The Classic/Retro Pop Culture Thread

Sorry.

That sounds good. I hope I recorded it. I saw one a couple of weeks ago where Mrs. Peel engaged in a sword fight while wearing a harem costume. That was pretty engaging.

 

Huh? A pilot is a demo episode for a series that hasn't been sold yet. Loosely speaking, it can also refer to a series premiere in general. The only season that can possibly have a pilot is the first. Unless it's a pilot for a potential revival of a cancelled series.

 

Columbo was back to the proper sequence this week with "Agenda for Murder," the first revival-series appearance by perennial Columbo guest/writer/director Patrick McGoohan. In the original series, McGoohan played the murderer in "By Dawn's Early Light" and "Identity Crisis" and directed "Identity Crisis" and "Last Salute to the Commodore." He both directed and appeared in this one, and he would later direct and appear in the excellent "Ashes to Ashes" and, surprisingly, write and direct the absolutely abysmal penultimate installment of the series, "Murder with Too Many Notes." McGoohan holds the record for playing the most murderers in the series, four in all -- although Robert Culp played three murderers in the original series and the father of a murderer in a revival episode.

Anyway, "Agenda for Murder" is one I've always found a little dull and unengaging, the weakest of the revival episodes so far, though I'm not sure why. McGoohan is clearly enjoying himself as political fixer Oscar Finch, having a good time playing off his old friend Peter Falk, and it's kind of a clever twist on the usual formula that Columbo has to keep chasing after this fast-moving operative from one place to another in order to ask him one more thing. Much of the first half is pretty much a single conversation stretched across multiple locations, which may be why it feels sluggish despite the hectic pace. Although it does remind me of those Tex Avery cartoons where lawman Droopy kept popping up to arrest the bad-guy wolf no matter how far he fled.

Maybe part of the problem is that aspects of the crime and investigation seem a bit contrived. Mainly, the final clue that damns Finch is only there to be found because of a randomly careless thing he did in the course of meticulously staging a suicide -- namely taking a bite out of a piece of cheese and leaving it unfinished. It was somewhat justified by the science of forensic bite analysis being relatively new at the time, and Finch not being a practicing criminal attorney anymore so that he would've been unaware of it, but it's still pretty random -- why eat just half of such a small piece of cheese? And while we're at it, wouldn't he have bitten it with his front teeth, yet chewed gum with his molars? How could the bite marks match between the two? (Although I suppose they could both be matched against his dental records.) Oh, and one more thing (to coin a phrase): If the victim had really fired the gun, I'm pretty sure the powder residue on his hand would've been hot and would've burned his skin, so the lack of burns from the cool powder should've been evidence that it was planted. But that was never mentioned.

This was an interesting glimpse into an earlier era of detective stories, though. Fax machines and caller ID were novelties needing to be explained to the audience, and it took lengthy conversations to establish and explain bits of forensic analysis that CSI would've gotten through in a matter of moments. Modern mystery/procedural audiences have become a lot more savvy about these things. I don't think of 1990 as being that long ago, but things really have changed fast. Of course, DNA evidence alone would make tons of classic mystery stories immensely easier to solve.

Oh, speaking of which: The presidential election wouldn't have been until '92, so wasn't February 1990 a bit early for a presidential primary? Maybe this movie was meant to be set a year or so in the future, or even in the past.

 

You could usually tell who wouldn't get picked because their photos were black & white. And they were usually photos of production staffers.

I regret that the show fell into the habit of using the same team constantly and lost the original idea that a different set of specialists was selected for each mission. Of course, they could've taken it even further -- for instance, instead of one master of disguise, they should've recruited different impersonators based on their resemblance to the individuals being targeted.

 

Yes, that happened at least twice -- the team showed their real faces on nationwide or international broadcasts, yet were back to being anonymous the next week. There was zero continuity in the show until the last season when there were a couple of vague connections to earlier episodes.

There's also the fact that Cinnamon Carter was supposed to be a famous cover model, and Rollin Hand and Paris were both performing magicians. Even Willy was something of a celebrity for his weightlifting -- and Barney put his face on the promotional materials for his electronics firm, and just being an African-American with his own electronics firm in the 1960s would've made him relatively famous in at least some circles. So it's kind of implausible that they weren't recognized more often, especially during stateside missions. Though there were a smattering of episodes where they were able to contribute to the mission in their real identities -- for instance, there was one where Cinnamon used her connection to a magazine editor to recruit the latter's help in a caper.

 

That sounds potentially interesting.

I used to wonder about the stories that we weren't seeing where Phelps was using those operative-- or if maybe there were other Phelpses out there getting different taped messages and using those other agents.

 

There was a lot more variety to the message drops than there came to be later on. The first one was a vinyl record, a method that was used on several occasions (and M:I: Rogue Nation paid homage to this). The second episode had a street photographer hand Briggs a card with the mission on it, a method never used again. Sometimes they used weird sorts of wire recorders or reel-to-reel tapes in TV news vans or nickelodeons in antique shops. It took maybe 3 seasons or so before they settled on using the miniature reel-to-reel tape on a regular basis -- and it's odd that they only once used a cassette tape, since the technology was in common use by then.

I think the real weirdness was in the later installments -- the last two seasons where they dropped the spy stuff and had the team working almost exclusively to fight organized crime in the US, with the open assistance of conventional law enforcement. Why, then, did they even need secret tape drops on self-destructing media to hand out the assignments? It was a gimmick that no longer served a purpose beyond familiarity.

 

No, they dropped that part in the last 2 seasons (except on the rare occasions that they did actual spy missions), and instead added some sort of line (different each time) addressing why "conventional law enforcement" couldn't do the job themselves.

Nope. Like I said, there was zero continuity in most of the series, so cast changes weren't acknowledged. Essentially the characters were written the same way as their predecessors anyway. Jim Phelps was originally written just like Dan Briggs, although he softened a bit once they started writing more to Peter Graves's personality. And Paris was indistinguishable from Rollin, at least until season 5 when they tried to give him more of a personality of his own.

The one time they did acknowledge or explain a cast change was in season 7, when Barbara Anderson filled in for several episodes while Lynda Day George was on maternity leave. Since that was a temporary cast change, they explained George's absence by saying Casey was off on assignment in Europe or some other excuse. And they actually gave Anderson's Mimi a debut episode explaining how she was recruited to the team, something that never happened for any other series regular. (Although it was done for a couple of guest stars in season 1, when it was more character-driven than it later became. I think both Albert Paulsen in "Memory" and Mary Ann Mobley in "Old Man Out" had recruitment scenes where Dan talked them into joining.) Also, the episodes were shown out of production order, so episodes with Casey, with Mimi, and with neither one were interspersed, so there was never a sense of Casey being absent for a long stretch.

Hey, I just realized -- Mimi. M:I, M:I. She was destined to join the team!

 

There were several Mission: Impossible episodes (one of which was remade for the '88 revival) about surviving Nazis or sympathizers making plans to restore the Reich. It was a pretty common story device in a lot of shows for decades after the war.

 

Columbo this week was one I've been waiting for, "Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo." It was the biggest formula-breaker yet of the revival series, and I remember it being very good, but I haven't seen it in ages. I guess it's inevitable, then, that I found it less impressive than it was in my memory. It's a clever idea, if a bit self-referential -- building a story around the never-seen Mrs. Columbo, teasing us with the prospect of meeting her as well as with the appearance of her death, only to fake us out on both. Having the murderer be deliberately targeting Columbo as revenge for him arresting her husband was an interesting idea, and Helen Shaver was very good as Vivian. She and Falk have an excellent interplay, and the more personal stakes give it an interesting tension.

Still, it's cornier in some ways than I remembered. The voiceovers in the funeral-scene frame are stilted -- and 1990 seems a little late to be using ripple-glass flashbacks unironically, though at least there wasn't a harp sound over them. And the first act is oddly sitcommy in its acting and directing, light and broad in a way that clashes with the ominous setup. It didn't help that they cast sitcom actors like Teresa Ganzel and Ed Winter -- who was uncannily Shatneresque in appearance and performance. Plus, it gave away too much of Columbo's side of the story. We knew he was onto Vivian and that he had advance warning of the threat to his wife. I don't recall how I perceived this the first time I saw it, before I knew how it ended, but I think it would've undermined the suspense to know that Columbo wasn't being fooled.

And speaking of fooling, it's hard to believe all those people would stage an entire funeral just to trick one person into a murder confession. I also wonder about the ethics of tricking someone into confessing like that. Columbo cautioned her about her rights, but it was a bit hypocritical, given that he'd set her up to believe she could ignore the warning.

One reason I always wanted to see this again was to see the bit at the end where they showed the photograph that we were supposed to think was Mrs. Columbo but turned out to be her sister. I was wondering if it might have been a photo of Kate Mulgrew, star of the short-lived and deeply ill-conceived Mrs. Columbo spinoff that the network attempted as a brazen money grab after the original show went off the air -- retconning Mrs. C into a far younger woman named Kate and making her a detective in her own right, with the "brilliant" conceit that this time it was the husband we'd never see. Which was such a horrible and roundly hated idea that they pulled the show after a few episodes, had Kate get an off-camera divorce (another inconceivable idea), and go back to her maiden name, along with a title change to Kate Loves a Mystery, which failed to save the show from an extremely early cancellation. Anyway, I've long wondered if the makers of this episode might've taken a dig at that show by using a picture of Mulgrew and then revealing that it was actually Mrs. Columbo's sister Kate. But no; it's a totally different woman and it's her sister Rita. So that answers that. No surprise that the producers preferred not to acknowledge Mrs. Columbo. It wasn't their idea, it was made over their objections, and they probably wanted everyone to forget it had ever existed.