This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim.
An acceptable variation, differing only in that it specifies the recording medium.
Our guest agent this time around is a puppeteer who makes a dummy of Rollin to fall from a cliff.
The IMDb review wasn't exaggerating about the (likely unintended) connections with the Desilu show that shares half its name with this episode. We get the outpost from "Arena"; Vasquez Rocks; some very familiar music cues...and oh yeah, Mark Lenard.
This one definitely has some genuine danger in the plan, with the hijacker being an unpredictable element who, among other things, almost shoots Cinnamon.
Interesting contrast with the Sullivan episode that aired earlier the same night--In character, Phelps mentions being stoned, though I see that the expression was once used as a synonym for being drunk.
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The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
"The Test Tube Killer Affair"
Originally aired September 18, 1967
Xfinity said:
Solo and Illya rush to Austria to take control of a teenage superhuman designed to be used by THRUSH; guest Lynn Loring.
Open Channel Description Error--I believe the entire episode took place in Mexico and Greece.
Solo and Kuryakin are working together again...and contrary to the babysitting half of the formula that was so common last season, our female guest spends the episode as the enemy agent's ally. The way that she's played by the handsome young THRUSH uber-agent the entire episode gets annoying. I didn't catch why this one superman was so important to Solo and Kuryakin when THRUSH had a school of them...but he happens to be the one running a mission, so the angle works out for them. And aw, isn't that sweet, he overcomes his training to be emotionless and opts to help the girl in the end...and gets killed by Solo for it.
I was wondering if Solo and Kuryakin's UNCLEmobile was new...a little Googling tells me that it was an AMT Piranha and indicates that it had been used in Season 3, though I don't recall noticing it before.
The concept around which the episode was based wasn't terribly well-realized...THRUSH needs specially trained "supermen" to plant bombs?
I don't have much of an ear for TV composers, but hearing so much of his Trek-sounding work on M:I, I instantly recognized this as Gerald Fried's work
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The Rat Patrol
"The David and Goliath Raid"
Originally aired September 18, 1967
Xfinity said:
An ambush on a German courier yields charts of desert waterholes and oases previously unknown to either the Allies or the Nazis.
The title refers to how the Rat Patrol operates from a serious disadvantage after their Jeeps get blown up by Dietrich. He could easily pounce on them at any time after that, but he doesn't want to risk that they'll destroy the valuable charts to keep them out of German hands. So Dietrich plays a siege game, keeping them surrounded and trying to lure them into surrendering. Though in the end, it might have been smart for the Germans to go ahead and blow them to smithereens in order to keep the charts out of American hands, which is where they wound up, of course, after the Patrol managed to capture a German vehicle.
I don't have anything terribly insightful to say so far, because from what I've seen, it's really a very simple, straightforward show.
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Batman
"Ring Around the Riddler"
Originally aired September 21, 1967
Xfinity said:
The Riddler wants control of prizefighting in Gotham City.
So...we have at least two episodes this season that involve Batman and one of his arch-foes engaging in a competition while wearing trunks outside their costumes. And yeah, West's Batman having a "chicken" trigger is completely out of character.
Millionaire Bruce Wayne said:
...the manly art of self-defense.
This episode's Batgirl assessment:
- When the Riddler robs the box office, Batgirl is the first crimefighter on the scene.
- She goes along with Batman's assertion of her having been lucky (and she's nearly rolling her eyes when she says it) because she can't tell him that she was there as Barbara Gordon.
- Add the twice-used Batgirl-Vanishing Trick to her resourcefulness. Hell, the first time the Commissioner and Chief O'Hara should have been looking in her general direction, but they didn't see her leave.
- She finds the Riddler's hideout via her own resourcefulness. Yeah, she's captured easily...and she escapes just as easily. (A sign of being reduced to single, half-hour episodes...they could have gotten a good scene out of showing how she escaped.)
- Barbara figures out Riddler's clues easily without Batman's help.
- Batgirl saves Batman from the magnet. (How does dropping filings at Batman's feet cause his feet to be susceptible to the magnet anyway?)
- Whatever moves they give her, she's no less effective in the climactic fight than the Dynamic Duo...and she does whack a couple of henchmen with dumbbells, so it's not all kicks.
In the Commissioner's office, Batman wears his stethoscope where his actual ears would be...that's a break with the show's established M.O. of having him put things on his cowl ears.
In her apartment, Babs has an old-fashioned clicker remote control. And the announcer calls her little trick closet the Batgirl-Nook...that's a name that hadn't stuck with me.
The Riddler's secret partner...didn't Dr. McCoy run her over with a car or something last Spring? And there's the Siren cliffhanger that H&I, in its ass-backwards efforts to keep two-parters together, didn't mind putting off the resolution of for three months...!
Thank goodness for IMDb--I was wondering if the Batgirl theme song had been cut for syndication, but it looks like it'll be turning up next week.
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Ironside
"The Leaf in the Forest"
Originally aired September 21, 1967
Xfinity said:
Ironside believes the murder of an elderly woman is not part of a string of similar stranglings.
The episode takes its name from what the show's titular character claims is an ancient Persian proverb...
Robert Ironside said:
The best hiding places are these: for a book, a library; for a man, a city; for a leaf, a forest.
...though it's suggested at the end that he'd made it up (which explains the lack of results I got with a Google search while watching).
This episode we get a better look at what I have no choice but to dub the Ironsidemobile, a wheelchair-enabled armored truck with some amenities for the Chief and his colleagues in the back.
There's a bit of clever investigation work in which Ironside zeroes in on the place that all of the strangler's victims could see from their apartments on the basis that somebody there could see all of them. (I saw him use the same method in a later episode that was on in the background during the Decades Binge.) He then has Eve pose as an elderly woman living alone to trap the strangler, who turns out to be the milkman.
I should also note that the show takes place in San Francisco, this being at a point in time when the Summer of Love is just winding up. There's a scene with some folk singers in a park, but it doesn't really scream "hippies" to me. Mark, who's on stakeout outside, is distracted by them when Ironside, watching from another apartment, sees that Eve is in danger of getting attacked, so the Chief throws a lamp out the window to get his attention.
It feels like a bit of a tangent that Ironside takes down the strangler at all, as he was right that the strangler wasn't the killer in the particular case that he was investigating. It turns out that the real killer was the man that he suspected early on, who was running an investment scheme. Ironside exposes him by walking his wife through the circumstances under which he would have persuaded her to give him an alibi, causing her to confess.
I'd given up on pointing out sightings of
THE CLOCK, but in this episode it pops up in multiple sets.
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"Black, White and Read All Over"
Originally aired September 21, 1967
Wiki said:
After yet another rejection of Donald's unpublished novel, Ann offers to submit it to her father, who knows a publisher who's a customer at his restaurant. Unfortunately he takes a look at it himself, and nearly equates it with pornography.
This time Ann does her own introduction...as with Simon Templar, it's not quite as satisfying that way.
I think that Ann's father is starting to grow on me. I used to hate him in casual viewing because he was such an uncompromising ass to Donald.
It took Ann and Donald 2-1/2 hours to get from Brewster to Manhattan? There must've been quite a bit of traffic. They said 40 minutes in another episode, which is much closer to reality.
"Oh, Donald!" count:
2-4 (two possible "Oh"'s being subvocal/muttered)
"Oh, Daddy!" count:
5
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Tarzan
"Voice of the Elephant"
Originally aired September 22, 1967
Xfinity said:
Jai's pet elephant's life is in danger after it receives the blame for the death of a commissioner.
OMFG, we actually see the treehouse!!! It's got a pulley elevator and everything! ("Everything" in this case being a cot, a table, and bamboo walls.) It's suggested that this is specifically Jai's place, where he does his homework without direct adult supervision.
The name of the titular baby elephant is Tanto...close to the aforementioned Tantor, and spoken clearly many times in this installment.
TOS guest: Percy Rodrigues, as the tribal chief who lets an innocent pachyderm take a murder rap for him. Fortunately, we have a loincloth-wearing legal expert on the scene...
The Lord of the Jungle said:
Observe the law of your tribe....The law which says that any elephant, regardless of his crime, is entitled to a fair trial just like a human being.
Cheeta plays a more useful role than usual, serving as a distraction for Jai (and comic relief in the process, of course).
Having no faith in blind justice, Jai frees Tanto and rides the baby elephant into the jungle, which could have made for a good Fugitive Premise if the situation had played out longer.
We get a brief bit of elephant herd footage at one point that teased me into thinking that Tanto's posse was showing up to kick ass and take names. We also get some reused footage of Tarzan from very early episodes--Ron Ely's hair was quite different then.
Overall, this proved to be a more colorful and cohesive episode than the season premiere, and unlike so many other episodes, there's some direct interaction of substance between Jai and Tarzan, rather than them being nearly absent from each other's stories.
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Star Trek
"Who Mourns for Adonais?"
Originally aired September 22, 1967
Stardate 3468.1
MeTV said:
The Enterprise encounters an alien who claims to be the Greek god Apollo.
See my post here.
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Get Smart
"Viva Smart"
Originally Aired September 23, 1967
Xfinity said:
Smart and 99 face a firing squad when they try to restore the deposed president of a foreign country.
I just now noticed how each credit in the opening after Adams's name follows Max through the next door.
Batman isn't the only show using big, cheap, fake-looking critters...here we get a big rubber spider. Not exactly the tarantula from
Dr. No there....
We get references to Cesar Romero, Ricardo Montalban, Herb Alpert, and Guy Lombardo.
There was nothing particuarly worthwhile for me in this episode. The extremely long "last cigarette" was a half-decent sight gag.
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Having worked up the nerve to go kill Maggie again, Barnabas is once again stymied, this time by the familiar sound of a flute playing "London Bridge."