Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

[The Old Mixer]

Of course! The old "derail the thread with Get Smart routines" trick!

 

[Poltargyst]

LOL

The catchphrases made the show fun.

 

[Silvercrest]

I like the catchphrases, but when binge-watching (or when Mrs. Silvercrest gets the DVD sets from the library), I've discovered that the sheer repetition drives me up the wall. Same with most other sitcoms or cartoons from that period. I've just got a low tolerance.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Get Smart was terrific, though I felt its humor relied too much on repeated catchphrases. It was a fun pastiche of the '60s spy craze, though a lot of its humor is probably lost if you're not familiar with the things it parodied.

Just in general, the '60s were my favorite era for sitcoms. There were so many imaginative, formula-breaking shows. It wasn't just family sitcoms and school sitcoms and workplace sitcoms. You had Get Smart, a spy show; Gilligan's Island, a survival narrative on a desert island; superhero shows like Batman and Captain Nice; science fiction premises like My Favorite Martian and My Living Doll and It's About Time; fantasy premises like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie; fourth-wall-breaking, surreal stuff like The Monkees and Green Acres to an extent... it wasn't always brilliant, but it was rarely boring.

And My World... and Welcome to It with William Windom. Not your average, everyday sitcom premise right there.

 

[johnnybear]

Another of those type of shows was The Munsters! I had been wanting to see that again for years in the eighties but when it came on after a few weeks I'd had enough!
JB

 

[The Old Mixer]

Just in general, the '60s were my favorite era for sitcoms. There were so many imaginative, formula-breaking shows. It wasn't just family sitcoms and school sitcoms and workplace sitcoms. You had Get Smart, a spy show; Gilligan's Island, a survival narrative on a desert island; superhero shows like Batman and Captain Nice; science fiction premises like My Favorite Martian and My Living Doll and It's About Time; fantasy premises like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie; fourth-wall-breaking, surreal stuff like The Monkees and Green Acres to an extent... it wasn't always brilliant, but it was rarely boring.

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[M'Sharak]

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I don't even need to click -- I can already hear the "1928 Porter" line of the theme.

Another of those type of shows was The Munsters! I had been wanting to see that again for years in the eighties but when it came on after a few weeks I'd had enough!
JB

The Munsters did have some wit and clever dialogue, but tended to lean a little too hard sometimes on exaggerated sitcom reactions and "Boy, Herman sure is a dunce" plots. Its contemporary The Addams Family was both sharper and more subtle.

 

[Christopher]

The Munsters did have some wit and clever dialogue, but tended to lean a little too hard sometimes on exaggerated sitcom reactions and "Boy, Herman sure is a dunce" plots. Its contemporary The Addams Family was both sharper and more subtle.

Yep, I always saw Addams as the real thing and Munsters as a pale imitation, though I now know that it debuted only 6 days later than TAF and thus was more a case of parallel evolution. (Indeed, Wikipedia says that Universal had been considering the idea of a monster comedy series as far back as the '40s, no doubt as an outgrowth of the Universal Monsters franchise.)

Addams was definitely less of a routine sitcom and more subversive and absurdist in its humor. Its producer Nat Perrin had done some writing for the Marx Brothers, something I hadn't known until now, but I can see the parallels in the humor style.

 

[FormerLurker]

Addams was definitely less of a routine sitcom and more subversive and absurdist in its humor. Its producer Nat Perrin had done some writing for the Marx Brothers, something I hadn't known until now, but I can see the parallels in the humor style.

Just the fact that the basis is the comic panels Chas Addams did for The New Yorker was enough for me. Granted, it wasn't until I was an adult and saw a collection of those panels in hardcover that I realized it, but it was enough. Made the two theatrical features that much more entertaining for me (I miss Raul Julia. He was wonderful).

 

[The Old Mixer]

Back on the island as a different character in the Season 2 finale:

(Hawaii Five-O, "Kiss the Queen Goodbye," Mar. 11, 1970)

 

[johnnybear]

I loved how the same actors kept coming back each year in US TV shows, it was hilarious! Don Stroud made a few appearances in Police Woman, Leslie Nielsen in Streets of San Francisco etc. In Trek we had Mark Lenard and Morgan Woodward in the first two seasons and others like Barry Russo, Ian Wolfe, Skip Homier, William Campbell, Diana Muldaur, while Roger C.Carmel played the same character so doesn't count but I wonder how many of them would have returned again and again if they had have gone to a fourth season?
JB

 

[johnnybear]

William Schallert, Billy Curtis in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
JB

 

[The Old Mixer]

I loved how the same actors kept coming back each year in US TV shows

Sometimes more often than that...Dragnet [1967-1970] has actors that it uses again and again as different characters, multiple times per season, often in consecutive episodes...e.g., Virginia Gregg, Howard Culver, and Bert Holland. IMDb says that they each did 13 episodes, but I'd have thought at least 20, they seem to come up so much.

 

[J.T.B.]

Morgan Woodward again plays a tough commanding officer, with the Skipper as his sergeant-major. The Virginian, "The Bugler," 1969.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Sometimes more often than that...Dragnet [1967-1970] has actors that it uses again and again as different characters, multiple times per season, often in consecutive episodes...e.g., Virginia Gregg, Howard Culver, and Bert Holland. IMDb says that they each did 13 episodes, but I'd have thought at least 20, they seem to come up so much.

Same could be said about the 'Law and Order' franchise. I wonder which actor/actress holds the record for the most guest appearances as a different character.

 

[Christopher]

Same could be said about the 'Law and Order' franchise. I wonder which actor/actress holds the record for the most guest appearances as a different character.

IMDb's full-series "Full cast and crew" pages tend to list actors in order of the number of episodes they appeared in, as well as listing all the characters they played, so it probably wouldn't be hard to look through its pages for the various L&O series and figure out who's at the top. I'm not motivated enough to try, though.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Just gonna leave this here...

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Now I know where Godley and Creme got their inspiration for this song.

 

[johnnybear]

John Crawford, Walt Davis in Task Force:Part Two, an episode of Police Woman!
JB

 

[Forbin]

Tanya doing her thing in a quick background shot. The Rat Patrol episode, "The Street Urchin Raid."

 

[PCz911]

Hawaii Five-O, "Which Way Did They Go?" (Dec. 24, 1969): Santa put William Windom in our stocking (mask):
View attachment 17416
But we must have been a little naughty this year, because the guy he's abducting is Phillip Pine in (very bad) yellowface.

It drives me nuts.... Hollywood.....Aaahhhhh. You can’t put a suppressor on a revolver (except the nagant, that doesn’t count ). It doesn’t work! Two words : cylinder gap