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Post-55th Anniversary Viewing
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The Ed Sullivan Show
Season 19, episode 18
Originally aired January 8, 1967
Performances listed on Metacritic:
- Ethel Merman sings "Some People"
- Ethel Merman and Gordon MacRae - "You're Just in Love" (a.k.a. "You're Not Sick, You're in Love") duet
- Gordon MacRae - Soliloqy from "Carousel"
- The Serendipity Singers - "If I Were a Carpenter" & a medley of folk songs
- The Royal Highlanders (pipe and drum corps)
- Flip Wilson - stand-up routine
- Myron Cohen (comedian) - toll booth routine
- Jose Greco (dancer, with his flamenco troupe) - dance to "The Horseman"
- Malmo Girls (gymnasts from Sweeden) - girls juggle in unison
- The King Toys (acrobatic act)
- clown act
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Gilligan's Island
"Court-Martial"
Originally aired January 9, 1967
IMDb said:
The Professor recreates the Minnow voyage to disprove a Maritime Board charge that The Skipper was responsible for the wreck of the Minnow, but their efforts prove that the person to blame for the wreck is actually Gilligan.
Aired four TV weeks before the
Trek episode, FWIW. This one has a teaser with an opening logo. The Skipper and Gilligan are lying on the beach listening to the radio when they hear a news report about Skipper being blamed by a board of inquiry for the loss of the
Minnow, which has him so despondent that he fashions a noose from vines, but Gilligan stops him; then considers jumping from the cliff, but Ginger and Mary Ann stop him. The other castaways are sure that the Skipper isn't to blame, and Ginger comes up with an idea from a movie again--to recreate the incident, for which they create crude bamboo mockup of the
Minnow's deck, with the girls simulating the weather starting getting up and the Professor pulling ropes to simulate the tiny ship being tossed. The takeaway is that the Skipper realizes that when the fearless crew was trying to avoid hitting a reef, Gilligan tossed an anchor that didn't have a line attached.
It's Gilligan's turn to fashion a vine noose, but the Skipper insists on taking responsibility for his crew, so the two of them decide to move to the other side of the island together, though the others all try to get them to stay. Sleeping in a lean-to, Gilligan dreams of being a young admiral on a sailing ship, with Queen Lovey and her daughters, Ginger and Mary Ann, as passengers. Their ship is boarded by pirates--Skipper, Mr. Howell, and the Professor. Lord Admiral Gilligan is locked in a cage on deck, but frees himself to rescue the ladies by taking on all three scoundrels in a sword fight...though his comical derring-do ends when his rapier is broken and he's forced to walk the plank. Gilligan awakes to the Professor running to him and the Skipper with the radio to share an announcement about how the board has found Skipper blameless because the radio operator in Honolulu had issued the weather report from the previous day, giving no warning of the storm.
In the coda, Gilligan plays skipper on the mockup.
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"The Night of the Feathered Fury"
Originally aired January 13, 1967
Wiki said:
Jim and Artie encounter Count Manzeppi again. This time around the count is attempting to acquire a wind-up bird that contains the Philosopher's Stone.
Colonel Armstrong (Oliver McGowan) is introducing Jim and Artie to Gerda Sharff (Michele Carey), a defector from Count Manzeppi's organization, when Manzeppi (Victor Buono reprising his role from a previous episode) sends in a grinder monkey named Loki who tosses a flash bomb, with Gerda disappearing in the commotion. The organ box that Manzeppi leaves behind plays a taunting message when cranked. Jim returns to the train to find Gerda there, who holds him at gunpoint wanting a toy chicken that she left behind at the scene. (Jim loads his horse into one of the train cars...I didn't realize they were bringing along their own steeds.) Manzeppi subsequently enters, wanting what Gerta stole from him. Manzeppi is followed by his henchmen of the episode, Luther Coyle (George Murdock), whose weapon of choice is a cup and ball that fires the ball with explosive force; and Dodo Le Blanc (Perry Lopez), a kick-oriented martial artist (possibly meant to be a capoeirista, though I don't know the art well enough to say). West holds each of them off in turn, and when they threaten to team up, Artie comes to the rescue via the fireplace entrance with an extra gun for Jim. They give Gerta the opportunity to leave. Then they become concerned about the third henchman in the room...
Artie: I never thought I'd hear myself say this--ahem--let's search the monkey.
Loki obligingly lets the agents inspect his cup, but afterward tosses a smoke bomb that he was hiding under his hat, allowing Manzeppi and his men to escape.
Back at Armstrong's office, the toy chicken taps out a name in Morse code, leading Jim to the toy shop of Heinrich Sharff, where he's confronted by Dodo; Luther; a third henchman, Benji (Hideo Imamura); and the Count, who lowers himself on a hanging crescent moon while playing violin and reveals that Sharff is dead. West escapes into a back corridor long enough to stick the bird on a ceiling with putty before falling via trap door into Manzeppi's obligatory underground lair, where he's shot by a gun-brandishing hand that pops out of a dinner platter. Jim wakes up from the drugged projectile in a hanging bird cage. Manzeppi tells him that the chicken contains the Philosopher's Stone, producing several small metal objects that have been turned to gold by it. He then leaves Jim to be interrogated via surgical skin removal by Benji.
Meanwhile, Artie--after having lured Gerda out of hiding to enlist her cooperation--enters the shop disguised as Sharff's visiting uncle, knocking out Dodo and Luther with sleep-inducing seltzer. Artie makes his way to where Jim is being held and helps him to escape while holding off Benji. Jim takes him to retrieve the bird, then Manzeppi appears with Gerta at his side to confiscate the item, but Jim and Artie coax her into turning her gun on Manzeppi to take the item for herself. The agents pursue her upstairs after a delay from Manzeppi, to hear a scream and find her, having been exposed to the moonlight, turned into gold. Then ensues an odd bit of business in which Manzeppi tosses a bomblet that reduces her and the chicken to bits of gold leaf, before making his escape in a hidden hot air balloon.
In the train coda, after Jim and Artie leave with their dates, their cook, Mama Angelina (a familiar-looking uncredited actress), opens the shades, the moonlight turns the gold leaf back into the toy chicken, and she takes it.
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Hogan's Heroes
"The Great Brinksmeyer Robbery"
Originally aired January 13, 1967
IMDb said:
When the gang's hidden cache of money - needed to purchase a secret map - goes up in smoke, the men of Stalag 13 must come up with a way to replace the cash - and decide to pull off a bank heist in the nearby town.
A mishap involving mislabeled nitro going off in the tunnel shakes the barracks and put the radio out of commission, so Hogan has to find a way to listen to the BBC for a message he's expecting. The prisoners let Klink overhear them talking about how the kommandant is too afraid to listen to the BBC so that he turns it on loudly to prove them wrong. They get their coded message to retrieve an airdrop of 100,000 marks that's to be used to pay a Ludwig Strasser for a map of German rocket sites. But when Klink makes a surprise inspection of the barracks, they hurriedly stash the money in the stove, and Klink sets fire to Schultz's three-day pass for not seeing that lights were out on schedule, and tosses it in the stove, burning the money. After Hogan pays a visit to Strasser (Theo Marcuse) to inform him that he'll need more time, he arranges for himself, Newkirk, and LeBeau to be put in solitary so they can slip into town for a while, where they hit the local bank to scope it out...finding that it's well protected.
Schultz sees the guys at a restaurant and confronts them, but Hogan scares him off by pointing out that he's in town without a pass. Proceeding with their heist brainstorming, they find that the vault's weak spot is that it shares an ordinary wall with an apartment belonging to a lovelorn young woman named Mady Pfeiffer (Joyce Jameson); so mustached Hogan pays her a romantic visit and keeps her preoccupied--which includes playing the radio very loudly and drinking her under--while Newkirk and LeBeau slip in and work on the bedroom wall to break into the vault. In a manner that must have been inspirational to Barney, they take what they need--including an extra 1,000 for Mady--and get the wall all back in place before they leave their unconscious hostess.
In the coda, Schultz is relieved to find the trio of prisoners back in solitary in time to be let out, and informs them that the man believed to be the robber was caught trying to deposit the stolen money at the same bank--presumably Strasser getting his comeuppance for being a mercenary who wouldn't spot Hogan the map in advance of his payment.
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Get Smart
"Someone Down Here Hates Me"
Originally aired January 14, 1967
Wiki said:
KAOS puts up a reward to kill Max and announces that their annual party will be canceled if they don't kill him, creating more incentive and more peril for Max.
A couple of attempts on Max are made by KAOS agents. In the first attempt, he's eating at a table that looks more like it's in a house than his usual apartment. In the second, an agent is captured (Dort Clark) and informs Max that he has a $250,000 price on his head.
Max: Anybody who tries to collect that reward is gonna have to do it over my dead body! [Stops to think about what he just said.]
Seigfried berates an assembly of KAOS operatives because he's lost eleven agents in the bungled attempts. Max becomes so paranoid that he even suspects the Chief and 99. Max consults Agent 13 in an ice machine, who entertains what he could do with the reward. Max then starts attacking innocent people on the street whom he suspects of being KAOS agents for various reasons.
The price is raised to $500,000, and the Chief convinces Max to take a vacation. At Max's apartment, 99 is visiting to say goodbye when Agent 63, Joe Froebus (Craig Huebing), drops in to be jumped by Max, who doesn't recognize...and we get our Frndly mid-scene interruption. (This is from the same batch of recordings that I was watching last year, which start expiring today.) Skip to Max visiting a Dr. Noodelman (Charles Irving) in an obvious redress of the Chief's office to learn about his fast-healing plastic surgery technique, which Max suspects KAOS agents may be using. Noodelman secretly calls his KAOS contact to confirm the reward, then straps Max into a chair under the pretense of examining him, but the Chief and Larabee pop in for a rescue.
Noodelman's files provide CONTROL with the pictures of a hundred KAOS agents who had Noodelman's surgery, and the Chief informs a still-paranoid Max that the reward will be expiring at midnight.
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Mission: Impossible
"The Reluctant Dragon"
Originally aired January 14, 1967
Paramount Plus said:
Dr. Cherlotov, a scientist of an enemy power, failed to defect to the West when his wife did. Now that he has developed a cheap, effective anti-ballistic system, the IMF are ordered to get him out.
The clear eight-track tape from the glove compartment of a parked car said:
Good morning, Mr. Briggs. The man you're looking at is Helmut Cherlotov [Joseph Campanella], the Iron Curtain's expert in rocket control. A year ago, his wife, Karen [Mala Powers], defected to the West. He was supposed to follow, but never made it. Since then, Cherlotov has been under suspicion by Taal Jankowski [John Colicos], the head of security. On his own, Cherlotov has developed the key to a simple yet extremely effective anti-ballistic-missile system. A system of that sort, in the wrong hands, could completely destroy the balance of power in the world.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to get Cherlotov out before his government discovers what he has achieved. As always, should you or any of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. Please destroy this recording in the usual manner. Good luck, Dan.
Incinerated! Cut to a pretty short portfolio--just Rollin and Barney. (A reminder that Landau wasn't even in the main credits this season, but billed as a "special appearance". Apparently Bain and Lupus have the week off. And as was often the case later in the season, Steven Hill is barely in it.) Our unusually small contingent of IMFers consult Mrs. Cherlotov at the briefing about her husband's current whereabouts and the circumstances of his failed defection. Fortunately, she doesn't ask to see Dan's manager.
Posing as the deputy commissioner of police from East Germany, Rollin infiltrates a group of colleagues named Duchinoff (Alex Rodine), Berkov (Norbert Meisel), and Lukowski (Allen Bleiweiss) who are at the university where Cherlotov works to exchange security ideas with Jankowski, who's aided by a uniformed officer named Lupesh (Michael Forest); while Barney is nearby as an African exchange student. (He seems a little old for that.) When Rollin finds an opportunity to break from the group near Cherlotov's modest lab, an altercation ensues in which Jankowski slaps the horn-rimmed glasses from the scientist's face, and Rollin takes the opportunity to play "good cop" while dropping the hint that he's there to help Cherlotov get out. Later Rollin finds Cherlotov hiding in his suite, but when Rollin tries to discuss a plan for defection, he finds that Helmut is a loyal citizen who's interested in being allowed to officially continue his work behind the Curtain rather than defecting.
Back in L.A., Dan learns that Karen was always more interested in defection than her husband was; and decides that he has to get her involved in the mission to motivate Helmut. Rollin reports Cherlotov to Jankowski, who still thinks that the scientist is ultimately motivated to defect. Rollin persuades him to lock Cherlotov up as a political prisoner for a while to make him grateful for what he's got. Helmut finds himself sharing a cell with an old colleague, Professor Lauchek (Norbert Schiller), and an elderly professor emeritus named Yablonski (Felix Locher), both of whom show signs of having been re-educated.
After a visit to the prison in which Helmut asks why Rollin didn't tell Jankowski about the plans he's been working on, Rollin recommends that Cherlotov be released. Meanwhile, Barney discovers that an additional level of passport verification involves a paper with metal fibers in it that will be hard to duplicate--Dan's plan being to get Cherlotov out via the route that seems too obvious, right through the border checkpoint. Back at security HQ, the ambitious Lupesh learns of a communique from East Berlin signed by the official whom Rollin is posing as, and keeps it from Jankowksi. Rollin is surprised to run into Karen, now in town in disguise. He and Barney determine that they have to get Helmut out ASAP, while he's being released from prison. Rollin is trying to get Cherlotov to accompany him when Lupesh intercepts Rollin to arrest him as an imposter.
Rollin makes a break for it and flees into a stadium, where Lupesh takes shots at him, but Rollin turns it into a brawl and Landau's stunt double sends Forest's fatally tumbling down a flight of stairs. Elsewhere, Barney takes Helmut with him at gunpoint to the lab, where Helmut is surprised to find Karen waiting for him. While she's convincing him that defection is the right thing to do, Rollin uses a demonstration of magic tricks at an ongoing party being held in his suite as an opportunity to lift the passports from his drinking colleagues, but finds they've already been lifted by one of the female attendees, a barmaid named Sophia (Elisa Ingram). In private, he convinces Sophia to let him help her avoid the consequences, and she turns over the pilfered goods. Afterward Jankowski takes Rollin with him to apprehend Cherlotov at his lab, where Jankowski gets the drop on Barney and holds Rollin at Luger-point with the others, having seen through his ruse. Barney comes to and a brawl ensues in which Jankowski is shot in a struggle over his gun. Rollin makes a gesture of helping the still-conscious Jankowski tend to his wound before slipping out with the others for a drive to the border.
Mission: Apparently Accomplished. This was a good example of Season 1 having not found the formula yet...it was infiltration and improvisation with a loose plan rather than an intricately woven scheme.
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That was nice. I wonder if the guy was aware of his presence, given how badly hurt he was.
Quite likely...apparently he was conscious when taken to the hospital.
Swede Savage - Wikipedia
Classic Carpenters. A song about nostalgia is now a nostalgic song.
On its album, this was the framing song of a side-long medley of oldies covers. The album version segues into "Fun, Fun, Fun".
She's in good classic form here. Her most recent single before this made the Top 40, but wasn't covered here, though it's been in the album end of my playlist for a while as a representative track from the
Lady Sings the Blues soundtrack.
(charted Jan. 19; #34 US; #8 US; #20 R&B; #53 UK)
It'll be interesting to see what pops up on the chart the next couple of weeks, as I have nothing from them in my collection.
some time 
