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SEARCH '70s television series....

Warped9

Warped9

Admiral
Admiral
Canadian SF writer, Robert J. Sawyer, has just announced some information that's come his way. On his Facebook page he relayed that he learned Warner Bros. will be releasing the 1972 series SEARCH in a newly remastered DVD box set.

https://www.facebook.com/robertjsawyer

Apparently WB had to go back to the original negatives so the transfers should look as good as it was meant to.

I'm excited about this because I quite liked this show way back. I hope they include the feature pilot PROBE in the new set. For me this will be a must purchase.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwOmmIEoLQg&app=desktop

Some background for those unfamiliar with the series:
http://www.bigredhair.com/search/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_(TV_series)
 
As soon as I saw the thread title, I turned to my TV novelization shelf and removed perhaps the obscurest thing there. :D

mnf2.jpg


You're the first person I've heard mention Search in about 30 years!
 
^^ Back in the '70s I used to have a copy of that very book. I can't for the life of me recall what happened to it.
 
I thought at first this might be about In Search Of..., PROBE sounds kind of familar but I don't really remember this series.
 
I remember it and I loved it! I also loved that Elke Sommer was in the pilot film.
 
I like that this series did something different by having three male leads, who alternated appearing week by week. I thought it was a great idea, and really drove home the concept that this was a large organization. Too many shows have one action star, and it seems that the place is just them.

The show may not have lasted, but it left it's mark in my mind.
 
Terrific news! I'll definitely be looking at buying the set when it comes out. Hope there are some great extras.

I remember watching this and late Mission: Impossible episodes back in the 70s. I liked the rotating leads, the mixture of missions, and of course, Burgess Meredith guiding the missions from the control room. Very creative idea for the time!
 
I've never seen this show, but I remember seeing its scripts offered for sale in the catalogs I got from Lincoln Enterprises (Gene & Majel Roddenberry's memorabilia company). I always wondered why they included it among their merchandise -- I guess it's because Bob Justman produced the show.

I'm not sure what I think of the premise. Of course the idea of an organization using ultra-high-tech gear is of interest to me, but their purpose seems a little sketchy. It's a series about... people looking for lost stuff? Well, then again, I suppose a lot of stories are about people pursuing various McGuffins, and the story is in what happens along the way. In a lot of Mission: Impossible episodes, the specific stakes of the mission were rather unimportant and it was all about the mechanics of how the bad guys were scammed/brought down.

But I'm definitely interested if Burgess Meredith is in it, and the female lead looks quite comely.


Vendikarr said:
I like that this series did something different by having three male leads, who alternated appearing week by week. I thought it was a great idea, and really drove home the concept that this was a large organization. Too many shows have one action star, and it seems that the place is just them.
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Maverick did much the same, alternating between two leads at a time (out of a total of four over the course of the series), although that was done to accommodate the shooting schedule by allowing them to have two different production units overlapping. The scripts were all written without any particular Maverick brother/cousin in mind and assigned arbitrarily to the different leads (except for those occasions where two of them shared an episode), and it was only the differences in performance between James Garner, Jack Kelly, and Roger Moore (and briefly Robert Colbert) that distinguished the characters.

Mission: Impossible was originally meant to have an ensemble-ish cast, with a different team composition each week drawing on different members of the regular cast and various guest stars (Martin Landau was officially a recurring guest in the first season, even though he ended up as the de facto lead once Steven Hill was sidelined). But as the series progressed, the team composition became more and more standardized.
 
^It even started to get a bit pointless for Phelps to pull out his folder of agents and decide who to call in. after a certain point, we'd see the same dossiers every single time, except, maybe, for the addition of a guest-star agent as the last choice (which, on second blush, is reason enough for the scene).
 
I seem to remember Angel Tompkins as the female lead in the control room, but IMDB only lists her for 2 episodes. I thought, back in my teens, that Angel was definitely the right name for her. SUCH a pretty.
 
Forbin said:
^It even started to get a bit pointless for Phelps to pull out his folder of agents and decide who to call in. after a certain point, we'd see the same dossiers every single time, except, maybe, for the addition of a guest-star agent as the last choice (which, on second blush, is reason enough for the scene).
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Which is why they stopped using the dossier scenes regularly after season 2. In season 3, dossier scenes were used ony in the seven episodes that featured guest team members. In season 4, when they had no regular female lead, the dossier scenes became regular once again in order to introduce the female agent of the week. The last three seasons abandoned the dossier scenes altogether.
 
Warped9 said:
You can watch an episode titled "Moonroock" for free here: http://shop.warnerarchive.com/jump.do?itemID=5&itemType=LANDING&cid=theater&ref=EWACTMACHINE

Wow! And some say Star Trek was sexist! :lol: A very Bondian feel to this.
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Yeah... On the one hand, the storytelling and characterization are very dated -- a Bond carbon copy, as you say. But on the other hand, the technology is remarkably modern, the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a present-day story -- constant video monitoring, constant communication with a technical support team, implanted comm receiver and dental transmitter, it all feels very modern. I like that part of it, but I really don't like the smarmy Bond-wannabe lead. Hopefully the other two rotating leads would be more appealing.
 
The technical parts make me think of the Bourne films.

The concept of this kind of technical backup and instant communication with the agent in the field is very cool. Imagine this idea in conjunction with something like the Six Million Dollar Man. Indeed the SMDM is of the same era yet doesn't feel as socially dated. Steve Austin is a genuine gentlemen compared to Hugh Lockwood.
 
By the way, that Miss Keach at Probe Control is exquisite. I would've liked to see more of her and less of Mulligan.

Warped9 said:
The concept of this kind of technical backup and instant communication with the agent in the field is very cool. Imagine this idea in conjunction with something like the Six Million Dollar Man.
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Yeah, they could've easily enough included a transmitter in the bionic eye.

Although what I find surprising about 6M$M in my recent revisit (up through the end of season 2, since that's all Netflix has) is how infrequently it actually shows Steve going on official government missions. A lot of the time he's just conducting scientific research or helping out a friend or stumbling across a crisis. There's one stretch where he goes on three vacations in the course of four episodes. And he tends to be a fairly reluctant secret agent, preferring to go his own way rather than just follow orders, so I don't think he would've appreciated being constantly monitored.


Indeed the SMDM is of the same era yet doesn't feel as socially dated. Steve Austin is a genuine gentlemen compared to Hugh Lockwood.
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Well, relatively. He was as much a womanizer as any '70s action hero, and he did have "old-fashioned" views about a woman's place that he wasn't afraid to acknowledge in "The Pal-Mir Escort." But I'll agree he wasn't as obnoxious about the womanizing as Lockwood. Well, except in the two Glen Larson-produced pilot movies, which tried to turn Steve into James Bond and gave him some of the most sophomoric sexual innuendoes in action-hero history, like "Sorry I had to violate your porthole."
 
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