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50th Anniversary Viewing
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Adam-12
"Clinic on Eighteenth Street"
Originally aired March 19, 1974
Season finale
MeTV said:
Abe Strayhorn and his assistants from the major fraud and consumer protection division of the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office launch an investigation into a local doctor following the death of one of his patients, who was found wearing a strange belt.
Wiki said:
This episode, in which Reed and Malloy appear only briefly, was intended to be the pilot for a new Mark VII series focusing on the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office (similar to [their] earlier series, The D.A., but focusing on consumer crimes), and was directed by Webb himself. However, no such series came to be.
I remember this bit of business from my previous watch-through of the series. It was so not
Adam-12 that I just left it on in the background while wandering to other activities. This time, review business motivated me to pay more attention.
The opening credits are edited to accommodate guests, three of whom were presumably to be the series leads...
Special Appearances by
ED NELSON
as
Abe Strayhorn
FRANK SINATRA, JR.
as
Gino Bardi
SHARON GLESS
as
Lynn Carmichael
[Cagney, not Lacey]
DICK HAYMES
as
Dr. Elroy Gantman
Dr. Gantman gives diabetic Clark Watkins (Bond...David Bond) what he describes as an electro-charged oscillator belt that's supposed to stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin, and is said to be based on space program research. As Watkins is leaving, Nurse Brown (Virginia Gregg) brings in a seven-year-old blind girl named Maggie Fenton (Dawn Lyn). Cut to Watkins at the morgue, where Malloy and Reed fill in Strayhorn, head deputy of the Major Fraud and Consumer Protection Division of the District Attorney's Office, about the cause of death--diabetic shock--and the strange, blinky belt that was found on the deceased. This segues to our would-be series setting, Strayhorn's office, where Strayhorn, having determined that the belt is just a vibrator hooked up to some lights, fills in his team, Bardi and Carmichael--the latter a former LAPD meter maid whose menial, first-day-on-the-job task is to count toothpicks to verify that buyers are being shortchanged. Bardi visits Ed Mooney (George Chandler), a neighbor at Watkins's rooming house, who points him to Gantman at the titular address. Lynn visits the doctor as a prospective patient, with Gino posing as her husband. Gantman's preliminary diagnosis is a rare form of leukemia, concerning which he gives Gino pills while discussing a treatment program. As Gino signs paperwork at Brown's desk, he takes an interest in Maggie, whom Gantman is supposedly helping to gradually regain her eyesight.
Having looked into Maggie's history, Bardi and Carmichael report to Strayhorn that she has a tumor, and Gantman has played into her mother's doubts about the needed brain surgery. Strayhorn sends them to talk to Mrs. Fenton (Virginia Vincent), whose husband having died on the table motivates her refusal to believe that Gantman's a quack. After consulting with the D.A., Strayhorn determines that they don't have sufficient evidence to pin a murder two charge on Gantman, which is what he's after. Art Wilson (Len Wayland), the LAPD detective in charge of the Watkins case, informs Strayhorn that they've brought in a TV repairman who built the belt gadget and is willing to testify.
After a break we find ourselves in the courtroom of the Honorable Judge Dodd (Harry Bartell), where, after helping Gantman to present himself as a man of faith for the jury's benefit, defense attorney Don Bates (Kenneth Tobey) has Maggie brought in for a demonstration. Maggie claims to be able to see light and shadows when Gantman shines his penlight in her eyes, but both Bardi and Strayhorn silently note the telltale clicking that precedes each successful test. Having secured the judge's permission to participate, Strayhorn quietly turns the penlight on, then questions Maggie, his subsequent audible clicking repeatedly producing the opposite results--Maggie claiming to be able to see when the light isn't on, and not to be able to when it is...causing twelve angry murmurs to arise. When Strayhorn presses Maggie, she tearfully admits that Gantman coached her to respond to the sound of the clicking for her mother's benefit. Bates objects that Strayhorn is showboating, and the judge asks to see both parties in chambers. Outside the courtroom, Bates pleads to Strayhorn for a lesser charge, only to find himself on the receiving end of a brief Fridayesque lecture. Malloy and Reed silently bookend the episode while helping Lynn escort Maggie and her mother to the University Eye Institute, who diagnosed her tumor.
Burt Mustin also appears, as the janitor at Strayhorn's office.
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The Odd Couple
"One for the Bunny"
Originally aired March 22, 1974
Season finale
Wiki said:
Al Delvecchio: Yehhhp, yep, yep...
Felix remembers shooting for Playboy magazine when then-fiancee Gloria showed up as a model.
When Myrna brings Oscar a copy of
Playboy that was delivered to his office, he tries unsuccessfully to hide it from Felix, who tosses it into the corridor and chastises Oscar for letting the rag in his house. (I think we've got a continuity issue before we've even gotten to the flashback--hasn't Felix done shoots for them before?) We learn that Oscar formerly worked for the magazine, and that he got Felix a gig there, while also getting Gloria, who was engaged to Felix at the time, a job as a cocktail waitress at the club. (Whatever the timing of Felix and Oscar's marriages was supposed to be, Oscar is in full slovenly bachelor mode here with the apartment in its pre-Felix state, including the gorilla.) Felix is scandalized to see Gloria at the club in her costume and makes a scene, yelling at all the customers that she serves.
Felix, who feels the need to adopt a pseudonym for such work, arranges to use Oscar's tidied-up apartment in lieu of his studio. Oscar hangs around in a smoking jacket with a pipe and eyepatch, trying to pick one of the models up. Things get worse for Felix when Gloria shows up for the shoot. Felix tries to withhold the resulting photos from art director Al Fisher (Lloyd Kino), but when he sees them, he declares that she'll be Miss April.
Felix ends up suing the Hugh Hefner Corporation to get out of his contract, with Curt Conway playing the judge and Arthur Batanides as the opposing lawyer, Mr. Harper. Felix tries to argue that he signed under emotional duress, and when Oscar testifies to the contrary, he tries to undermine Oscar's credibility, who subsequently declines to take the stand as a character witness. Felix pleads with the judge, who wants to see the photo to determine if it's obscene, and to Felix's horror, the judge wolf-whistles and has the photo passed around to the jurors. Felix loses his case, following which Oscar summons him to the club to talk with Heff (himself), who volunteers not to use the photo.
There's questionable continuity within the episode itself, as, after we return to the present, Felix lampshades why he's sore at Heff after all these years despite the flashback's resolution. Also, Batanides is billed as "Plaintiff Lawyer," even though he's supposed to be the defense.
I also want to say that there was a previous reference about Felix having met Gloria at such a shoot, which this episode would seem to be based on while also contradicting it.
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Emergency!
"Inventions"
Originally aired March 23, 1974
Season finale
IMDb said:
The firemen enter a contest to invent new firefighting tools. The paramedics handle victims of possible radiation poisoning. A comatose man is suffering from a mysterious ailment. A woman's overweight son is wedged in her living room ceiling. The firemen respond to a leak at a chemical plant.
Directed by Kevin Tighe.
Johnny's sharing an idea with Roy for winning the $250 contest prize, but clams up when Chet walks by the bulletin board. Station 51 and another engine are called to a vehicle collision that's blocking a freeway exit. Johnny sees to the unconscious driver of an overturned truck (Hal Bokar), while Roy's tending to a conscious woman pinned in her car who may have a jugular wound and is having trouble breathing. Roy notices as the others are moving the truck driver that the truck is marked as carrying radioactive materials, which the revived truck driver subsequently confirms. While firefighters from the second engine check for leakage with a Geiger counter, it's discovered that the freed woman also has a leg fracture. Rampart has two treatment rooms and the corridor area set up for radiation safeguards. (You wouldn't like the Brackett when he's exposed to gamma radiation.) Brackett and Morton see to the woman with a counter present, while Early treats the truck driver. It's determined that both will make it and that nobody was exposed...by which point the paramedics and presumably firefighters present at the scene have switched into medical scrubs.
Back at the station, Johnny's determining that the squad is also clean while sharing his new idea with Roy to create a foam bomb that could be hurled at a fire like a grenade. The squad is called to an athletic club where a masseuse named Aubrey (Pepper Martin) informs the paramedics that his groggy customer, Clair Hartley, went comatose during a massage. Johnny takes interest when he learns that the man came in with a drink from the club's bar, and has the martini transferred into a bottle. While Early and Morton are trying to determine what's wrong with Hartley, his wife, Helena (Aneta Corsaut), flies in from Boston and Early questions her about his medical history. Early diagnoses that the man's been poisoned, but can't treat it without knowing the nature of the poison. When Hartley's friend in L.A., Bill Ellis (Charles McCauley), comes to Rampart, Early asks him about Clair's activities, and takes interest when he learns that Ellis and Hartley were both suffering headaches after a cab ride to the athletic club.
Back at the station's parking area, Stoker and Marco are trying out a gadget that's supposed to put out fires by blowing cooled air onto them, but it just blows around a can full of burning paper and catches fire itself; while Johnny's come up with a new idea for a launchable net. Chet saunters over in his socks to show the other firefighters his invention--human fly shoes, which are boots attached to a platform with suction cups on the bottom...the problem being that once he gets himself stuck on the ground, he can't move. Chet has to hurry out of them when the station gets a call to the residence of a woman named Norma (Lillian Bronson), whose heavy-set son, James (Robert Miller Driscoll), is in the attic with his leg stuck in a hole through the living room ceiling. James drops a reference to the energy crisis as he explains that he was trying to install insulation. Assessing that the ceiling won't be able to hold his weight along with that of any rescuers, the firemen chainsaw a larger hole around James and lower him down.
At Rampart, the cab driver (Michael Richardson) answers a summons and is questioned by Early and Morton, who eventually learn that he'd spilled a can of spot remover in the back of his cab a few days earlier. Early reports to Mrs. Hartley and Mr. Ellis that he'll now be able to treat Clair, who was affected by a toxic mixture of carbon tetrachloride fumes and alcohol.
The paramedics and Chet have given up on their contest ideas when the station and other units get called to a plant where a corrosive chemical cloud has leaked out. Stanley has the area evacuated while the firefighters spray down the structure and the paramedics climb up for a man lying unconscious on pipes. Despite Roy experiencing a hazardous slip and Johnny getting his hand burned by a spray of steam, they retrieve the man and lower him and themselves down via a launched cable.
In the coda, Johnny--who somehow lost his voice in the last rescue--is outraged to learn that a firefighter from another station won the contest using his and Roy's original idea from the beginning of the episode, which was for a canvas spanner sleeve.
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You'd think these guys would have their own pads.
They had to bring Ringo in for legal reasons, as Lawford had his name put in the paperwork rather than John's.
I didn't want to post this until we got to the actual recording sessions, but here it is.
(Not Capped.
)
