Barbara Eden on Why Jeannie and Tony Were Never Intimate: "She was an entity"
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Certainly there was. MPI Home Video began releasing episodes of The Prisoner on VHS in 1984, and I remember watching VHS tapes of The Outer LImits and The Avengers in the 1980s.. . . This is as close as the movie is ever going to come to a streaming release.(Sony/Columbia destroyed the masters. There was no TV-on-home-video market back in 1991 . . .
Oh, yes. My father was an early adopter of new technologies, and in the '80s he built up a fair collection of video laser discs, the early ones that were the size of vinyl LPs. He had a full collection of The Prisoner on laser disc, though I think most of our other laser discs were movies, including the 1983 laser disc release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Special Longer Version).
I still have a bunch. The entire run of original Star Trek, The Fugitive releases, the one Lost in Space 90's release and a few Japanese laserdiscs of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In the 90's there was a store called Laserland near me where I could rent them. I wound up recording all of the Space:1999 releases they had.
It's hard to remember now how cool laser discs and CDs were when they were new, these futuristic, silver, rainbow-gleaming things. Laser discs were especially impressive, because they were as big as LPs but heavier, substantial things rather than lightweights like CDs/DVDs. And we thought back then that they were indestructible, not subject to warping and scratches and dust like LPs, because the laser and the magic computer inside could compensate for such things. Little did we know how fragile they'd actually turn out to be.
I collected a ton of laserdiscs back in the day, but they took up so much room. Over the past 20+ years, I've since replaced most of the titles first with standard DVD, then Blu-ray, etc., so i've placed the LDs in a separate room for storage. Contrary to popular belief, all content, from foreign edits, supplemental material, color grading and original audio mixes have not all transferred to the new formats, so that gives me yet another reason to hold on to the physical LDs...despite digitizing much of their content / storing it on drives.
I have to agree about the chemistry of the three male leads. Dr. Bellows always suspecting Tony of doing or being something, yet never putting his finger on a possible source rarely ran out of comedic gas, while Hagman and Daily had great, underrated chemistry as best friends.
Betwitched's scripting did use insult humor often (especially in the relationships between Darrin and Endora, Abner and Gladys Kravitz or Darrin and Sirena), and made its fair share of social commentary all throughout its 8 season run, which was due to the specific demands of a very liberal Elizabeth Montgomery, who also tried to champion the hiring of more minorities behind the camera. In fact, Bewitched's most daring social commentary came during its 7th season in the episode "Sisters at Heart" (aired 12/24/1970) where Tabitha's desire to have one of Darrin's client's daughter Lisa--a black girl-- as a sister has her use witchcraft to first switch skin colors with Lisa, then mix it up with skin colored polka-dots. The episode was based on a story written and submitted by 10th grade English students at Los Angeles' Thomas Jefferson High School. At the time, the episode received much attention, culminating in a Governor's Award at the 23rd Emmy Awards. So, contrary to the idea that the series' social commentary was pressured away after season one is not historically accurate.
As pointed out above, Montgomery often tried to exercise her considerable influence and power to address sociopolitical matters when the opportunity presented itself.
Being an Irwin Allen fan, i'm guessing you'll like the fact that in "Sisters at Heart", Lisa's father was portrayed by Don Marshall, at the time, only a few months removed from the end of his 2-season run as Dan Erickson on Land of the Giants.
Darrin--as originally conceived--was supposed to be the "threatened" Conservative stand-in for a part of the population who bristled at the thought of accepting anyone from a different background (i.e., race / religion, etc.), or outright rejected it. His being a "wet rag"--as you put it--was one half of the comedic conflict, especially with the great Agnes Moorehead's Endora. That series set-piece could not have worked any other way.
Regarding Larry, I found his power-hungry glad-handing ways funny, with actor David White knowing how to perfectly have Larry change an opinion in the blink of an eye if he believed it would benefit him (or McMann and Tate), while talking up or snatching credit from Darrin, often in the same breath. Darrin called Larry out on his unethical ways, but still considered him a close friend, after all they've experienced together. Not too uncommon to some real life situations.
Not to mention, in the sixties Arab-Americans were generally considered "white," just ethnic whites (not unlike an Italian, a Spaniard, etc.).
Take away the supernatural elements of the Bewitched concept and Darrin and Larry would have fit in as characters on "Mad Men" pretty seamlessly.
Barbara Eden seems like a lovely (interior and exterior) woman, but at the end of the day, I think the theory she is putting forward is simply her interpretation, not that of the writers or producers of the old show. After all, they got married on the TV show (later season(s)), after Tony proposed, so the idea he didn't think of her as "real" or as an "entity" was contradicted by the original series canon.
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Indeed. I've heard of LDs on which the layers were improperly sealed at the factory, allowing air to oxidize the internal aluminum plating, causing the media to spontaneously go bad within a few months of purchase.
My DVD of Airplane got overstressed enough (I don't recall exactly how it happened, other than that it involved pulling too hard on an excessively tight hub, with the same effect (only much faster). And it happened while I was on vacation (whenever I fly, I carry that DVD, and my portable DVD player, as my own personal in-flight movie), and I ended up spending an evening visiting a B&N in Chicago to pick up a new one. Naturally, the silk-screening on the media wasn't nearly as elaborate as on the original release.
Instead of having a second layer of plastic welded on to the label side, they only have a layer of lacquer under the label: not vulnerable to delamination, but very vulnerable to being scratched on the label side.
On the shiny side, however, smudges can be cleaned off, and minor scratches polished out.
And there were dual-layer DVDs from a couple of decades ago with a defective process that caused the second layer to deteriorate so only the first half of the content on each disc is playable. In my ongoing Patreon rewatch-review series, I've had that happen with my old DVDs of both The Flash (1990) and RoboCop: The Series (which I'm currently rewatching in preparation for future posting). For the former, I was able to borrow DVDs from the library, and I was hoping I could fall back on streaming for RoboCop, but the streaming version is from a terrible BluRay transfer that lops off the top and bottom of the 4:3 image to make it widescreen and still sometimes distorts the image's aspect ratio. I ended up buying a new DVD set, which is apparently a companion release to the terrible BluRay transfer under the same package design, but at least has the right aspect ratio, though the image quality is mediocre.
what do you mean "considered"? They certainly didn't suddenly become black or asian!
Yes, hence the use of the term "considered."
What do you mean? Whiteness has always been arbitrarily defined by what it excludes. There was a time in the past when groups such as the Italians and Irish were not considered white. The definition has changed over time.
And surely you don't believe there are only three ethnic categories?
Your use of the past tense implies people from the middle east aren't considered white today, maybe I read too much into it.
No, there's a shit ton of ethnicities, it's races that are arbitrarily limited. I just didn't feel like typing out "pacfic-islander, Native American, aboriginal Australian, ect." Middle eastern is a broad ethnicity and if you insist of categorizing it, the only place it fits is white.
I don't think you read too much . I used "considered" in the past tense because it was about the past (the 1960s). As your exchange with Christopher seems to indicate, many people today don't consider people from the middle east to be white.
Well, I'd disagree, as there's plenty of ethnic diversity in the Mideast. After all, it's always been a crossroads of civilizations, a place where different cultures met and intermingled, which is why it generated so many world religions and other important cultural innovations.
And as I said, whiteness is arbitrarily defined. It usually just means "the people racists don't consider subhuman."
I thought Julian Bashir was a white guy from the west end of London until I met his parents in DS9 season 5.
I just had a (racial profiling) revelation...
I know grandparents and recessive genes come into play which explains how Bill's fake kids where all over the place in The Cosby Show, but mum and dad Bashir were perhaps a touch too dark to have naturally produced a baby who could be that easily mistaken for a Caucasian...
What did they do?
WHAT DID THEY DO??
Obviously Amsha and Dick could have adopted Jules? Which in of itself is a kind of unnatural selection, %100 choosing the preferred exact superficial traits of their child.
Or there could have been an earlier round of illegal genetic modifications that caused the initial retardation?
What?
No. NO. NO, Julian is not Illyrian. I am not eating that shit, F%%k off.
