The Classic/Retro Pop Culture Thread

[Mr. Adventure]

I suppose this sucks the fun out of the proceedings but:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming/LiveActionTV

 

[The Old Mixer]

Remington Steele, all of the titles had punny uses of the word "Steele" in them.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I suppose this sucks the fun out of the proceedings but:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/IdiosyncraticEpisodeNaming/LiveActionTV

Fascinating. I didn't realize so many shows used naming conventions.

 

[urbandefault]

Fascinating. I didn't realize so many shows used naming conventions.

Friends used "The One With ...".

 

[The Old Mixer]

The Green Hornet
"Programmed for Death"
Originally aired September 23, 1966

The cheese is strong with this one....

I don't think it's supposed to be that easy to fall through a window by breaking the glass.

It's a bit cheesy how they film the news right outside of Brit's office. Has the unintended effect of giving the Daily Sentinel too small a sense of scale. TV studios are big spaces, they don't film the news in the office next door.

A couple weeks ago one of the bad guys was Trump...this time, we get Frank Miller!

The show likes to fill time with stock shots of the hideout and car business...but Batman did that too, and does help to establish these things.

And this must be the pilot, because there's the weird mask!

Seems like if Miller's oven is as hot as the Earth's core, he couldn't put his face a foot from the open door, or reach inside with mitts. Likewise, he'd need more than mitts to walk into a freezer that was 50 below zero.

***

 

[scotpens]

Every episode of La Femme Nikita's first season had a single-word title, all the second-season episodes had two-word titles, and so on. If the show had lasted longer than 5 seasons, the episode titles wouldn't have fit on the screen!

Not really a naming convention, but there was a vogue for flowery, pseudo-poetic or pseudo-literary episode titles in TV dramas of the 1960s. Naked City was especially infamous for those.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Friends used "The One With ...".

The title of every Seinfeld episode should have been "Still About Nothing."

I don't think it's supposed to be that easy to fall through a window by breaking the glass.

It's possible. Some glass was pretty brittle back in the day.

Every episode of La Femme Nikita's first season had a single-word title, all the second-season episodes had two-word titles, and so on. If the show had lasted longer than 5 seasons, the episode titles wouldn't have fit on the screen!

They would have had to hire Jim Steinman.

Not really a naming convention, but there was a vogue for flowery, pseudo-poetic or pseudo-literary episode titles in TV dramas of the 1960s. Naked City was especially infamous for those.

Star Trek had some good ones, too. I miss that.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Oh, almost forgot. I was off yesterday, so I got to watch an episode of Zane Grey Theater (and the little bug in the corner does say Grit, not Comet). It starred Robert Culp and Inger Stevens, and DeForest Kelley was in it. Nice, strong, character-driven story, as was the case with most anthologies in those days.

One amusing thing is that the on-screen title is Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater. I wonder if we got a contemporary revival if it would be called something like Quentin Tarantino's Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater.

 

[Christopher]

It's a bit cheesy how they film the news right outside of Brit's office. Has the unintended effect of giving the Daily Sentinel too small a sense of scale. TV studios are big spaces, they don't film the news in the office next door.

Except the Sentinel was a newspaper first and foremost, and the TV desk was a side operation (presumably added for the show to let them present the news in a format better suited for TV -- not unlike how the Daily Planet in the '40s Superman radio show had its own dedicated radio station). It's not unreasonable that, as the publisher, Britt would've wanted to be able to monitor his paper's news broadcasts just as he oversaw the content of the paper itself. And having the studio right next to his office is an easier way to do that than rigging a TV monitor, I guess.

Of course, that newscaster was none other than Gary Owens, later the Laugh-In announcer and the voice of Space Ghost.

 

[The Old Mixer]

It just seems like this show's own brand of "Do more than four people work at this newspaper?" to me. Having a TV station should make it seem like a big operation, but running the newspaper and TV station out of three adjacent rooms makes it seem far too Mayberry-scale.

Ah, H&I...appeal to the overgrown kid in me with a Saturday morning full of classic superhero shows, and make me feel prematurely old by spamming that AARP commercial....

So now they're on "Ralph Hanley"...did they ever change it back, or did he stay "Hanley" for the rest of the series?

 

[Christopher]

It just seems like this show's own brand of "Do more than four people work at this newspaper?" to me. Having a TV station should make it seem like a big operation, but running the newspaper and TV station out of three adjacent rooms makes it seem far too Mayberry-scale.

It's not the whole station, just the news desk. Assuming that the Sentinel did own an entire local channel with a whole programming lineup, there was probably a studio somewhere that handled that, and they just ran the newsroom out of the Sentinel offices for integration with the newspaper's efforts, or something.

So now they're on "Ralph Hanley"...did they ever change it back, or did he stay "Hanley" for the rest of the series?

Are you talking about The Greatest American Hero? They changed Ralph's surname from Hinkley to Hanley after John Hinckley, Jr. shot President Reagan, but they changed it back at the start of the second season. So it was only Hanley for a few episodes.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Batman
"The Joker Is Wild"
Originally aired January 26, 1966

And now the Clown Prince of Crime...with his ordinarily flesh-colored hands and painted mustache making hard to see him as anything other than a guy in make-up. The mustache is particularly hard to not fixate on at the end when the Joker is effectively breaking the fourth wall by addressing the TV viewers of Gotham in extreme close-up. I'm thinking that maybe they should have just owned it and painted his mustache green.

Now I'll never be able to hear the photon torpedo sound on Trek again without thinking of the Joker's spring-loaded pitcher's mound.

"There's only one man who can handle this...I don't have to tell you who." Indeed, we're about to roll the opening credits anyway.

If I were making rules for a Batman drinking game, the "Gosh Bruce, you're right" moments would definitely have to be in there....

Ah, but seeing the Batmobile tear out of the secret Batcave entrance...there's that overgrown kid factor kicking in.

It's interesting that Batman has to explain the criminal need to leave clues to Gordon and O'Hara a couple of weeks after they last tackled the Riddler (never mind that the show establishes Batman and his foes as having been in business for a while). For the audience's benefit, I know...but it only makes the commissioner and chief of police look all the thicker and less competent when they demonstrate that they haven't learned anything by handing a perfectly good piece of evidence that Batman would want to investigate over to Bruce.

This 2-parter is an adaptation of "The Joker's Utility Belt" by David Vern Reed and Dick Sprang, appearing in Batman #73 in 1952. It's close enough that by modern standards, they'd probably be entitled to story credit.

I'm not familiar with that story first-hand, but one moment strikes me as something that they probably tore right off the page--the Joker getting in a quick soliloquy about Batman's utility belt when he's supposed to be choking on gas.

It's always seemed to me that the scene in the Hall of Fame was written with the assumption that the statues would actually be the actors holding really still, and that the henchmen would actually look like the famous comedians. It's a case where there's a pretty distinct mismatch between the script and the production.

Glad it wasn't just me. I'm not sure what we're supposed to think is happening in that scene. Were they supposed to be hidden in the pedestals? Or the statues themselves? If so, it's not conveyed very well...you'd think there'd be some debris.

the Pagliacci encounter where the Joker debuts his belt

Wouldn't it seem conspicuous to anyone that a Pagliacci performer would wear a rubber clown mask instead of just make-up?

*******

Are you talking about The Greatest American Hero? They changed Ralph's surname from Hinkley to Hanley after John Hinckley, Jr. shot President Reagan, but they changed it back at the start of the second season. So it was only Hanley for a few episodes.

You know any other Ralph Hanleys? Yeah, I was just commenting about what was on in the background at the moment. I know the reason for the switch, I was just wondering how long it stuck (which you answered). Had to verify that "few episodes" comment, as they were only on the fourth...hadn't realized the first season was an uber-short mid-season replacement affair.

*******

The Atomic Beam (TM), with a strobe powerful enough to stun and disorient any would-be TV viewer!

 

[The Old Mixer]

Batman
"Batman Is Riled"
Originally aired January 27, 1966

...which point out the anomaly that most of the dialogue and narration in this episode seems to have been written under the assumption that "Boy Wonder" was Robin's actual superhero name, rather than a descriptive epithet.

I was definitely noticing that in the first half of this episode. At least the papers got it right...after which point the episode seemed to go back to calling him Robin in general.

What was Batman trying to accomplish throwing that pellet from his (fake) utility belt after Joker & co. were already out of the hideout door? And I don't care how good Joker may be at sleight of hand, switching belts on Batman in the middle of a fight seems extremely unlikely.

In what passes for early installment weirdness on this show...when Batman revealed that he'd used a universal drug antidote pill, he didn't call it a universal drug antidote Bat-pill. And that was some pretty clumsy expository voiceover mixed into the climactic fight.

Robin's Holy Exclamations usually go by me without much notice, but Dick's "Golly G-minor!" got a good belly laugh out of me!

*

 

[Christopher]

Robin's Holy Exclamations usually go by me without much notice, but Dick's "Golly G-minor!" got a good belly laugh out of me!

The thing I've recently realized about the show is that, though it was very faithful to the comics of the era in many ways, it changed Robin a great deal. In the comics, Robin was always the funny one, constantly making jokes and wisecracks, and he and Batman would often trade wordplays. But the show made him -- and Batman -- much more serious. I guess the "Holy Blank" interjections were meant to be punny wisecracks, but Burt Ward just delivered them so gravely. Other than that, the only hint of the comics' Robin's fondness for wordplay was the show Robin's proclivity for deciphering riddles.

 

[The Old Mixer]

The video's horribly cropped, but the October 15-16 Binge is:

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Ah, that will be a good one. That used to be one of my favorites back in the day. I think that the episode where Admiral Nelson turned into a werewolf is responsible for my lifelong love of werewolves.

 

[The Old Mixer]

The Green Hornet
"Crime Wave"
Originally aired September 30, 1966

Not much to say about this one. The plot revolves around the Hornet's reputation as "the most masterful criminal of our time"...a reputation that he somehow manages to perpetuate despite not actually committing any crimes.

A minor thing that bugs me a little about the show in general...granted, it's Bruce Lee doing the driving, but there's something unsexy about a hero who sits in the back seat....

*******

Batman
"Instant Freeze"
Originally aired February 2, 1966

So here we have our first Mr. Freeze, who has a normal skin tone. This villain not only has an unseen past with the Caped Crusader, but a Batman-involved origin, to boot! And the episode takes place in July, well out of sync with when it aired (or was likely shot).

Isn't it convenient that Alfred always seems to be in the study when the Batphone rings?

Bruce and his young ward double-dating gives us a slightly squicky image....

Batman puts a lot of effort into developing an anti-cold (Bat-)pill...couldn't he just work on a protective suit?

I'm unclear as to what purpose the multiple fake Batmen served, but it's an interesting gag that seems like it would be better suited to the Joker.

Meanwhile, back in the Batcave:

Yay, it's the Giant Lighted Lucite Map of Gotham City!

I got a pretty good laugh when I read that label!

*******

 

[RJDiogenes]

Not much to say about this one. The plot revolves around the Hornet's reputation as "the most masterful criminal of our time"...a reputation that he somehow manages to perpetuate despite not actually committing any crimes.

Doesn't he use his own newspaper to maintain that reputation?

A minor thing that bugs me a little about the show in general...granted, it's Bruce Lee doing the driving, but there's something unsexy about a hero who sits in the back seat....

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if details like that contributed to the Hornet making less of an impression. I remember when Next Generation first came on the air, I loved the new dynamic of the captain staying on the bridge where he should be, while the younger first officer did all the beaming down-- then I found out that people were complaining, and they phased out that aspect of the show.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Doesn't he use his own newspaper to maintain that reputation?

That could only go so far...where are the actual crimes? Show me the stolen money!

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if details like that contributed to the Hornet making less of an impression.

Certainly watching it side-by-side with its sister show, Batman...if the latter was what audiences were looking for, TGH must have seemed pretty underwhelming for its more straight-faced and less colorful/OTT approach. Like I said upthread, I think this show would have worked a lot better in the b&w era. I like its potential more than its execution.

*******

Batman
"Rats Like Cheese"
Originally aired February 3, 1966

How did Robin get back to the Batcave after he and Batman split up? They're not clear who took the Batmobile, but Robin's not supposed to be driving at this point, right? I could see the Boy Wonder getting a ride from Chief O'Hara, but to Wayne Manor or the presumably nearby entrance of the Batcave...?

OK, Batman wasn't putting everything into that pill...his special long underwear seemed more effective.

And George Sanders is rather chilling, pardon the expression, in his more vengeful moments. He's not playing for laughs the way so many of the Bat-villains do -- he's deadly serious.

Too bad Ahnold didn't take note.

I probably also wondered how the areas could be heated and chilled so instantaneously

Might such instantaneous and extreme changes in temperature also have effects on the inanimate objects in the room? Drink-chilling and baked Alaska jokes aside, how can Freeze even eat food that was prepared at normal temperature and then thrown into a -50 degree zone?

And Batman and Robin were off their game here. They should've realized that Freeze's "Strike one/Strike two" theme in the skywriting taunts, combined with the diamond theme of his crimes, pointed toward Paul Diamante.

To be fair, though, they wouldn't have seen his presence in the beginning of the previous episode the as plot set-up that it proved to be.

*******

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

The Green Hornet
"Crime Wave"
Originally aired September 30, 1966

Not much to say about this one. The plot revolves around the Hornet's reputation as "the most masterful criminal of our time"...a reputation that he somehow manages to perpetuate despite not actually committing any crimes..

Technically, any time GH is involved with any criminal organization (seen a number of times in the series), he could be charged (at the very least) as an accessory to whatever crimes the main partner committed.

Batman
"Instant Freeze"
Originally aired February 2, 1966

So here we have our first Mr. Freeze, who has a normal skin tone. This villain not only has an unseen past with the Caped Crusader, but a Batman-involved origin, to boot! And the episode takes place in July, well out of sync with when it aired (or was likely shot).

George Sanders was one of the series' best villains--serious, calculating and a real, believable challenge to the Dynamic Duo. Easily the best actor to portray Mr. Freeze on the series, as Preminger and Wallach were poor replacements with their "vild" bit and not an ounce of that comic book menace--which Sanders possessed. The series would have benefited from Sanders returning as Freeze.

Isn't it convenient that Alfred always seems to be in the study when the Batphone rings?

There were a few times when Bruce & Dick were there, or the room was not occupied, with Aunt Harriet wondering about "that noise from Bruce's study."

Batman puts a lot of effort into developing an anti-cold (Bat-)pill...couldn't he just work on a protective suit?

i believe that was to illustrate that Batman had the knowledge necessary to research, then manufacture drugs....I know that sounds loaded, but you understand. It gave him the edge over other heroes of the day who were all about gadgets, a would-be karate chop and not much else.