I assume this is in an expanded home video release? The theatrical film is on YouTube, but I'm not finding that part.
I haven't seen that. I haven't watched a lot of the Tom Baker years. I'll add that season to my list for after I finish collecting the Peter Davison DVDs. And I didn't even recognize him. I found out afterward that it was him. It would actually be kind of cool for Doctor Who to do a tribute to Douglas Adams by bringing in Arthur Dent, or an Arthur Dent pastiche. True. The writers really weren't thinking things through. That's the way you like it.
Well, you should at least get The Keeper of Traken and Logopolis, since those are the first two stories in the "Master Trilogy" (the third is Castrovalva; this marks the beginning of Anthony Ainley's time as the Master and the regeneration from the Fourth Doctor to the Fifth Doctor). They also introduce Nyssa and Tegan as new companions. Did you ever watch the original Tomorrow People series? Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson both guest-starred in "A Man for Emily." It was one of the most ridiculous stories that show ever did, but it's worth a few minutes to see Peter Davison wearing a silver afro wig and cowboy outfit. I have no doubt that fanfic has done that numerous times by now. In RL... back in the mid-'80s, NonCon (the annual Alberta regional science fiction convention) was held in my city. I was on the concom, and one of the things I organized was an open house in our hotel room for Doctor Who fans. At that time the only Doctor Who that was on PBS were the Tom Baker episodes, so a friend from Calgary brought a suitcase full of VHS tapes on the Greyhound. We set up a VCR and for 3 days we ran Doctor Who videos for 14 hours/day. One of the people who was at that convention was into British SF, and he loved role-playing. The hotel was a small one, and we didn't have whole floors booked for the convention - so non-convention attendees were apt to run across con attendees in the hallways at any time of day. So when they saw a blond guy who physically resembled Hagar the Horrible but was wearing an Arthur Dent-style bathrobe, standing at the intersection of two main hallways, asking passersby, "Excuse me, but could you tell me what planet I'm on?" they didn't quite know what to make of it...
By the way, do I remember correctly that it was incredibly easy to peel off the false skin? Like, you just needed your fingernails and a little force? If this was the case, the Visitors should be a little afraid to hit on a corner...
Yeah, about the typical difficulty for pulling off a Mission: Impossible-style rubber mask -- namely, just as easy as the plot needs it to be at that moment.
I thought that might be overdoing it. I didn't want to traumatize you. I started watching regularly around the time of the regeneration. "Logopolis" sounds familiar and I have "Castrovalva." I'll probably start working my way backwards once I finish my Peter Davisons. I never saw that. I'm glad they didn't go with that look for Doctor Who. Although I suppose there's an alternate universe somewhere where they did.... Yeah, Cosplay was considered weird in those days. For some reason. Hagar the Horrible in a bathrobe was probably the next regeneration after silver Afro and cowboy suit in that alternate dimension. Yes, all those shocking moments when we got a glimpse of lizard skin through fake flesh.
Adam-12, "Dirt Duel" (Sept. 13, 1972): Micky Dolenz as a biker! Here we come, Rollin' down the street....
In fact, his character's name was Oiler. _______ Alright, I've got so little 50th anniversary business going on this week that I'm going to put it in the same post as... This Week's Sidelist Viewing What was going on the week these episodes aired. _______ Batman "The Sandman Cometh" Originally aired December 28, 1966 "The Catwoman Goeth" Originally aired December 29, 1966 Caatu Purrada Nipto. Catwoman's record has been clean for months? Wasn't she just stealing Chad & Jeremy's voices two weeks ago? The thing that really stood out to me here was that the villain pairing seemed out of whack. The main scheme is Sandman's, while Catwoman's role is pretty much tacked onto that. It looked to me as if perhaps Newmar was available, so they rewrote/expanded a moll role to be that of a rival villain instead. This is supported by at least one of a couple of odd storytelling shortcuts in this two-parter. In the first part, the Dynamic Duo twice get information from Commissioner Gordon between scenes, without us ever seeing them together as we usually would. Perhaps that could have just been an issue of conflicting schedules between actors. But in the second part we get the odd bit of business with the Catacomb, which just stands out as pointless filler when, after all the buildup about its dangers, Batman rescues Robin from it off-camera! I suspect that perhaps, in trying to give Newmar a substantial role in the episodes, some of the usual story beats got squeezed out. Apparently the Batcomputer has a food dispensing function...this will prove handy later when they put food into the machine for decoding. It seems that the show is now sticking strictly to the silly inability to change identities in the field. Even if that's the case, wouldn't Batman riding in Bruce's limo be less conspicuous than Batman riding on the back of Alfred's bicycle? All of Spaghetti's deceased husbands have the same first initial and surname...? _______ Tarzan "The Fire People" Originally aired December 30, 1966 Jai and Cheeta are back, along with now-recurring baby elephant Navi! This one strikes me as having been very much padded to fill the hour...and that was also my impression when I just caught it casually in the background. The main story is about the tribal chief (played by Morris Erby, whom IMDb tells me was in THX 1138) dealing with having to defy his people's religious belief that they must stay on the mountain, and needing to convince them to do the same. Going by the dress and hairstyles of the tribespeople, the episode was apparently going for some religious allegory. The middle third of the episode consists of the chief and Jai literally meandering around in a cave set, routinely reacting to stock footage of lava flows, while Tarzan attempts to find them. I'll give Ron Ely some credit, it probably takes some nerve to dance around with flame jets while wearing a loincloth. Another TOS guest that I never would have spotted myself: Mittie Lawrence (Crew Woman, "The Corbomite Maneuver" [uncredited]). There are TOS guests aplenty, OTOH, on this week's... _______ 12 O'Clock High "Graveyard" Originally aired December 30, 1966 This time the episode starts with the 918th bombing factories that are making components for some of them thar new-fangled jet-planes. Here's another case of a brigadier general coming along for the raid...and now that I look it up, Robert Lansing's regular lead in previous seasons was also a brig. gen., so I have to wonder if maybe there wasn't some wartime authenticity to that angle...at the very least, it would have been baked into the show's premise by this point. The meat of the story is very sign-o'-the-times. I'd not commented on a brief establishing shot of African American soldiers in a previous episode, but here we have African American guest characters serving both on the ground and in the air. History tells us that they would have been serving in segregated units, and that's supported by the detail that two of these characters are the only survivors of their unit...but the episode never makes an issue of race one way or the other, and one of the regulars doesn't bat an eyelash at taking orders from an African American major... ...who's not actually a major, but a former officer who'd been busted down to private because of his aversion to killing, and is now impersonating the dead major who'd been leading his unit. He's supported in this effort by a sergeant played by Don Marshall (just a week before his appearance in "The Galileo Seven"). Ultimately the impersonation angle doesn't really go anywhere, as it's dropped in Act II. In the end the private, who'd prefer to practice medicine, redeems himself by proving that he is capable of killing under duress, after having received a pep talk from Gallagher in which the colonel likened killing the enemy to eradicating a disease--Now there's a sunny message! Playing a strong supporting role in the air is Lloyd Haynes (Alden from "Where No Man Has Gone Before," who hails from South Bend, it turns out!), as the leader of what's presumably a Tuskegee Airmen squadron, though I didn't catch the episode dropping that name. And the episode has two more TOS guests, albeit background types that I never would have spotted without IMDb: Dallas Mitchell and Garrison True. _______ And so, both in this post and in the long term for the sidelist viewing, it's onward into 1967! This Week's 50th Anniversary Viewing _______ The Avengers "The Joker" Originally aired April 29, 1967 (UK) (Now that premise sounds familiar....) Steed Trumps an Ace Emma Plays a Lone Hand As you can see, the episode gets Steed out of the way quickly, though it turns out to be a deliberately planted tripwire that caused his fall. Nasty villain, trying to give nifty-looking spiral staircases a bad name! At first I thought that this was yet another episode riffing on "The House That Jack Built," but its pedigree goes back a bit further than that...it turns out that it's a remake of a Cathy Gale episode from 1963, "Don't Look Behind You," which even uses some of the same character names. Wiki cleared this point up for me, after IMDb confused the issue by making it seem like these were repeat appearances by the same characters played by different actors. One of the recurring names is that of an unseen Sir Cavalier something...which is pretty similar to "Jack" having identified Emma's father as one Sir John Knight. This one was pretty ho-hum for me...I've seen the show do multiple episodes with the same basic premise that were more entertainingly surreal. There's too much attempted building of suspense/mystery without enough actually happening in the story. We know she's in danger, she knows she's in danger, get on with it. Another reuse: The mysterious home uses the same castle-style entrance as "The Superlative Seven". I think it's the same set on the inside as well, albeit redressed with a giant playing card motif. Shades of M:I--Emma has big, glossy head shots of herself published in magazines about playing bridge. Giving the audience what they want: a lingering shot of Emma in a bra while changing clothes. _______
I was reminded of this while watching the second episode of TMFU, given who was playing the villain....
Nice. I just realized that "Jai" is short for "Jane," which both disturbs and amuses me. Or has someone already mentioned that and I forgot? That is indeed very 60s. But that is not. I'm surprised at that, even on a war show. But I never really watched the war shows. I just saw them occasionally when my Uncles had them on. And the star of Room 222, which I wish one of these retro channels would show. I've only got the first season on DVD and I don't think all of the seasons have been released.
I forgot to mention that on TOCH, the regulars had a good reason this time for their story on the ground...their bomber got shot up and they bailed onto the island where Davis and Marshall were holding some German POWs, after failing to make an emergency landing on its airstrip. First I'd thought of it...gee, thanks!
My name is The Old Mixer. Darkness falls with unexpected swiftness over The Classic/Retro TV Thread, in accordance with the surfacing of recollections long buried...or something like that.... I'd planned to bring Dark Shadows into the 50th Anniversary Viewing fold in June, when the first of the episodes that I'd recorded from last Halloween's Decades Binge originally aired. But I realized that I probably still had the earlier episodes from the six-month batch that Decades airs tucked away on the Not-DVR Analog Storage Medium that I'd still been using the previous year. Utilizing archaic methods from 30 years ago this week, I confirmed that I had a solid batch of nearly all of them, missing only the first few episodes that Decades airs, which start with the introduction of Barnabas Collins. But the episodes that I have began hitting the big five-oh a couple of weeks back, so I have a bit of catching up to do before I can view in sync with other 50th anniversary business. My plan is to review a week's worth of episodes at a time, which seems more suitable to the relatively relaxed pace of daytime soap plots...organized in a way similar to how @TREK_GOD_1 does his Supergirl reviews, with blurbs covering individual characters and plotlines...which, applied to a soap opera, reminds me a lot of Johnny Carson's old "Edge of Wetness" skit. Those of you who know what I'm talking about can imagine the organ cues between blurbs. So, without further ado, here's our first installment, covering a partial week's worth of episodes.... _______ Dark Shadows Episodes 212-214 Originally aired April 19-21, 1967 We pick up with Barnabas and Elizabeth meeting for the first time. Posing as the descendant of the presumably long-dead figure that the Collins clan knows from his portrait, Barnabas is at his most charismatic and civil when dealing with his distant relations, belying his true nature. Frid does great work balancing the pretense of what his character is saying with the projection of underlying menace for the benefit of the audience. Barnabas seems to have no designs on those of his own bloodline, which suggests that there are boundaries he wouldn't cross. The same benefit isn't enjoyed by... Victoria, for whom Barnabas turns on the charm right away, while sizing her up like a piece of meat...I'm surprised it took the show so long to get around to Barnabas actively pursuing her. When he's not around to entrance her with his detailed stories of Collinwood in ages past (about which she's very perceptive, making sure that the audience gets what he's really talking about), Victoria is busy looking after... David, who finds that he doesn't have the Old House to himself anymore. No, David, he's not a ghost...but Barnabas has reason to believe that the lad has actually interacted with other spirits in that house...specifically that of Josette, for whom Barnabas nurtures an obsession that the show is only beginning to hint at. At this point, that plotline is taking a backseat to the obsession that everyone else in the show has with... Willie, even when he's not in the episodes. In his mysterious absence, everyone takes up their grievances with his accomplice... Jason, who's such a delightful sleaze. Hints are dropped about the dark secret that he's holding over Elizabeth...hints that are partially overheard in a couple of different scenes by... Carolyn, who also spends some time at the Blue Whale, taking in its endearing Swinging Sixties music while meeting up with... Burke and Joe....I have to get back in the hang of telling these two apart...let's see, Burke's the one who looks older and has the bigger, squarer chin. I'm not sure what's going on between him and Carolyn that he's trying to apologize for, and I don't particularly care. I know it's a daytime soap, but the relationship drama is really the least interesting thing going on in this show. When Carolyn returns to Collinwood, she has her own first meeting with Barnabas alongside her uncle... Roger--Where would he be without that decanter? Nice touch: Barnabas pining over sunrises in his scene with David. This review is an Old Mixer Production. _______
Yep, Micky (two years removed from the end of The Monkees as a recording act) moved back to his original profession--acting. Around the same time he guest starred in this Adam-12 episode, he provided voice work for the dreaded Hanna-Barbera cartoons, such as The Funky Phantom, one in a line of endless Scooby Doo clones.
Well, he would not cross them at this point in time... Frid's Barnabas Collins broke the vampire-on-film mold as soon as introduced himself to Mrs. Johnson; completely different than Lugosi, Carradine, Chaney Jr, Lee and anyone else you can think of up to that time. Though not British, Frid's slight accent and manner of dress visually linked him more with the then-exploding "British Invasion" in popular music than the traditional Transylvania set, giving him a strange, contemporary appeal (strange considering what the audience knew him to be). Moreover, although he was clearly sinister to the audience, one could see how his aristocratic behavior covered a great many "sins" of details such as a lack of personal information, and (as time moved on) his consistent absences during the daylight hours. John Karlen's Willie Loomis was a very effective character--dangerous, a true street criminal type, and completely unsettling to the isolationist, colder residents of Collinwood. Not simply stopping there, he was a study in internal chaos, as he feared Barnabas, yet struggled to stand his ground (as we will see) on important, even threatening matters--eventually daring to call Barnabas out on the desolate nature of his existence, and his arrogant "master planner" attitude. Dennis Patrick--another solid character actor, who (as Jason McGuire) will prove to be the 800-pound Annoying / Dangerous Gorilla in the room, with the added frustration of Elizabeth defending him, when its clear she cannot stand being forced to do so. Fairly independent young woman, who eventually feels on her own in the Jason matter, though she did tend to play both Joe and Burke's strings in the pre-Barnabas episodes.
I was thinking along the same lines...the hair, the falsified backstory about his coming from England. I've said it before elsewhere, though I didn't find a place for it in the structure of my review...the main thing that really intrigued me about this show when I first caught it on Decades was how subtly they played the V-word angle. All of the tropes are there for the audience to see and connect together, but at least in this collection of episodes, even those in the know never come right out and say what he is. And that's where Frid seals the deal with his acting and charisma. One can totally buy that the Collins clan would be taken with him in a way that doesn't make them look like idiots for not putting together what the audience knows.