The Classic/Retro Pop Culture Thread

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50th Anniversary Viewing (Part 2)

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Mission: Impossible
"Speed"
Originally aired February 16, 1973

That's right--only three episodes until the end and we're still not done with Lynda's pregnancy or Greg's 'stache!

A hood named Phalen (Ron Soble) and an accomplice break into a chemical plant by night, holding up the guard and driving their tanker truck in to fill it up with the titular narcotic. Phalen reports his success via phone to Sam Hibbing (Akins).

Hibbing's drug-addicted, dirt-biking daughter, Margaret (Sullivan), is waylaid by the IMF on her way to a rally so Casey in disguise can take her place. Being played by another actress gives Casey the freedom to make a show of biking recklessly through the streets of San Francisco (a Quinn Martin Production...which started this season) so that her father will pursue her. Conventional law enforcement and an unnamed operative in a car help Casey to stage an accident, following which Hibbing makes a point of taking her stash so the fuzz won't find it. Fake Margaret is taken to the hospital, where Jim, posing as a biking buddy, offers Hibbing to help his daughter get off speed.

Meanwhile, Barney, posing as a visiting underworld figure from New Orleans, makes a deal with supplier Mike Dayton (Charles Bateman) to put up the bread to purchase Hibbing's newly acquired goods at an upcoming auction. Casey gets an unexpected visit from Zinc (Jesse Vint), a sleazier actual biker boyfriend of Margaret's whose advances she has to fend off and who gives her a new stash while expecting payment. Tipped off by surveillance, Jim pops in and a fight and chase ensue, with Jim losing Zinc in an elevator that the IMF didn't have the forethought to rig for the occasion. Jim then pays the real Margaret a visit at the hospital where she's being held to question her about Zinc, but she won't talk without a fix.

Jim brings home Fake Margaret, who makes a show of having gotten straight with his help. Margaret's new pal catches the attention of Hibbing's top man, Fred Snelling (uncredited Ross Hagen), who's long had an interest in the real McCoy. While the auction takes place, which involves multiple rounds of bidding on paper ballots, Phelan investigates the charter air office where Jim's supposed to be working. He's caught at gunpoint by Willy, posing as a disgruntled employee of Jim's. Phalen claims that he's an insurance investigator, and Willy tells him how Jim was a Korean War pilot who spent ten years in Leavenworth for killing another officer.

Barney and Dayton win the bidding, and Barney hands over the 40% downpayment in marked counterfeit bills, with the rest to be given on delivery, for which Barney sets the condition that the goods have to be delivered to New Orleans very early the next morning. Casey calls Smelling to get friendlier and offer him a tip that his position as Hibbing's delivery expert is being muscled in on. He goes to see first Hibbing, then Fake Margaret, whom he finds having a fake drug-induced freak-out. Margaret implicates Smelling as the one who brought her the pills, and Jim attacks him in a fake rage, mercilessly TV Fu-ing him multiple times and injecting the unconscious man with Barney Juice to simulate death. Concerned that the tight delivery schedule is now in jeopardy, Hibbing corners Jim into handling it for him.

Zinc pays Casey another unexpected visit in Margaret's bedroom in which he tries to force himself on her and loosens her mask. Hibbing catches the two of them and Zinc Scooby Doo's Casey, so she jumps out a window and evades foot pursuit. Realizing that he's been dealing with "the Man," Hibbing races to the warehouse where Jim's picking up the goods, but when Hibbing confronts him, Jim and Barney come to the rescue with a little gunplay to take out his men.

The episode closes with Real Margaret being released, grateful to Jim for helping her get straight.

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Love, American Style
"Love and the Baby Derby / Love and the Burglar Joke / Love and the Favorite Family"
Originally aired February 16, 1973

"Love and the Baby Derby" opens with brothers Paul and Danny Thorndyke (John Davidson and Wes Stern) attending what turns out to be a fake funeral of their Uncle Julius (E.J. André), who's used the occasion to offer via still-living will $1 million to the first Thorndyke to marry and have a baby. Swinger Paul tries calling various girlfriends, but none want to take the chance of losing the challenge while being stuck with a baby. Danny more pathetically tries to call a number of girls from his past who weren't interested in him in the first place. All the while, Julius and his right-hand man, Lorimer (Harold Peary), keep track of the nephews' efforts in a war room.

Danny puts his brains to work, screening applicants from a computer dating service who are rated with the highest fertility quotient (all of whom already have babies). Paul gets a visit from Johnnie Darling, a cross-dresser (Charles Pierce) whom it turns out was paid by Danny as a distraction. Danny in turn meets Jane (Colleen Camp), a very attractive woman who doesn't meet his qualifications, but whom he falls for at first sight. Paul also finds himself smitten with Johnnie's sister, Boni (Barra Grant). This leads to a double wedding, followed by a reception in which both brothers have rigged the food and drinks to gain head starts, knocking everyone attending out. Various other pranks ensue on the honeymoon night, causing both brothers to be too wary of the other to just get on with the usual business.

We jump ahead nine months to both brothers waiting at the hospital while their wives are in labor. Paul is informed first, but it turns out that Jane had twins, and delivered the first earlier. Neither gets the money, however, because it turns out that Julius got married to his nurse (wartime German secretary Cynthia Lynn), who had his baby two days earlier.

"Love and the Favorite Family" takes us to the set of Meet the Mercers--an Ozzie and Harriet-style sitcom in which an actual family play TV-friendly versions of themselves. America's favorite family consists of father Steve (William Schallert), mother Susan (June Lockhart), jockish son Buzz (Larry Bishop), and drunk sister Penny (Jenifer Shaw), who occupy a set that looks like another redress of the Brady kitchen. While they project a wholesome late '50s / early '60s image on camera, the actors bicker over their contracts and number of lines between takes. A Mr. Nielsen (William Tregoe) visits the set to inform them that they've been canceled after ten years. The director (James Millhollin) resolves to save the show by making the episode they're working on the best they've ever done, though nothing much comes of this. Amidst the family in-fighting, we learn that Buzz owns controlling stock of the production company and is having an affair with the TV family's wacky neighbor Wilma (Bobbi Jordan) off camera. Nielsen returns to inform the Mercers that he'd gotten them mistaken for another sitcom featuring a family with a similar name. The segment ends with a couch potato couple watching the show, laughing and nodding their heads at the dated onscreen humor.

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All in the Family
"Hot Watch"
Originally aired February 17, 1973

The episode opens with Mike frustrated because Gloria's been working long hours while her store does inventory, not leaving them time for...you know. Archie comes home in a good mood, showing off his new watch, which includes the time in China, a calendar, the phases of the Moon, and an alarm. Edith scurries to set the table in double time because Archie's timing her. Archie reveals what the timepiece cost and that his friend who sold it to him works on the docks, raising Mike's indignation, which veers into a tirade about how Congress lets Nixon get away with anything without asking any questions. (Hope he likes the taste of his own foot.) Mike's reaction when he learns Archie's friend is an ex-con causes Archie to accuse him of hypocrisy, as he'd be more sympathetic if Tommy were a minority.

The watch stops after Archie pounds his Heinz bottle. Afraid to take it to a legitimate shop where it could be identified as stolen, Archie tries to find a shadier repairman through first a friend of Stretch Cunningham, then Lionel, only to learn that Edith already took the watch to a jeweler. Mike and Gloria come downstairs after clearly having found some time. Archie tries to call the jeweler to get the watch back quickly, but the shop is closed. Then the jeweler, Mr. Abrams (Jack Tesler), drops by to inform him of the bill, and that the watch is a cheap knock-off of the expensive brand that Archie thought it was, making the bill more than the watch is worth. After Abrams leaves, there's some mind-boggling nonsense about Archie thinking that he lost $275 on the watch based on how much he thought it was worth.

Coda continuity: Archie's wearing his glasses to read the paper.

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Emergency!
"Honest"
Originally aired February 17, 1973

Station 51 responds to a gas explosion at the home of Martin and Leslie Noble (Michael Lerner and Beverly Sanders). It turns out that Martin lit a cigar when he didn't know that Leslie had left the oven on. Johnny holds the wife's white lie about liking the smell of his cigars responsible for the explosion, on the dubious logic that the whole thing might not have happened if she'd been honest with him from the beginning (though Martin had apparently already had a fight with her after having learned the truth).

A boy who's having severe breathing difficulty is brought into Rampart and examined by Morton. When Morton is bluntly honest with his mother, Mrs. Epps (Anne Whitfield), that Roderick is choking to death and he doesn't know why, she goes into hysterics, causing Roy to argue to Johnny that total honesty isn't necessarily a good thing. At the station, Chet gives Johnny another lesson by telling him what a nurse he's seeing really thinks about him.

The squad is called to a hotel where a man lies unconscious in a pool after attempting to dive in from the roof. The paramedics get him braced up for moving with the help of the pair of clothed bystanders who've been holding him above water. Roy tells Brackett that the patient shows signs of having a spinal injury. A tenuous attempt is made to tie this incident into the episode's theme based on how the diver, Andy, was responding to a challenge from a female companion named Jill (Hilda Wynn), though I wasn't following the logic of it. Andy is rushed to Rampart, where Brackett and Morton are trying to get details from Mrs. Epps about what Roderick and his college-age older brother Curtis have been up to in Curtis's garage lab. Morton later gets details from Curtis on the phone about how they were dissecting a frog and deduces that boy is allergic to formaldehyde fumes.

A 13-year-old accident victim named Teddy is brought in, having been driving his mother's car in a high-speed chase with police. A girl named Cheryl who boards in Teddy's house (Ondine Vaughn) blames herself because she never told his mother that he'd been sneaking rides in her car, afraid of getting him in trouble. This gives Johnny more ammo in his stance on honesty.

Station 51 and other units are called to a house fire in Miller Canyon, where an infant boy named Toby and his grandfather are trapped inside. the firefighters prioritize getting the child out only to learn that the old man (uncredited Vincent Perry), who said he'd find his own way out, is blind, so they go back in to save him...and Johnny fumes over the potential consequences of the man's lie. They get him out in time and get him to Rampart.

At Rampart, Mike blames himself for the Epps boy dying, though Brackett and Dix have belatedly learned that his mother gave him antihistamine before bringing him in, which would have complicated his situation. At the station, Roy argues to a sullen Johnny that the grandfather's lie was a noble one, and Chet strings Johnny along some more about the nurse he's seeing.

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The Mary Tyler Moore Show
"Remembrance of Things Past"
Originally aired February 17, 1973

Mary gets a call at work from old boyfriend Tom Vernon. She's hesitant to take the call and makes excuses to not see him. Later she describes to Rhoda how he once indirectly proposed to her, and the roller coaster effect that their relationship had on her emotions. He calls her again at home and she continues to avoid seeing him; but the next day she ends up calling him with Murray's encouragement and sets a date.

Mary initially insists on going out, but Tom (Joseph Campanella) romantically breaks down her defenses and she agrees to delivery. The next day, Mary frets over receiving a call from Tom that never comes, but he shows up at her apartment that night with pizza and beer. She tries to make another excuse to cut things short, then breaks down when she finds that he brought her the wrong type of pizza. They have a discussion about his lack of commitment, he asserts that they want different things out of a relationship, and they regretfully accept that it won't work between them.

A subplot has Ted preparing for a visit to Washington to interview Secretary of State William P. Rogers. That's not the only reference to the contemporaneous presidential administration. Mary describes to Rhoda how she switched into an overly formal mode when Tom initially called her:

My voice sounded like Pat Nixon welcoming Eagle Scouts to the oval room.​

In the coda, Ted returns from his trip to editorialize on the air because he couldn't get in to see the president:

Something to hide, Richard Nixon?​

Umm...

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The Bob Newhart Show
"Emily, I'm Home...Emily?"
Originally aired February 17, 1973

The first words of the episode are totally titular! Emily comes home late to inform Bob that she's hosting a committee meeting, which interferes with Bob's ability to watch a basketball game. He tries taking the set into the bedroom, but Emily thinks it's too loud and awkwardness ensues when Bob has to put his suit on over his pajamas to go out to the kitchen. Trying to watch the game at Howard's doesn't work out when Mary Ellen (Jill Jaress, reprising her role from "The Crash of 29 Years Old") drops in for private time. Emily visits Bob's office the next day to tell him that she's been offered a full-time administrative position, but given his experience the previous night, Bob isn't pleased with the development.

The first words of the second act double the titularity! Three weeks later, Bob comes home to find that Emily's gotten a Spanish-speaking maid, Marina (Alma Beltran). Emily comes home with groceries that turn out to be easy-to-make packaged food, as she doesn't have time to cook anymore. Bob ends up so desperate for after-work companionship that he asks Elliot Carlin to dinner. After unloading his own problems on his patient, Bob returns home very late and very plastered. Bob slurrily asks Emily to quit her job, but relents when she tells him that working makes her feel good.

Bob: I'm sober enough to know...I don't wanna go from the flying plan into the fryer.​

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50 Years Ago This Week

March 4

• The British yacht Auralyn was struck by a whale off of the coast of Guatemala and sank in the Pacific Ocean. Sailors Maurice and Maralyn Bailey would drift for 117 days later on a life raft before being rescued on June 30.
• The release of a large group of American prisoners of war took place. [Long, mangled list snipped out.]

March 5

• The "Great Michigan Pizza Funeral" was held by the frustrated owner of a food processing factory, Mario Fabbrini of Fabbrini Family Foods, near Ossineke, Michigan. The company had been ordered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to recall the pizzas on suspicion that the mushroom pizzas had botulism-causing bacteria. The pizzas were tipped into an 18-foot (5.5 m) deep hole in the ground before a crowd of onlookers, who were addressed by Michigan governor William Milliken.

March 6

• The Office of the U.S. Immigration Department in New York City cancelled John Lennon's visa extension five days after granting it. On March 23, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) told Lennon that he had 60 days (until May 5) to voluntarily leave the United States because of a 1968 conviction in the UK for possession of hashish. Lennon's wife Yoko Ono's application for permanent resident alien status was approved. Lennon had lived in the U.S. since August 13, 1971.
• Operation End Sweep was resumed after a short suspension prompted by North Vietnamese delays in releasing prisoners-of-war.
• Spring training and exhibition games opened for the 1973 baseball season in the U.S., with the first test of the American League's new designated hitter rule being done with Larry Hisle of the Minnesota Twins, who hit two home runs in five times at bat. Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees would become the first DH in a major league game on April 6.

March 7

• The first photographs of Comet Kohoutek were taken, as Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek was photographing the night skies from the Hamburg Observatory in Bergedorf, West Germany, while looking for the return of a different comet. On comparison of the first photos to a set taken two days later, Kohoutek realized on March 18 that he had discovered a new astronomical object. Initially promoted as what would be the brightest comet since Halley's, Comet Kohoutek would be barely visible in the night skies.

March 8

• In the 'Border Poll', voters in Northern Ireland elected to remain part of the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists were encouraged to boycott the referendum. Turnout was 58.7%, but less than 1% for Catholics.
• Two car bombs exploded in front of Whitehall and the Old Bailey in London within 10 minutes of each other, injuring as many as 300 people, one fatally, in what one reporter described as "the worst scenes of destruction since the World War II blitz." Police two other parked cars with large bombs and defused both before they were set to go off. The bombs had been placed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in an apparent protest against the Northern Ireland referendum.
• The South Vietnamese government made its second prisoner exchange of POWs with North Vietnam, releasing 499 captured soldiers at the border in Quang Tri province. The South had 6,300 POWs and the North had 1,250.
• The crash of a U.S. Army C-47 killed the 11 members of The Golden Knights, the Army's parachute demonstration team, as they were practicing from their base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
• Paul and Linda McCartney are fined £100, and ordered to pay costs, for growing cannabis in their greenhouse at Campbeltown.
• Died: Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, 27, American musician and founding member of the Grateful Dead, died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage as a consequence of alcoholism.

March 9

• Operation End Sweep, the minesweeping exercise carried out by the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps to remove naval mines from Haiphong harbor and other coastal and inland waterways in North Vietnam, exploded its first and only mine during the operation, although it did remove other mines in the harbors. A Pentagon spokesman said that many of the several thousand mines that had been dropped ten months earlier in 1972 "had gone inert and lay harmless on the sea floor."

March 10

• Sir Richard Sharples, 56, Governor of Bermuda, was assassinated while walking with his aide-de-camp, Captain Hugh Sayers of the Welsh Guards, and his dog. Both men and the dog were ambushed and shot to death outside of Sharples's residence at Government House in Hamilton. Seven months later, Erskine "Buck" Burrows would confess to the shooting after being arrested; Burrows also admitted to having murdered, on September 9, 1972, Bermuda Police Commissioner George Duckett. Burrows would be hanged on December 2, 1977, after being convicted of multiple murders.
• Attorney Charles Colson resigned as Director of the White House Office of Public Liaison to return to private practice, after serving as the "hatchet man" for U.S. President Nixon. In 1974, Colson would be indicted and convicted on charges of obstruction of justice in connection with the cover-up of evidence connecting the White House to the Watergate burglary. While awaiting trial, he would become an evangelical Christian.

Selections from Billboard's Hot 100 for the week:

Leaving the chart:

• "Love Jones," Brighter Side of Darkness (13 weeks)
  
• "Superstition," Stevie Wonder (16 weeks)
• "Trouble Man," Marvin Gaye (12 weeks)
• "Why Can't We Live Together," Timmy Thomas (15 weeks)
• "The World Is a Ghetto," War (16 weeks)

Recent and new on the chart:

"I'm Doin' Fine Now," New York City

(Mar. 3; #17 US; #8 AC; #14 R&B; #20 UK)

"Out of the Question," Gilbert O'Sullivan

(Mar. 3; #17 US; #2 AC)

"Reelin' in the Years," Steely Dan

(#11 US)

"Frankenstein," The Edgar Winter Group

(#1 US the week of May 26, 1973; #18 UK)


And new on the boob tube:

• M*A*S*H, "Sticky Wicket"
• Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Season 6, episode 23
• Hawaii Five-O, "The Diamond That Nobody Stole"
• Adam-12, "Anatomy of a 415"
• Kung Fu, "Chains"
• The Brady Bunch, "You're Never Too Old"
• The Odd Couple, "Take My Furniture, Please"
• Love, American Style, "Love and the End of the Line / Love and the Growing Romance / Love and the Postal Meeter" (season finale)
• All in the Family, "Archie Learns His Lesson"
• Emergency!, "Rip-Off"
• The Bob Newhart Show, "Who's Been Sleeping on My Couch?" (season finale)

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Timeline entries are quoted from the Wiki page for the month and Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles Day by Day, with minor editing as needed.

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Possibly the chemical has a legitimate pharmaceutical use, but I couldn't say without looking into it.

*groan*

Yeah, this struck me as an example of the body types not being convincingly close enough. And even if we buy the magical IMF mask tech that's completely convincing and allows full face functionality even when wearing two of them, that just makes it harder to swallow that somebody could so casually rip it off like it's just a store-bought Halloween mask.

Her Obvious Stunt Double isn't!

Guess I should have gone into more detail about that. The opening has the brothers attending the fake funeral and having the will read to them, following which the uncle drops his charade and comes back to life in the casket. So they knew he was alive all along...and I think he was at their double wedding.

Not so beloved if you're a starship captain.

The segment didn't seem very well fleshed out plot-wise...it's main purpose seemed to be to send up traditional family sitcoms. I should note that at one point the father, in character, delivered some anti-commie propaganda directly into the camera.

Doo doo Doo doo, doo doo Doo doo...

IIRC, they just used that plot device in a previous episode, too.

This episode did have a particularly tight narrative theme, even if they tried a little too hard to shoehorn some of the vignettes into it.

The intrepid journalist who'll soon be claiming to have broken the Watergate scandal wide open:

They got a couple of gags out of Bob trying to get information out of her through the language barrier. Howard speaks Spanish, and the maid tried to set him up with her daughter.

The premise of this episode calls into question how another recent one tried to establish that she was just a sub. I don't think a sub would be on any committees to host meetings. It also doesn't seem like a sub would be bringing guest speakers into the classroom, as she did in one of the earliest episodes.

The Wiki episode list includes the production numbers for potentially putting them in that order. I guess the factoid that I'd be interested in at this point is that if the last new aired episode was a leftover production-wise, what was the series finale in production order? And looking it up, it appears that would be "The Pendulum"...which, interestingly enough, is the next one up, airing second from last in the season.

 

That almost slipped by...

Interestingly, the John deportation business was from Wiki, and wasn't covered on that date in the Lewisohn book.

I already had this one, but it's as good as new to me. It's alright, but doesn't really stand out.

This one is completely new to me. Doesn't make much of an impression, but I'll be getting it.

Very.

Stone-cold, and on my Halloween playlist. Also, this and "Reelin'" have both been in my shuffle for a while because of the album track playlist.

LAS segments often don't have a lot of story logic, and this one was more surreal than most.

As with WWW S4 in production order, that makes a heckuva lot more sense.

It tends to come up here that in this era, not a lot of stock was placed in season or even series finales. By the end of a season they were usually just airing leftovers, and sometimes I get the impression that shows may have deliberately saved relative stinkers for late in the season.

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As is evident by now, I've fallen substantially behind in my 50th anniversary viewing, and I'm now facing the possibility that some of my earliest remaining recordings for the season--for M*A*S*H and Emergency! specifically--are threatening to expire later this month. I'm planning to try to chug through what I can, but those shows may suffer awkward early cut-offs, to be revisited when able. FeTV is actually on Emergency! S2 again, so I should be able to replace lost recordings right around the same time that I'll be losing them; MeTV is currently in S8/11 for M*A*S*H, so there may be some delay getting back to any episodes that drop. The wild card here is that the closer I get to the end of the season, the more shows will have already dropped, allowing me to get to the remaining ones sooner. And FWIW, the last new episode of Emergency! this season didn't air until April, so ideally I'd been intending to get to it ahead of its airdate.

 

Well I just watched "Pendulum," and I thought it was a pretty good episode to have potentially gone out with. The IMF posing as an evil international organization to expose another evil international organization...one last return to the old form. Plus, Dean Stockwell.

Apparently an uncredited role in the actual season finale by airdate, so I'm assuming a relatively minor IMF operative.

I haven't found it very memorable thus far.

As was The Fugitive well before it.

I'm planning to assess where I'm at about a week before the recordings are due to expire, at which point I may want to prioritize binging the remaining episodes of those series.

 

MOD SQUAD BINGE MARCH 25! MOD SQUAD BINGE MARCH 25!

Practically picking up right where I left off, too!

If he was uncredited, then he's not a full on guest star agent like Barbara Anderson...more likely somebody who just pops in to don a disguise or do a voice on the phone, who just as easily could have appeared in an episode with Casey or one of her subs.

On the subject of substantial series finales that preceded M*A*S*H, add Kung Fu. In airdate order they weren't the last new episodes shown, but they devoted a three-parter to ending his brother quest, though not resolving his overall fugitive premise.

On the subject of expiring recordings, I'm set to re-rerecord the remaining episodes of Emergency! next week, though I'm not sure how that works on Frndly when I already have recordings of the same episodes; and I'm planning to binge what will probably be the season's last four episodes of M*A*S*H the weekend of Mar. 18.

This all reminds me of the Great Incredible Hulk Binge, when we were in the middle of our weekly reviews in the Other Thread and I had to rush to get through the remainder of the series in advance before Netflix dropped it.

 

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50th Anniversary Viewing (Part 1)

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M*A*S*H
"The Long-John Flap"
Originally aired February 18, 1973

While the unit in general is suffering from a lack of cold weather gear, Hawkeye is showing off the fact that he's perfectly comfortable in his long johns. Trapper begs Hawkeye to sell them and Hawkeye eventually relents to guilt and lets him wear them, only for Trapper to lose them to Radar in a poker game. Nurse Beddoes (Kathleen King) takes an interest in Radar because of his valuable merchandise, but he breaks his date with her after he trades them with the cook (Joseph Perry) for a full leg of lamb. The cook then offers them to Burns as a bribe to avoid being busted down over a kitchen inspection, and Hawkeye has to suffer the indignity of seeing ferret face wearing his long johns in the Swamp.

Frank, not surprisingly, surrenders them to Margaret, only to be held up by Klinger (firmly in women's clothing at this point) for them, who learns that Houlihan now has them and lets Burns go.

Burns: The next time we meet, I wanna see a shine on those high heels!​

Klinger nabs them from Houlihan's clothesline with a bayonet, then confesses to Father Mulcahy and ends up leaving them with him. Mulcahy wears them overnight, then turns them over to Blake. The colonel doesn't want to give them up, but Hawkeye and Trapper find that he's having appendix trouble, so they rush him into the operating tent. An announcement goes out about the successful operation, but the announcement that the underwear was saved gets a bigger round of applause.

In the coda, Radar delivers the long johns to Hawkeye on behalf of Blake, and this time Hawkeye refuses to let Trapper wear them.

This was a pretty amusing bit of business overall.

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Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
Season 6, episode 21
Originally aired February 19, 1973

She was just Meredith Baxter then, and they were co-starring on Bridget Loves Birney. The others are cameo guest, and Rona isn't announced. She's in the news segment:


Rip does some physical comedy with his toupee, like wiping his head with a handkerchief that he tugs from side to side under the rug.

Richard doing Groucho at the opera:


A Salute to Air Travel not only features Jud performing "Daisy a Day," but immersive retro context pays off in spades as Dan informs us that the astronauts took the song to the moon!


https://judstrunk.com/history

I don't know why this isn't even mentioned in the song's Wiki article. The song had been released in November '72--did its inclusion in the last lunar landing lead to it becoming a charting hit? Anyway, damn--a salute to Jud Strunk!

The Fickle Finger goes to a policeman who had a legally parked car crushed:


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Hawaii Five-O
"Percentage"
Originally aired February 20, 1973

Nick and Lepe (Edward Shonk and Derek Mau), a couple of thugs working for a gambling kingpin named Yoshigo, beat travel agent James O'Hara (John Howard) to death with brass knuckles as a message to his partner, Sam Green, who's been hosting gambling junkets to foreign countries that are cutting in on the local business. Green (Milton Selzer), formerly a bookie who worked for Yoshigo, is at a junket in Seoul when he gets into $120,000 of debt backing a wealthy, irrate customer named Bill Howard (Mitch Mitchell), who thinks he's being cheated and insists on raising the limit. When Green returns home and learns about O'Hara, he figures that Yoshigo wants him alive in order to cut in on the business, so he calls the crime lord (Kwan Hi Lim) in front of Chin and Ben to announce that he's dropping the junkets.

Green is subsequently paid a visit by the Korean casino operator, Kuang (Seth Sakai), and a couple of his heavies, who take up residence in the hotel where Howard keeps a penthouse apartment. Green goes to McGarrett believing that Howard is in danger from Yoshigo, who'll use the opportunity to kill Howard as a way of creating a scandal that will discourage any further competing junkets. Yoshigo enters the hotel before Danno gets there to offer protection, and Danno witnesses Howard taking the obligatory dive from the high-rise. Fellow junketeers Walter and Valerie Sinclair (Douglas Kennedy and Carole Kai) are questioned because Valerie, who was having an affair with Howard, was one of the last people to visit him. Meanwhile, Yoshigo's current and longtime bookkeeper, Herman Stein (Leonard Stone), makes a clumsy attempt to blackmail Yoshigo into giving him a long-promised percentage of the business based on his knowledge of Yoshigo's visit to Howard's hotel. Green subsequently pays his old friend Stein a visit to persuade the reluctant bookie to help him break into Yoshigo's safe and turn state's evidence against him.

Between them, Che and Doc Bergman determine that Howard was murdered via skull fracture prior to being dragged to the lanai and pushed over. Examination of the otherwise-cleaned decorative Hawiian war club determined to have been the weapon turns up blood from the killer set in deep grooves of the rough-hewn wooden handle, which would have resulted from the killer's palm having been cut by the handle's sharp edges. Meanwhile, Green and Stein do the safe job, with Green planting a bomb on the safe afterward to divert suspicion from Stein, and Green turns over the books to Five-O, who don't know how he obtained them. Ben intercepts and arrests Kuang and his men as they're heading for the airport to catch a flight back to Korea.

McGarrett has the Sinclairs brought in again and has a look at their palms. Then he brings in Green and finds exactly the long cut across the palm that he was looking for. Green claims that he had no motive as Howard had paid him and he'd paid back Kuang, which Kuang supports, producing a briefcase packed with the cash. McGarrett then accuses Mr. Sinclair, who'd withdrawn that exact amount, of paying Sam to kill Howard, and reconstructs how the two of them dragged the body to the lanai--clothing fibers having been found that matched one of Sinclair's outfits--and how Sinclair waited to push Howard over to give Sam time to get out and establish an alibi. Sinclair confesses, having been motivated to do anything to keep a wife who now expresses her disdain, indicating that Howard gave her what the "old, old man" couldn't. Kuang is let go, but denied his money, which is now evidence in a felony case.

The title ties into Sam Green's penchant for working percentages. I figured he was the murderer because he was a little too actively scheming throughout the episode, and conspicuously friendly with Five-O.

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Adam-12
"Suspended"
Originally aired February 21, 1973

The episode opens with Malloy and Reed among a group of officers engaging in instructed practice in a darkened firing range. The partners make things interesting by wagering who buys the soda afterward on their marksmanship. Once Reed's off-duty...well, I'll let the other guy do some of the work for me...

Reed's replacement while he's on desk duty during the investigation is Officer Steve Tyson (Don Dubbins), an old acquaintance of Malloy's who's recently returned to the division and who's so by-the-book that even Friday Jr. Pete makes fun of him behind his back! Eager to help Jim get off the hook, Pete takes an approved code seven at the station to work out a number of alternate combinations of the plate number that Reed thought he saw but didn't match the VW, then check them out in scene in which Shaaron Claridge, the lady on the other side of the radio, makes her only onscreen appearance in the series:

There was a close-up but done at a really odd side angle...I assume owing to Claridge not having been an on-camera actress.

Reed goes before a review board, which is adjourned after they're informed that the shooting victim has died. Jim and Pete return to the scene of the shooting while off duty, trying to reconstruct what happened, and Pete continues to run plate numbers. Malloy continues this effort by calling the numbers in from the car while on duty, which is met with objection from Tyson, who promptly gets a demonstration in how you chew a fellow officer out. Finally one of the combinations turns up a '62 VW, so Pete goes to the registered address to check it out. They find the driver leaving his residence and pull him over, only for him to speed off as the officers are getting out of the car. A pursuit ensues, which ends with the suspect being cornered in a cul-de-sac. A weapon matching the one held on Reed is found on his person; and with black tape, Pete demonstrates for Steve and Mac how the letters and numbers on the plate could be masked to produce the ones that Reed saw.

This one had Pete summoning Steve back to the car during a seven "on the double". Pete's PA voice isn't as demonic as Jim's.

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Kung Fu
"Sun and Cloud Shadow"
Originally aired February 22, 1973

Cue flashback...

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The Brady Bunch
"How to Succeed in Business?"
Originally aired February 23, 1973

Pete comes home ecstatic about his new job, about which the parents are proud, and he voluntarily gives up his allowance. But at the bike shop, Peter flusters his boss, Mr. Martinelli (Jay Novello), by working too diligently on the same bike for three days. When the customer calls wanting his bike, Martinelli sends Peter to lunch so he can finish the job himself, and Peter misinterprets polite comments that his boss makes to assume that he's earned a promotion, which he prematurely announces to the family. When Peter returns to the shop, however, Martinelli politely and reluctantly lets him go, describing him as not mechanically inclined.

The family prepares a surprise party, for which Alice bakes a cake. Peter comes home to inform Greg of what happened, and after dinner on the patio is about to inform the parents when the cake is brought out, lit by sparklers, so he keeps his silence. Greg advises Peter to ask Martinelli for one more chance, but Martinelli has to turn him down. He does, however, cover for Peter when the family visits, while Peter spends his work hours feeding pigeons in the park. When the folks announce that they want to take Peter up on an earlier pitch to sell them bikes, he tries to discourage them, so they visit the shop and learn the truth. The parents come riding up to Peter in the park on their new bikes, hand over the commission that Martinelli agreed to let Peter have, and give him an encouraging talk. The episode climaxes with the entire family riding their bikes together...including Alice, the only one who uses training wheels.

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The Odd Couple
"Let's Make a Deal"
Originally aired February 23, 1973

This is what, the third episode this season to be about a game show?

Monty Hall makes his entrance at the end of a poker game that he's participating in, as he and Oscar are old college pals. Murray and Speed are starstruck; there's a gag in which a woman in a wacky costume is at the door as Monty is leaving; and Oscar has somehow burned a huge hole through Felix's bed without burning down the apartment building, because for some reason he fell asleep on it with a cigar while Felix was out of town. Sleeping on an Army cot doesn't agree with Felix's back. Oscar doesn't have the money to replace the bed, so he gets the idea to appear on Monty's show, which is currently in town, in the hope of winning a new bed.

Felix, who was such an enthusiastic fanboy of Password, has the opposite attitude toward LMAD; so this time it's Oscar coaching Felix on how the game works. At the studio, Monty turns Oscar down by stating that the rules for the show forbid friends or relatives as contestants, so Felix decides to outsmart him by disguising Felix. Felix refuses to go in a chicken outfit, insisting on coming up with his own costume...which turns out to be him and Oscar playing the front and back of a horse, respectively...their name tags sporting the aliases of Frederick Ungman and Ozzie Mallone. Oscar tries to backend-drive Felix into taking an envelope containing at least $100, but Monty insists on unmasking them, then rolls with the revelation and plays the two of them up as celebrity guests. Felix is disappointed that the prizes he passed up turned out to be a gourmet rotisserie and a microwave oven, but then the money turns out to be $1,000. Against Oscar's advice, Felix gets caught up in the mania and decides to take a chance on one of the curtains. The prize turns out to be twenty cases of canned squid, but one of the cans has a note attached to it, and Felix is given the choice of the money or the note. This time he's persuaded to take the money, and it turns out to be the right choice, as the note was just an IOU for another can of squid. However, Monty then comes clean on camera about his friendship with Oscar, volunteering the contestants' winnings to the charity of their choice in observance of the rules.

In the coda, Felix prepares a LMAD-style dinner for Oscar and Monty, consisting of three mystery plates. Oscar and Felix get steak, while Monty ends up with a can of squid.

This brings back vague memories, as I used to catch Let's Make a Deal on weekday afternoons as a pre-schooler.

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